Providing Feedback That Will Be Used

You can always tell when the first round of assessment begins in the 16 week classes. That is because we always see a rise in the number of eLearning and accommodated testers in the Testing Center. In addition, after more than three decades in higher education, I know that having enough time to do all of the things we need to do for good teaching and learning is one of the tasks that faculty constantly struggle with. That is why a recent article that ran in Inside Higher Ed caught my attention. Dr. Deborah J. Cohen provides us with what she describes as a faster way to grade in 2020. She writes, "I came of age teaching when students picked up their graded work in boxes outside of professors’ offices. That also meant many students never came to retrieve their final papers after I had spent hours on tedious commenting. Some had graduated, and some simply did not care -- they were fine just seeing the final posted grade. It was as if I were writing long, involved letters to myself. I refuse to engage in that wasted work now. Whatever requires my feedback happens earlier in the semester, so that students have an opportunity to use the comments to improve their work. And on every syllabus, I indicate the following, which sets clear boundaries and places accountability squarely on the student: “You will get much more out of this course, and any course you will ever take, if you concern yourself more with the processes of how to think, how to learn and how to write than on the letter grades. In 10 years, you will probably forget the grade you got in my class, but I hope that what will stay with you are the learning tools and skills that you will acquire." I suggest you read the entire short article to learn more about her time-saving grading practices.

HOW THE BRAIN DECIDES WHAT TO LEARN
In order to learn about the world, an animal needs to do more than just pay attention to its surroundings. It also needs to learn which sights, sounds and sensations in its environment are the most important and monitor how the importance of those details change over time. Yet how humans and other animals track those details has remained a mystery. Now, Stanford biologists report October 26 in Science, they think they've figured out how animals sort through the details. A part of the brain called the paraventricular thalamus, or PVT, serves as a kind of gatekeeper, making sure that the brain identifies and tracks the most salient details of a situation. Although the research, funded in part by the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute's Neurochoice Initiative, is confined to mice for now, the results could one day help researchers better understand how humans learn or even help treat drug addiction, said senior author Xiaoke Chen, an assistant professor of biology. In its most basic form, learning comes down to feedback. For example, if you have a headache and take a drug, you expect the drug will make your headache go away. If you're right, you'll take that drug the next time you have a headache. If you're wrong, you'll try something else. Psychologists and neuroscientists have studied this aspect of learning extensively and even traced it to specific parts of the brain that process feedback and drive learning.

DOES A BAD GRADE MOTIVATE OUR STUDENTS?
David Gooblar wrote a terrific post a while back that is filled with great information specifically about grades and motivation. He wrote, "In an exhaustive review of the literature on formative assessment, two researchers at King's College drew on a number of sources who have documented a phenomenon familiar to many faculty — that is, students’ reluctance to be drawn into a more serious engagement with learning work. Such students, for a variety of reasons, do not primarily aspire to learn as much as possible. Rather, they want to get by with minimal effort, avoiding any disasters along the way. For those students (and it's fair to say my student who wrote a poor essay falls into this category), a properly bad grade might be just such a disaster. A bad grade might be the jolt that lets those students know their current approach is not working. But if we acknowledge that grades might be able to help in our efforts to motivate students, we also have to understand that we can't rely on grades alone." Keep reading here.

THE STUDENTS SPEAK
Harry Brighouse shares instructional practices that undergraduates say they have rarely encountered and think should be more widely shared. The first recommendation of the American Academy’s recent report "The Future of Undergraduate Education" is simple: we should work to improve undergraduate instruction. But how? In many disciplines, we don’t have rigorous measures of learning, so we cannot easily identify the best practitioners and simply copy what they do. Undergraduate students, however, experience numerous teachers and a lot of instruction, some good and some bad. They are a source of valuable information about what constitutes good practice. So, at a recent event co-sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Education, the University of Wisconsin at Madison College of Letters and Science, and the American Academy, we asked five undergraduate students at the university to describe instructional practices that they’ve encountered rarely but were especially effective -- and that they think should be more widely shared. Of course, some strategies work in some disciplines better than others, in some kinds of classes better than others and for some instructors better than others. Here’s what the students at the event told us.


WHAT IS TRADITIONAL?
Popular culture tells us that college "kids" are recent high school graduates, living on campus, taking art history, drinking too much on weekends, and (hopefully) graduating four years later. But these days that narrative of the residential, collegiate experience is way off, says Alexandria Walton Radford, who heads up postsecondary education research at RTI International, a think tank in North Carolina. What we see on movie screens and news sites, she says, is skewed to match the perceptions of the elite: journalists, researchers, policymakers. Today's college student is decidedly nontraditional — and has been for a while. "This isn't a new phenomenon," Radford says. "We've been looking at this since 1996." So, what do we know about these "typical" college students of today?

