FACULTY DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES
The Teaching+Learning Center (T+LC) will be offering a workshop focused on mental health for the first time tomorrow at 1:00 PM. Dr. Bridget Sonnier-Hillis, a psychology instructor, and Wendy Devall, director of disability services for BRCC, will co-present on this important topic. There is still time to register. Then on October 6 from 1:00 to 2:30 PM, T+LC will be presenting a workshop about the millennial learner in response to your ranked requests at the fall faculty development kickoff. We will spend some time looking at the characteristics of this group of student and how we can tailor our teaching to their specific needs. The session will conclude with an open discussion session and registration is now open.

REPLACE POLICIES WITH DEMONSTRATION
Dr. Lolita Paff believes that that policies we put in place in our classes may not be garnering the response we hoped for. She writes, "Policies are necessary. They serve as a warning to students: this is what will happen if you are absent, miss an exam, turn work in late, text or surf the Web during class, and the like. Policies don’t teach students why these behaviors hurt their effort to learn. Despite extensive evidence to the contrary, many students believe their learning is unaffected by technology distractions. 'No screens' policies are aimed, at least in part, to minimize distractions that hurt learning (their own and peers’). But policies aren’t nearly as powerful as an activity that demonstrates the effects of distraction." Keep reading... 

STUDENT RETENTION IMPROVES WITH ONLINE CLASSES
Does online learning impede degree completion? That is the problem that Drs. Peter Shea and Temi Bidjerano sought to resolve in their research. What they found is just the opposite. They report, "Contrary to expectations, the study found that controlling for relevant background characteristics; students who take some of their early courses online or at a distance have a significantly better chance of attaining a community college credential than do their classroom only counterparts. These results imply that a new model of student retention in the age of the Internet, one that assumes transactional adaptation, may be warranted. Keep reading.

MISCOMMUNICATION, PERSONAL ATTACKS AND TROLLING
Adding a discussion component to your face-to-face or eLearning class is a great way to measure learning. The depth of a question can tell you plenty about where your students are along the learning spectrum. Having peer-to-peer discussions is also a great way to illustrate that students are part of the learning process and should not expect all of the answers to come directly from you. If you are thinking of adding discussions to your class, there are a few areas of concern that you should be prepared for and Anastasia Salter has written an article to help you out. She writes, "I’ve been teaching a large online class for the first time this semester, and as the course involves looking at a number of challenge interactive works and games I put a lot of emphasis on discussion forums and critical debate. However, discussion forums of this kind present a lot of potential problems in an online class. We only have to read the comments anywhere on the web (pro tip: don’t actually read the comments) to see that the online medium offers huge potential for miscommunication, personal attacks, trolling, and harassment–even when in the space of a virtual classroom." To see her tips click here. 

THE PAIN OF AWKWARD SILENCE
Dr. Kenneth L. Parker, Steber Professor in Theological Studies at St. Louis University, has an interesting post today about asking students questions. He writes, "At the beginning of each academic year, I have to relearn the same lesson: enduring the awkward silence after a question has been asked. At the start of my career this “skill” seemed unendurable. It felt far easier to fill the empty void of fifty or seventy-five minutes—or God forbid, two and a half hours—with the sound of my own voice and well chosen words recorded on paper. After all, students are conditioned to expect that of my guild. Yet as I began to take more seriously the need to create learner-centered classroom experiences, one of the first steps to achieve that goal proved to be silencing my own voice, and waiting for students to find theirs. Continue reading

IS PESSIMISM HURTING STUDENT SUCCESS
Some of your students may be falling behind because they suffer from a negative disposition. Dr. Travis Bradberry provides us with interventions that can help create student success through positivity. He writes, "When faced with setbacks and challenges, we’ve all received the well-meaning advice to “stay positive.” The greater the challenge, the more this glass-half-full wisdom can come across as Pollyannaish and unrealistic. It’s hard to find the motivation to focus on the positive when positivity seems like nothing more than wishful thinking. The real obstacle to positivity is that our brains are hard-wired to look for and focus on threats. This survival mechanism served humankind well back when we were hunters and gatherers, living each day with the very real threat of being killed by someone or something in our immediate surroundings." Continue reading

CELEBRATE CHARACTER DAY
September 18 is character day and schools and organizations around the world are hosting screenings of a short film called The Science of Character, which explores the research behind character development and encourages us to focus on our character strengths for greater personal and community well-being. Amy Erin Borovoy has also compiled an impressive away of short videos for each of the seven highly predictive character strengths distilled by KIPP schools, in partnership with grit researcher Dr. Angela Duckworth, and psychologists Drs. Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson (authors of the groundbreaking book Character Strengths and Virtues). Borovoy concludes, "I hope these videos will inspire you to celebrate #CharacterDay on September 18th, and to think about the importance of character every day!"

