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.

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.

STUDENT RATING WORKSHOP
What role does faculty organization play in student ratings? How can you better illustrate concern for your student's success in your courses? How many ways can you state the course objectives? Can you increase rigor without hurting your student rating scores? These are some of the questions we will discuss at the upcoming professional development session, Interpreting Your Student Ratings and Using Them for Professional Development, on Thursday, February 26. The session begins at 1:00 pm in 311 Magnolia Building. If you have specific issues that have cropped up in your student rating feedback, now if a great time to send me an email (pourciaut@mybrcc.edu). I will include it in the anonymous list and provide suggestions for improvement at the workshop. You can register now for this event being sponsored by the Teaching+Learning Center.

INCREASING OFFICE VISITS
One of the more common complaints we hear is that students rarely take advantage of our office hours. Having a student visit you is not only a proven method to improve student success but provides us with a wonderful opportunity to provide some career advice for our students. So how do we get them to make a purposeful trip to our offices? The latest blog from Faculty Focus offers several suggestions. One of the more straight-forward is requiring your students to visit. It is suggested that you require this visit to occur early in the semester. The post suggests, "If the visit is to discuss some course issue, say possible term paper topics, that conversation can show students the value of meeting with the prof. They get good feedback on the topic they’re considering, get ideas about other options, and can ask questions about assignment details." The post also suggests using course centers which consist of scheduled one- or two-hour time blocks in unoccupied classrooms.

IMPROVING COURSE RIGOR
Most of us have heard of (and hopefully are using) Bloom's Taxonomy to increase rigor in our classrooms. The Teaching+Learning Center has been distributing a Quick Flip Question booklet for the past several years. If you have not received one of these handy resources, contact me and we will get one to you. Another good resource to help you increase rigor in your classes is Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DoK) Levels.  Many instructors are using the DoK scale to improve instruction leading to better learning by their students. Take a look at this site which provides an overview and some videos to help you understand how to use DoK properly.

FACULTY DEVELOPMENT ON CRITICAL THINKING

The conversation about the idea of teaching students to think critically has gone from a whisper to a roar. Many states have adopted learning outcomes that designate critical thinking as one of the required standards for their institutions of higher education. Many of the questions I am often asked focus on critical thinking. In fact, the Common Reader Faculty Learning Community spent some time discussing the concept as well. In response to the curiosity, The Teaching+Learning Center is offering the webinar Teaching for Critical Thinking on October 31 at 3:00 PM. Dr. Stephen Brookfield, University Distinguished Professor at the University of St. Thomas, will be making the presentation. At the end of this webinar, you will be able to: Design and implement an Assumptions Audit; Implement the Critical Incident Questionnaire-a tool to model critical thinking; Design and conduct a Scenario Analysis exercise; Design and conduct a “Chalk Talk” exercise; and, Incorporate two or more techniques for modeling critical thinking into your practice as a teacher. You can register now for this faculty professional development workshop.

RELEVANCE AND AUTONOMY ARE KEY TO STUDENT SUCCESS

Underachievement in college students is linked to lack of motivation (Balduf, 2009 and references therein). Two major factors that contribute to poor motivation are inability of students to see the relevance of classroom activities to their chosen careers (Glynn et al., 2009) and lack of a sense of autonomy (Reeve and Jang, 2006; Reeve, 2009). Dr. Katherine Robertson has written an article addressing both of these issues. She suggest that experiential learning be used and describes it as "a process through which students develop skills through direct experience. While most people think of experiential learning as something that happens outside the classroom, it is possible to give students real-life experiences in the classroom, too," says Dr. Robertson. She also suggests that to enhance student autonomy, have your students write their own rubrics and guidelines under your guidance. 

FACULTY LEARNING COMMUNITIES ROLL ON 

The Common Reader Faculty Learning Community is wrapping up their faculty development project and will have some interesting outcomes based on the lively discussion in and out of the formal sessions. In addition, the Building a Hybrid Course Faculty Learning Community had their initial session yesterday. This FLC is looking to create a best-practices model or template that all faculty can use as they build their hybrid classes. The FLC membership includes: Becky Adcock, Joanie Chavis, Janet Daniel, Raven Dora, Jessie Hornbrook, Mary Miller, Susan Nealy, and Todd Pourciau. They are using the Jay Caulfield book How to Design and Teach a Hybrid Course as the text for the FLC. Look for updates as they move through their sessions.

TESTING WORKSHOP PROVES BENEFICIAL

The faculty professional development session Testing 101: Assessing Student Learning held on October 17 received high marks from the faculty who spent part of their fall break participating. Dr. Amy Atchly, speech communication, was able to learn new ways to help her students overcome test anxiety. Paul Guidry, criminal justice, decided to “stop being concerned with coverage and to be more concerned with actual learning.” Belvin Givens, CSSK, is planning to use the post-test assessment methods explained in the seminar. Leroy Waguespack, STEM, was happy to receive his own Bloom’s Taxonomy flipbook to help him develop higher level-thinking questions for his tests.  Almost all of the participants said that they planned to use a test blueprint to design their assessment instruments. Watch this blog and your email-box for information on a repeat of this session.