We all know Dr. Benjamin Bloom for his taxonomy but did you know that he also wrote about how learning occurs under different methods of instruction? Using research conducted by two of his doctoral students (which he guided), the 2 Sigma Problem emerged. The instructional methods were identified as conventional, mastery and tutoring. Although written in 1984, I am struck by the lack of movement from the conventional teaching method although active teaching leading to active learning has made an impact and continues to grow as practitioners discover news ways to ignite student performance. Of course we are left wondering which mode worked the best? Bloom, Anania, and Burke found that using the conventional mode of instruction as a baseline, students under mastery learning saw a one-sigma (standard deviation) improvement in performance. Students who received one-on-one tutoring saw a two-sigma improvement. As Alfred Essa, Vice President of R&D and Analytics at McGraw-Hill Education, explains "A one sigma is roughly a one-letter grade in improvement. It can be the difference between a student failing a course and passing a course—and most educational interventions don’t come close. If one sigma of improvement is huge, two is monumental." You can read Bloom's article here.

Do you have students in your classes that never participate although you know from their work that they are bright and articulate? Maybe they are introverts? Karen Costa has written a terrific article about her college experience as an introvert. She provides some really good questions that we should be asking ourselves on this topic. She even suggests that maybe introverts are better built for elearning courses. She writes, "While critics will argue that extroversion is the ideal mode of existence and that as higher educators, we are therefore bound to press all students into a life of extroverted servitude, let us return to where we began, in the work of Susan Cain, whose 'quiet revolution' made the leap from a book to a movement. Cain has dedicated her life to remedying what she calls the 'grave mistake' of idealizing extroversion and argues that we must stop treating introversion as a 'second-class personality trait.' One of Cain’s model introverts, Rosa Parks, is a reminder that quiet can also be powerful. Isn’t it our job, after all, to help all of our students claim their power, even if that means letting go of our deeply held beliefs about primacy in learning modalities?" Read the entire article here.

The story about Dr. Carl Wieman in Inside Higher Ed is terrific. It begins, "As a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Carl Wieman could probably get away with being a mediocre teacher. Yet he’s devoted much of his career to improving the ways colleges and universities teach science, in his own classrooms and in one of the grandest experiments of his life: the multicampus Science Education Initiative. Wieman’s new book chronicles the latter effort and makes a strong, evidence-based case for pursuing broad changes in science instruction: out with lectures and in with active learning. It’s also an easily digested how-to guide for interested parties, including deans, department chairs and other faculty members. The project has major implications for administrators, too." I am looking forward to reading the book. As a proponent of active learning I am glad to see additional evidence-based results that prove its worth. You can read the entire article here. If you are interested in active learning, there is an abundance of information on this blog.

BEING TIRED CAN ALTER YOUR TEACHING
Teachers can reach a place where teaching does nothing for them or their students. They don’t just wake up one morning and find themselves burned out; they’ve moved there gradually, and it’s a journey that often starts with tired teaching. Teaching is relentless. It happens every day, several times a week—or potentially 24/7 if it’s online. And it’s demanding. There’s so much more than the actual teaching. There’s considerable planning involved before each class. Plus, we need to spend time with students—those who want to talk, those needing help, and those with questions or, sometimes, complaints. There are assignments to grade and feedback to provide—all carrying the expectation of a quick turnaround. Continue reading here.

BREAKING A VICIOUS CYCLE
Working as a school psychologist has allowed Kathy Casale the opportunity to notice something about many of the students who don’t turn in assignments: They are often stuck in a cycle that involves a pernicious interaction of three overlapping cognitive processes: sustained attention, working memory, and anxiety or stress. When students have a problem with one or, more typically, all of these functions, it’s hard for them to produce. She notes that students often get caught in the same repeating cycle: Anxiety and stress reduced working memory capacity, making it harder to pay attention, so they missed work, which in turn increased their anxiety, and so on. Continue reading here.

TEACHING STUDENTS TO AVOID PLAGIARISM
Plagiarism can be a real pain. Most teachers have had to deal with it in some form or another, and a whole lot of you still haven’t quite figured out the best way to combat it. Many of us issue stern warnings and threaten serious, soul-crushing consequences. Others also use software to detect plagiarism. While these methods can deter students from plagiarizing and catch them if they do, they operate on the assumption that all plagiarism is devious, that all students who plagiarize know exactly what they’re doing, and our mission is to catch and punish. Now because I don’t believe that assumption is true, I think we could be handling the problem with a lot more finesse. To continue reading or to listen to the podcast, click here.

HOW TO MONOTASK
Here is an interesting article about the battle for attention that our reading assignments face. Stop what you’re doing. Well, keep reading. Just stop everything else that you’re doing. Mute your music. Turn off your television. Put down your sandwich and ignore that text message. While you’re at it, put your phone away entirely. (Unless you’re reading this on your phone. In which case, don’t. But the other rules still apply.) Just read. You are now monotasking. Maybe this doesn’t feel like a big deal. Doing one thing at a time isn’t a new idea. Indeed, multitasking, that bulwark of anemic résumés everywhere, has come under fire in recent years. A 2014 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that interruptions as brief as two to three seconds — which is to say, less than the amount of time it would take you to toggle from this article to your email and back again — were enough to double the number of errors participants made in an assigned task.