LOOKING FOR NEW TEACHING TOOLS
If you have not registered for the professional development workshop to be held on Thursday "Active Learning Overview: How and Why It Works", there is still time. Next up from the Teaching+Learning Center (T+LC) is "Engaging Students from Day 1" to be presented by Biology Instructor Russell Nolan on Thursday, September 24 at 1:00 PM. You can register for that session as well. The entire T+LC website has recently been updated so you may want to spend some time poking around to discover the array of resources provided by your center. In addition, if you have not accepted your invitation to join the Teaching and Learning Faculty Development Canvas group, you are missing out on a wealth of additional resources on teaching, active learning and material for your students.

PUBLISHING OPPORTUNITY
Beginning in July 2016, Teaching & Learning Inquiry will be hosted at the University of Calgary as part of the university’s Open Access publishing program through Libraries and Cultural Resources. The 4.2 issue (scheduled for September 2016) will be the first to appear in the new format. As noted in previous reports from the Publications Advisory Committee (PAC), the move to Open Access (OA) will have a number of advantages. This more accessible format will make the SoTL community’s work more widely available, open up the journal to online-only features, and reduce costs. The Committee sees OA as congruent with both the ethic of sharing that characterizes the SoTL community and the significant shifts in the scholarly publishing world. With TLI’s new online format, authors will be able to include audio or video files, as well as color images and photos. Articles can also include supplementary files, including supporting evidence or raw data, survey tools, and coding protocols. Readers will have easy access through live links to resources described in articles, opening the door to interaction between authors and readers. (For instance, authors may link to a feedback form that would send reader responses directly to them.) They are exploring ideas for other kinds of articles and would love to hear your thoughts. Please email the editorial office at TLIj@ucalgary.ca. For examples of the kinds of works an online environment can support, see The Spatial History Project and the Journal of Visualized Experiments.

 

MYTH OF MULTITASKING
Have you had the talk with your students? You know what I am talking about? The talk about the hazards of multitasking (or switch-tasking as it is more appropriately called). The research is clear on this subject. When we try to do two things at one time, everything suffers. If it is two simple tasks like folding laundry and listening to the weather report, our brain can handle them. If the competing tasks are challenging, like listening to a lecture while texting, the brain is using the same mental resources and both tasks suffer. Researchers have documented a list of negative outcomes that can occur when student switch task while doing classwork. The first (and this may be the one that can turn the tide for you as you share this with your students) is the task takes much longer to complete. Why? Each time the student returns to the classwork, the brain has to refamiliarize with the material. Second, the mental fatigue caused by repeatedly dropping and picking up a mental thread leads to more mistakes. Third, students' subsequent memory of what they are working on will be impaired if their attention is divided. Fourth, when we are distracted, research shows that our brains actually process and store information in different, less useful ways. Looking to dig deeper into this topic? Here are a few of the scientists working in this field: Russell Poldrack, David Meyer, James Kraushaar, David Novak, and Larry Rosen.

LET'S TALK
High engagement levels between students and faculty is still the best way to prevent attrition and improve retention. Dr. Constance Staley offers the following advice, "Clear and cogent communication is a key to success in all of our relationships—and the instructor–student relationship is no exception to that rule. Of course, communication in the classroom concerns more than just your lecturing; it encompasses all the ways you listen to, speak to, and interact with students. How can you enhance or improve your communications with your students this semester? Continue reading...

UPCOMING WORKSHOP
During the Faculty Development Kickoff held earlier, we asked you which topics you wanted to learn about this academic year. Active learning was one of the top picks and will be the topic for the professional development workshop on Thursday, September 17 at 1:00 PM. We will spend some time on the how and why, discuss a few active learning methods, and then take some time redesigning one of your current lessons. You can register here. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email me (pourciaut@mybrcc.edu).

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