Yes, I Agree and...

We all know the drill. We have decided to use the discussion board feature on Canvas to engage with our students and have them increase their peer-to-peer interaction. We determine the topic and issue an assignment with directions asking students to begin the topics. Once that is done, they are also asked to comment on the topics started by their fellow students. We sit back and wait and nothing happens. Well, to be fair, some students post and then other students give one to five word responses that do not move the conversation forward at all. So what went wrong? Dr. Beth René Roepnack has written a concise article on how we can improve online discussion by simply changing a couple of things. Her article appears on Faculty Focus and she offers the following suggestions. " I adjusted the structure of my online discussions from students starting threads (you know the drill, post-and-reply-to-two) to the instructor starting them, which creates a more organic discussion structure similar to classroom conversations. This simple modification, along with asking open-ended questions from the deep end of Bloom’s Taxonomy, creates discussions that support student learning and engagement with the material and each other." You can read the entire article here. If you use her suggestions, let me know if you experienced the same results that she did.

THE COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARS

Building community among our faculty is very important for us to function as a disconnected group of disciplines that must come together cohesively to address systemic problems such as student retention and success. Part of our jobs as faculty has always been to focus on the needs of our students. Whether it is showing your students how to annotate, suggesting better study skills, or advising them about time management, when we take the time to teach students how to navigate college, we are also helping our colleagues. If a student learns a valuable college success skill in one class, we all benefit. So as the landscape continues to shift and the opportunity to attend college is an option for more students, we know that the number of underprepared student will continue to grow. Here are a few suggestions that you can use to create a stronger foundation for students who are faced with multiple impediments. Suggest during your advising sessions that taking the College Success Skills course provides a solid orientation for surviving and prospering in college. When you notice students are struggling, whether by formative or summative assessment or simply through observation in your classes, suggest that they make a trip to the Academic Learning Center. Make sure you send them with a referral sheet. Once they have made their visit, have them return the referral sheet to you so that you can see what intervention was offered and what the ALC professional staff suggests as the next step. The entire process can be viewed on the ALC website. The most important thing in this situation is to talk with your students who are struggling. A high level of engagement, often marked by the student-faculty relationship, is key to improving student success.

THE VALUE OF COMMUNITY COLLEGES

LCTCS President Joe May recently had a guest editorial published by The Advocate. In trumpeting the merits of the community college experience, Dr. May uses one of our own BRCC student’s story to make his point. He says, “Students who often choose to enroll in community colleges value their low cost, easy access, small class size, and high quality instruction that aligns with the needs of the local economy. Many of these students, such as Laketa Smith at Baton Rouge Community College, acknowledge that many of their previous education and career choices were not in their long-term best interest. Laketa, like a great number of students, needed developmental education in reading to help her prepare for college-level courses. As the result of her developmental education courses, she is successfully enrolled in honors courses at BRCC. At the same time, she not only saved herself money she saved the state of Louisiana as well.”

END OF SEMESTER SUGGESTIONS

As you begin to create your final exams, I would encourage you to use the comprehensive approach. What we know about the brain and learning is that it requires prompts and redundancy in order to create deeper learning. Repeating questions from your past quizzes and tests is a good idea, especially if a high number of students did not demonstrate mastery on the previous assessment. You should also be looking to see if the students are using the feedback you have provided them by assessing their ability to integrate changes and new knowledge. Test anxiety is a very real impediment for many of your students. Positive messaging and confidence building are two key components to allowing your students to give you their best effort. Encourage them to build study guides individually and then allow them some class time to share their efforts with other students in the class. The sum is always greater than the parts when it comes to knowledge. Finally, you may want to have each of your students bring in a self-addressed stamped envelope. That way you can send them feedback on their final exam. You could also email this information or create a general feedback document that you could post to your Blackboard site. This allows us to continue to scaffold the knowledge they learned this semester and connect it to new knowledge in the semesters to come.

THE HONOR CIRCLE EXPANDS

Join us in congratulating Dr. Sandra Guzman as the most recent recipient of the Keep Calm and Be Engaged shirt of honor. Watching Dr. Guzman in her classroom is an inspiring experience. Her love of both teaching and her discipline is readily obvious. She is a big proponent of active learning and making sure that her assessment instruments are aligned with her teaching. Dr. Guzman is also a disciple of Bloom’s Taxonomy and champions its worth to her colleagues. As a biologist, she is concerned about the environment and shares her passion with her students in this area as well. Her students tell us she is tough but caring. They also say that she is able to take a difficult topic and relate it to their lives in ways that help them learn and make connections to previous knowledge. So we welcome Dr. Guzman to the Keep Calm and Be Engaged honor circle where she joins previous recipients Paul Guidry, Wes Harris, Dr. Mary Miller, and Amy Pinero.