DISCOVERING WHAT WORKS IN STUDENT LEARNING
Here is an interesting story about faculty-led solutions to student learning issues. "The long search for an answer to one of higher education’s most pressing questions led here, to the basement of a bistro outside Hartford. What do students really learn in college? To find answers, about 20 faculty members from Central Connecticut State University came to spend the waning days of summer break analyzing hundreds of samples of students’ work. Carl R. Lovitt, their provost, gave them a pep talk over bagels and coffee: "You are engaged in work of meaningful national significance." Academe has been pilloried for decades, he said, for its lack of accountability. This project could remedy that. It’s the kind of acronym-heavy, jargon-laced endeavor that’s easily overlooked. But by measuring students’ intellectual skills, it might turn out to provide telling insight into one of higher education’s central functions." Keep reading

UPCOMING FACULTY DEVELOPMENT SESSIONS
There are a number of faculty development events coming up. The first is this Wednesday at 4:00 pm. Turnitin is offering a free webinar on how to use the Quickmarks feature to give students really useful feedback. Register here. On Tuesday, October 25 at 3:00 pm, the Teaching+Learning Center's Canvas Series continues with a session on the use of Gradebook. Register now. In response to your request, the Teaching+Learning Center will host a session on classroom management on November 3 at 3:00 pm. You can register now for that session. For those of you looking to build and keep an engaging classroom experience, the Teaching+Learning Center will host a session on November 29 at 3:00 pm. You can reserve your spot now. If you are looking for a specific faculty development topic, please let me know. If you would like to have a private consultation, please send me an email request at pourciaut@mybrcc.edu.

WORST LECTURE EVER
Amy Blanding, Kealin McCabe, and Heather Smith, PhD take a humorous approach to a learner-center teaching method called the Worst Lecture Competition. They write, "effective oral skills, well-designed presentations, and quality feedback are attributes that employers typically want from graduates. However, these skills are often expected to exist without appropriate support and training. Recognizing that public speaking often induces fear, a more positive, out-of-the-box approach could ease students into developing presentation skills. Regardless of personal perceptions regarding their own lecture proficiencies, students possess life experiences that give them the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of other presentations; sometimes they just need a prompt to acknowledge the value of their own experience. In addition to cultivating their own skills, it’s also essential for students to work on peer feedback skills. With these goals in mind, we created the Worst Lecture Competition" Read the entire post here.

DID YOU LISTEN TO THE TEXT
Would you like to add podcasts to your teaching toolkit?  Michael Godsey has a helpful article that explains how he did just that. He writes, "I recently discovered my students voluntarily reading a story together, all at the same time. And they were inspired by an unlikely medium—podcasts—which is obviously ironic, as many people like podcasts precisely because they don’t have the time or inclination to sit down and read. In fact, Serial has an explicit warning at the beginning of their transcripts: Serial is produced for the ear and designed to be heard, not read. Of course, teenagers are infamous for enjoying exactly what they’re told not to do, but I was nevertheless surprised that while listening to an episode of Serial in class, their collective eyes fixed on the transcripts displayed on a screen at the front of the room. And I was startled—happily so—by their shouts when I was tardy in scrolling down." Read the entire article here.

REAL TIME CHECK ON LEARNING
Don't have time to check out a set of clickers from the Library? Still want to survey your students during class? You can use Google Forms instead. Dr. Michael J. LaGier writes, "As many educators are, I am interested in exploring methods that provide real-time, formative assessment in the classroom. Being a teacher of such courses as microbiology, microbial genomics, and immunology, which are dense in jargon and abstract concepts, I need to be able to quickly get a snapshot of how well my students are grasping important ideas or concepts. My students also need this information in order to assess their own learning. To this end, I started exploring the use of personal response systems, or clickers, as a method for rapid classroom assessment.Within Google Drive, I discovered an online survey tool called Google Forms. With Google Forms I am able to create surveys that my students can answer in real time, for free, using any device that is Wi-Fi compatible and has an Internet browser capable of running Google (smartphones, tablets, and laptops all work)." Learn how to do it here.

LEARNING TROUGH LAUGHTER
Boredom may be the largest pedagogical obstacle to teaching (Smith, 2007), and many believe it is up to teachers to spark students’ interest in classes. One way to ignite students’ enthusiasm is by using humor. In the classroom, humor can create a cheerful learning climate, enhance social bonding through increased student-instructor interaction, add variety to lectures, decrease test anxiety, and provide enjoyment and laughter. In addition to the social benefits, humor is cognitively and pedagogically important. For instance, instructional humor has been touted as an excellent way for students to learn
vocabulary, increase critical thinking, practice semantics, and remember more information. Because humor often plays with meaning, it helps individuals change their current mental perspective by visualizing problems in an alternate way, as well as engaging their critical thinking. In a study by Jana Hackathorn, Amy M. Garczynski, Katheryn Blankmeyer, Rachel D. Tennial, and Erin D. Solomon, results indicated that using humor to teach material significantly increased students’ overall performance on exams, particularly on knowledge and comprehension level quiz items, but not application level items. Moreover, learning a construct through the use of humor was most effective for comprehension level quiz items. Continue reading this article here.

EARLY COLLEGE HIGH SCHOOLS
Have you heard about the move afoot to turn high schools into college? Usually called early college high schools, they are growing in numbers due mainly to their success rates. Nationwide, 90 percent of early college students graduate from high school, 10 percentage points above the national average, and 30 percent of students get either an associate’s degree or a certificate, according to Jobs for the Future, the Boston-based nonprofit that runs the national Early College Designs program. Now, there are 280 early college schools nationwide – nearly 50 of which are in Texas. So far, the model has proven largely successful in graduating students from high school and introducing them to college courses. Most function like magnet schools, though, with students choosing to attend or even needing to apply. Continue reading this story here.

MENTORING OUR NEXT GROUP OF ENGAGED SCHOLARS
The BRCC Mentoring Program hosted the second meeting of the semester for the group of 14 Mentor/Mentee pairs yesterday. Our new faculty are reporting that having a mentor has improved their acclimation to teaching at BRCC and has greatly reduced their stress level. Topics during yesterday's session included student motivation, critical self-reflection, classroom management, and student retention. Participants also shared stories of what they have learned through their teaching experiences and how this continues to change and shape how they respond to their students. New faculty for fall 2015 include: Jennifer Bernard (Nursing), Matthew Buras (Mathematics), Danielle Burns (Art), Alexandra Cavazos (English), Tim Dykes (Construction Management), Zach Gasior (English), Darren Jones (Philosophy), Felecia McGhee (Surgical Technology), Lisa Namikas (History),  Gregory Otto (Aviation), Priya Pathak (Chemistry), Pam Potter (Nursing), Jose Taj (Spanish), and Shena Williams (Nursing).

IS FAILURE REALLY VALUABLE
Many people learn from a young age that making mistakes feels terrible and can be embarrassing. That lesson often gets learned in school. But in her TED Talk, Kathryn Schulz says those terrible feelings come from realizing wrongness, not the feeling of actually being wrong. Because often, people are wrong for a while before they realize it, and in that intervening time, being wrong feels eerily like being right. In education there’s a lot of talk about valuable failure, the necessity of mistakes for learning and celebrating the learning that comes out of being wrong. And while teachers, parents and students may understand that concept in the abstract, in the moment, they still don’t want to be wrong. To protect ourselves from ever being wrong, we try to be perfect, but inevitably fail, making things worse. Schulz points out that nothing ever turns out as we expect, and that’s a core part of being human. Continue reading

4 EASY STEPS TO LEARN MATH
Math proficiency is a subject of a lot of anxiety for college leaders, students and even national leaders. Employers and educators alike know that math skills are crucial to many of the science, technology and engineering jobs expected to be ever more important in the future, but students’ math comprehension continues to stagnate. In his TED Talk, mathematician Conrad Wolfram argues much of this angst is about how well students can compute by hand, not how well they understand math. He breaks math down into four steps: 1. Pose the right question about an issue; 2. Change that real world scenario into a math formulation; 3. Compute; and, 4. Take the math formulation and turn it back into a real world scenario to verify it. Continue reading

MORE STUDENT SUCCESS RESOURCES
I recently sent you an update noting that I had added a student resource about avoiding procrastination on the Teaching and Learning Faculty Development Canvas site under Modules. Here is another short article you can share with your students about studying. The author, Dr. Christine Harrington, writes, "The strategy that most students use- and is unfortunately the least beneficial- is reviewing notes.  Think about it- reviewing your notes doesn’t take much effort or energy.  It’s a pretty low level cognitive task." Continue reading

LEARNING MADE EASIER
IDEA provides some great tips on how you can help your students learn fundamental principles, generalizations, or theories. How can students show they “comprehend” a principle, generalization or theory? Bloom describes three ways. First, they can restate the principle, generalization or theory in their own words, which Bloom calls translation.  When asked what is Newton’s third law of motion, the student might answer, “It’s when two things hit each other, they push each other equally in opposite directions.” Bloom states that translation can take one of three forms: translation into the student’s own words, as we’ve just seen; translation into symbolic form e.g., from verbal to graphical form (inserting arrows into a picture to depict the forces operating on the chair in the example above); translation from one verbal form to another, e.g., metaphor, analogy. Read more here.

DOES LEARNING STOP
Most of us can describe what good teaching looks like and many of us accept the premise that learning occurs when student accept the new knowledge and are able to apply it to different contexts. But when does learning end or does it have to? That is the basis of Dr. Maryellen Weimer's latest blog post. She writes, "With courses ending so definitively, it’s easy to think that whatever impact you or the course might have on students is over. But learning doesn’t always end when the course does. Some insights and understandings are iterative and cumulative. Students arrive at them after repeated exposure, as the evidence mounts and their skills and experiences deepen. Other intellectual development happens when students are finally ready to learn.Read more here.

HOW MUCH FEEDBACK IS ENOUGH
Are you sure that the feedback you are providing to your students is really helping them? It is a question that nags at us. We want to provide enough feedback to help our students from repeating the same mistakes. We also want them to learn from what they did right and wrong. But we are always concerned about giving feedback that demotivates our students. Dr. Matt Gomes and doctoral student Noel Turner offer their own take on this dilemma. They suggest that we have students identify a specific outcome or assessment criterion they are concerned with, and respond only to that concern. When Dr. Gomes uses this strategy, the question becomes “What does this student need to do in order to perform better along specific project goals or assessment criteria? What do they need to do to become a more reflective writer (project goal) or to organize their claims effectively (criterion)? This strategy has the added benefit of prodding him to specifically elaborate on his understanding of outcomes or assessment criteria." Read more here.

USING BLACKBOARD TOOLS TO LIGHTEN YOUR TEACHING LOAD
For many of us, using Blackboard for the basics (posting grades, attendance, syllabus) is about all we do. But there are so many other ways to exploit the great tools on Blackboard to make our teaching less stressful. The Blackboard Professional Development Series continues with a workshop on October 23. We will gather at 1:00 pm in the Teaching+Learning Center (311 Magnolia Building/Mid City Campus) to learn from eLearning Program Manager Susan Nealy about the wonders of Blackboard. Reserve your spot now before you leave for your fall holidays. Then bring your questions to the workshop next Thursday and get ready to be amazed.

INSPIRATION FOR A MATH COLLEAGUE
Sometimes we need some inspiration to keep our energy levels high for our students. This story by Jessica Lahey in the Atlantic does just that for me. She has written about Dr. Steven Strogatz, Professor of Mathematics at Cornell, and his quest to right the wrongs of bad math teachers in your past. She asked him why a veteran professor of higher math choose to spend a semester in the company of undergraduates, many of whom would rather visit the dentist than spend two hours a week exploring mathematical concepts. The short answer is that Strogatz has discovered a certain thrill in rectifying the crimes and misdemeanors of math education. Strogatz asks his students, more than half of them seniors, to provide a “mathematical biography.” Their stories reveal unpleasant experiences with math along the way. Rather than question the quality of the teaching they received, they blamed math itself—or worse, their own intelligence or lack of innate talent. Strogatz loves the challenge, “There's something remarkable about working with a group of students who think they hate math or find it boring, and then turning them around, even just a little bit.”

ACTIVE METHOD THAT IMPROVES LEARNING
An article by Drs. J. Nestojko, D. Bui, N. Kornell, and E. Bjork that recently appeared in the journal Memory and Cognition, declares that students learn things better when they think they are going to have to teach the material. The research paper reports that fifty-six undergrads were split into two groups. One group were told that they had 10 minutes to study a 1500-word passage about fictional depictions of The Charge of The Light Brigade, and that they would be tested on it afterwards. The other group were similarly given 10 minutes to study the text, but they were told that afterwards they would have to teach the content to another student. Neither group was allowed to take notes. In fact, 25 minutes after the study period was over, both groups were tested on the passage. Specifically they had to recall as much information as possible from the article, and then they faced specific questions about the content. The students who thought they were going to teach the material recalled more facts from the text, and they did so more quickly. They showed a specific advantage for the main points in the text, and their recall was also better organized, tending to reflect the structure of the original text. This active learning method could be adapted to almost any course at BRCC. Let me know if you try it.

SUCCESS AND SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS
Mark Phillips has written a really interesting article for Eutopia about myths associated with education. His inspiration was a book by Drs. David Berliner and Gene Glass titled 50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools: The Real Crisis in Education. The book focuses on the U.S. public education system, but many of the myths apply equally to our own college students. Phillips put the myth that teachers are the most important influence on a child’s education as his number one. He writes, "Of course teachers are extremely important. Good teachers make a significant difference in achievement. But research indicates that less than 30 percent of a student's academic success is attributable to schools and teachers. The most significant variable is socioeconomic status, followed by the neighborhood, the psychological quality of the home environment, and the support of physical health provided." I understand his argument to mean that teachers are very important but part of a larger system that can include many impediments that a student and teacher must overcome for teaching and learning to occur. I am familiar with Dr. Berliner's work and have seen him present a number of sessions at the annual American Educational Research Association. I am anxious to read the entire book. Let me know what you think of the list and the book.

COMMUNITY COLLEGES PROVIDE A WAY UP
The Wall Street Journal ran an article this weekend that proclaims that economic mobility is alive and well for Americans who pursue technical or practical training. That is a fact that we are well aware of at BRCC and hopefully we are continuing to make sure that our course content is relevant in preparing a workforce-ready graduate. Tamar Jacoby writes, "Americans have a host of postsecondary options other than a four-year degree—associate degrees, occupational certificates, industry certifications, apprenticeships. Many economists are bullish about the prospects of what they call "middle-skilled" workers. In coming years, according to some, at least a third and perhaps closer to half of all U.S. jobs will require more than high school but less than four years of college—and most will involve some sort of technical or practical training." The future is indeed bright for BRCC and our sister schools of LCTCS.

ARE YOU A GOOD TEACHER
How would you describe good teaching? Ben Johnson recently joined an online discussion about that topic. He remarked, "My experience is that good teachers care about students. Good teachers know the content and know how to explain it. Good teachers expect and demand high levels of performance of students. Good teachers are great performers and storytellers that rivet their students' attention. Great teachers engineer learning experiences that maneuver the students into the driver's seat and then the teachers get out of the way. Students learn best by personally experiencing learning that is physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. John Dewey had it right in 1935 when he espoused his theories on experiential learning. Today we call this constructivism" Many of the things he had to say echo what you will find in the pages of Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do, a book that we used as a common reader in the fall 2013 semester (and plan to use again this fall). So do you think the comments above describe you? Although I aspire to be what Johnson and Bain have described and challenge myself through critical self-reflection, I know it is a journey that we are all called as teachers to make.

TWO AND DONE FOR A NEW LIFE
Tomorrow will be the last Friday BRCC will be open until August 8. June 2 marks the beginning of the summer semester, four-day work weeks and we are off and running with 4-week, 8-week, and full semester offerings in addition to our eLearning courses. We have been meeting so many of our new students at the various orientation sessions being offered. They are excited and so are we. This is truly a partnership and that point must be made clear from the start. College is not high school and so the students have a terrific opportunity to write a new story for their lives. If you think about it, someone can come in and in only a short 24 months have a totally different life. Our students become welders, artists, nurses, first responders of all types, sonographers, veterinary technicians, entertainment technologists, musicians, and folks who work in all sorts of businesses, both big and small. It is these students that will form the sustainable families of the future and that is why what you do is so important. Please feel free to contact me or any of the staff in the Division of Innovative Learning and Academic Support if you need assistance. We are here for you.

DOES YOUR CLASS NEED A WARNING
Angus Johnston has written an interesting column about trigger warnings in the classroom. He writes, "A classroom environment is different for a few reasons. First, it’s a shared space — for the 75 minutes of the class session and the 15 weeks of the semester, we’re pretty much all stuck with one another, and that fact imposes interpersonal obligations on us that don’t exist between writer and reader. Second, it’s an interactive space — it’s a conversation, not a monologue, and I have a responsibility to encourage that conversation as best I can. Finally, it’s an unpredictable space — a lot of my students have never previously encountered some of the material we cover in my classes, or haven’t encountered it in the way it’s taught at the college level, and don’t have any clear sense of what to expect.

MEETING STUDENT'S UNIQUE NEEDS
Adaptive learning is a uniquely innovative, albeit expensive, way to address the problems of costs, retention, and student success, especially in remedial education where this technology promises to be most useful. So says Brian Fleming in a terrific piece on the topic. He continues, "Personalization in teaching and learning happens best when content delivery, assessment, and mastery are “adapted” to meet students’ unique needs and abilities. Educators, of course, have been doing this for centuries. What is new about this practice today, however, is simply the use of technology, which comes in the form of heavily automated digital learning platforms driven by predictive modeling, learning analytics, and the latest research in brain science, cognition, and pedagogy. This technology can be used in any discipline, though it is most common in math and science courses and primarily as a tool to enhance student success in online and remedial education, where the need for personalization has historically been most urgent." The future is here but are we ready?

COLLEGE SUCCESS SKILLS THAT WORK
With no classes scheduled for the next two weeks, things should be slowing down at BRCC, right? Not so, because this is traditionally a time for graduating high school seniors to start their college orientation process. We have held a number of sessions already with more to come. I was asked to participate and give the orientation crowds a ten minute version of how to succeed in college. Impossible you say? Not really, I say and here is part of what I tell them. College and high school are different. The clearest way to send this message is to talk about the 80/20 and 20/80 rule. In high school 80 percent of the information students learned came from the teacher. That means that 80 percent of what a student may need to pass a test is being provided in carefully crafted learning experiences that do not require any active learning to occur. In college, that role is (or should be) reversed. Students must realize that their professor will provide about 20 percent of what they need to be successful in the course. The rest of the information needs to come from other reliable sources like textbooks, journal articles, personal research, and most importantly, application of the basic knowledge. This process, usually described as critical thinking, is what sets the college experience apart from high school. So how do we get our student to shift from the 80/20 to the active learning model? First by having them understand the difference by talking about it and having them think about it. Next, talk about the college experience, your expectations, and the effort that is required to be successful (or strongly encourage them to take the College Success Skills class that we offer). Finally, talk about how the college experience and the approach they learn to apply here will benefit them for the the rest of their lives. The "real world" requires them to think critically, write well, and work with others. These are all of the skills they learn in college. At the end of my presentation at orientation, I challenge the incoming students to begin to write their own story. I ask them, "Who do they want to be and how will they get there?" I close by reminding them that making the decision to come to college infinitely increases the chance that their future will be bright.

EXPECTATIONS VERSUS ABILITIES
In a classic survey of campus faculty, Browne and Osborne noted a large discrepancy between faculty expectations for incoming students and incoming students’ perceptions of their own abilities. In particular, faculty expect college students to: critically think, manage their time, monitor their own stress levels, solve problems, clearly articulate what they do and do not know, and prioritize tasks so more important tasks are afforded more time. In this same poll, however, first year students cited the following areas of weakness in their own preparation for college: poor time management skills, ineffective methods for coping with stress, frustration with communication abilities, and poorly developed critical thinking skills. It may not surprise you that this survey was released in 1998. So here we are sixteen years later and not much has changed. The good news, according to Browne and Orborne's research, is that the process of critical thinking can be taught and modeled well enough in one semester to initiate some long-term change. Even with a model for critical thinking in hand, however, student success is not guaranteed. Students need ongoing and frequent practice with applying the critical thinking model, and they need practice with applying the model in diverse ways. Discipline-specific applications on the process of critical thinking may be less effective in the long run than requiring students to implement critical thinking in ways that are relevant to their daily lives. As you begin to plan your learning experiences for next semester, remember to look for ways to help students develop their critical thinking skills. Take another look at the survey list above at the beginning of your next semester. If your class is filled with first-time students, who were most recently in high school, they may not have all the skills your expect. That means you have to change your approach but in the end it will create less frustration for you. Remember to keep calm and be engaged.

GO BACK IN TIME
Before you leave for the summer (if you have decided not to teach during the summer term), you might want to request a copy of the updated Active Learning Manual. It is filled with active learning strategies that can be used in any type of class. There are even some suggestions specific for those teaching in the online environment. You might also want to take another look at this post on active learning. Can you spot a good learner? Revisit this post and match the list with the students in your class who had success. Is the article validated by what you observed? If you are looking at a course redesign project over the summer, take a look at this information to help you stay focused.

BRAIN NEWS WE CAN USE
There is good news and bad news on the brain front depending on which side of the neural network you are on. According to a recent article in Popular Science, the concept of brain emulation has a long, colorful history in science fiction, but it's also deeply rooted in computer science. An entire subfield known as neural networking is based on the physical architecture and biological rules that underpin neuroscience. Computer engineers have created artificial neural networks capable of forming associations, or learning. However, any neuroscientist will tell you that artificial neural networks don't begin to incorporate the true complexity of the human brain. Researchers have yet to characterize the many ways neurons interact and have yet to grasp how different chemical pathways affect the likelihood that they will fire. It appears there are rules they just don't know yet. So in the battle between human and machine, it seems we are still winning. We are discovering new things about how we learn everyday, which is another reason that teaching continues to be such a fascinating career or vocation. A lesson for our students is to practice good living like getting the proper rest, avoiding high anxiety situations right before assessment, and developing healthy eating habits to make sure their neurons are firing properly.

MEMORY AND REPETITION
"The average person probably remembers more of what they see than what they hear," says Dr. Dave Yearwood in a great article about exposing your students to the same information multiple ties to insure it sticks. He writes, "according to molecular biologist John Medina, the key to more remembering what we see and hear is enhanced when repetition is involved. Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating mass memorization of anything by anyone. Memorization is necessary in some cases, but given the easy access to all kinds of information, I see little reason for my students to commit large amounts of information to organic memory as opposed to knowing how and where to find it. What I am merely suggesting is that frequent re-exposure to snippets of content will likely aid understanding of what was presented or discussed."

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT CREATES LONG-TERM BENEFITS
Raise your hand if you believe it is a professor's job to stimulate, care about, and encourage their student's hopes and dreams? Put your hand down and take a look at this article by Scott Carlson in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He writes, "If you believe the new Gallup-Purdue Index Report, a study of 30,000 graduates of American colleges on issues of employment, job engagement, and well-being, it all comes down to old-fashioned values and human connectedness." Harold V. Hartley III, senior vice president at the Council of Independent Colleges said, "The thing that I think that is of particular value of this survey is that it is looking at outcomes of college that are different from the outcomes that we typically look at—like did you get a job, what is your salary, and those kinds of things."

ACTIVE LEARNING ON TAP FOR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
The fact that active learning methods help to improve student success has been widely documented. Implementing active learning into your courses requires some time and attention but the rewards for you and your students is immediate and immeasurable. If you are interested in adding new tools to your teaching toolkit, especially in the active learning area, then this professional development workshop on Friday, March 28 is built for you. Teaching and Learning Interventions for Student Success will be presented at 10:00 am at the Frazier Site in room 227. Presenters Todd Pourciau and Jeanne Stacey will facilitate a lively interactive workshop that will have you ready to go. Whether you are just joining the active learning movement or are looking for supplements to enhance your current skill set, this workshop is for you. Registration is now open.

TAKING TESTING TO NEW HEIGHTS
The Testing Center at our Mid City Campus has seen a measurable increase in customer usage. The staff is working hard to accommodate the diverse numbers of users and the expanded hours this semester and testing at Acadian Campus and several of the sites has helped to relieve some of the pressure. However, it is more important than ever that we remind our students that appointments must be made in advance in order to insure that they have a spot to test. We are asking for a 24 hour minimum appointment request for all test takers. In addition, if you are teaching a course through the eLearning Program, please make sure that the Testing Center staff has all of the pertinent information before your students begin arriving for testing. As we work to improve the service we offer and to create a relaxing environment that provides the best testing opportunity for our students, it is important that we work together to maximize student success. Should you have any questions, you can contact a Testing Center staff member at 216.8038 or via email (testingcenter@mybrcc.edu). If you have specific eLearning-related questions, please contact Program Manager Susan Nealy at 216.8130 or via email (nealys@mybrcc.edu).

ONLINE TEACHING WISDOM
Liz Timbs, a Ph.D. student in History at Michigan State, has written an interesting opinion piece about how delivering a class in an online environment takes some special skills and training. She writes, "Compared to a traditional classroom setting, the virtual classroom requires a different approach to communicating with students. While email occupies a central role in how I communicate with students in a traditional course, email becomes vital for a successful virtual course. The more detail the better; this saves you from writing 2-3 emails when you can communicate all of the directions in one clear, straightforward email. Writing emails of this nature can seem very tedious and pointless, but being precise helps both the students and the teachers (or teaching assistants) a lot!"  She goes on to describe a few other pearls of wisdom that she has learned on the Superhighway.

ENGAGED SCHOLARS CIRCLE ADDS A MEMBER

The latest honoree to be recognized by the Teaching+Learning Center for excellence in the classroom is Catherine Doyle, Instructor of Nursing in the Nursing and Allied Health Division. Catherine is a big proponent of active learning methods and uses the full teaching toolkit to get the most out of her students. That is really great since she is helping to teach the next generation of nurses for our area. We caught up with Catherine at the LCTCS conference and took the picture at the left. Catherine's students told us that she is very invested in their future and that she always finds a way to help them understand even the most complex things they have to learn. Congratulations to Catherine who joins Paul Guidry, Sandra Guzman, Wes Harris, Mary Miller, and Amy Pinero as examples of faculty who believe in the power of engagement as a retention strategy.



BUILDING ON OUR MOMENTUM CONFERENCE
This year's LCTCS conference provided a great opportunity for all of us to interact with our counterparts at the sister institutions in our system. On Thursday, I was happy to join Russell Nolan, Instructor of Biology in the Division of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, for a presentation entitled Teaching Teachers How To Teach: The science of learning, from theory to application. We were fortunate to have more than 50 colleagues join us for a session that explained the art and science of teaching using kinesiology-focused research. We were also able to extol the virtues of the scholarship of teaching and learning as a tool to help improve our teaching and our students' learning. I was again fortunate to be joined by members of our outstanding faculty for a session on Friday entitled Good Teaching Can Be Learned: Results of a faculty learning community at BRCC. Nisha Aroskar (Economics) Wes, Harris (English/Honors College), and Angela Pursley (Accounting) shared their experience from the FLC with more than 30 colleagues from around the state. Their stories were inspiring and clearly illustrated  the power that faculty learning communities can have for change and growth.

JOKES CAN IMPROVE LEARNING
Dr. Alicia Rieger believes in the power of humor for the learning process. She writes, in a recent article, "Humor has been reported to increase motivation, enhance the retention of new information, advance problem-solving skills, encourage creativity and critical thinking, facilitate a positive learning environment, and decrease exam anxiety (Martin, 2007). In the college classroom, teaching should move beyond transmitting facts to encouraging students to think critically and creatively about the subject matter. According to Tamblyn (2003), students must use their imaginations and open their minds to new ideas if they are to think critically and creatively. Humor is about allowing oneself to be intellectually playful with ideas."