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.

The BRCC Library has added a new book of interest for those of us looking to expand our teaching toolkit. Why Students Resist Learning edited by Anton O. Tolman and Janine Kremling is offered as a practical model for understanding and helping students. The authors spend some time on the subject of student resistance that you may encounter as you begin to move them from passive to active learners. The book is written in a way that helps us "develop a coherent and integrated understanding of the various causes of student resistance to learning...and enable them to create conditions conducive to implementing effecting learning strategies." There is also a new volume (54, number 1-February 2017) of the American Educational Research Journal in the collections. There are a number of articles related to teaching in the STEM disciplines. In addition, the opening article, Educating for Democracy in a Partisan Age: Confronting the Challenges of Motivated Reasoning and Misinformation by Joseph Kahne and Benjamin Bowyer might be of interest to you in your attempt to teach information literacy and critical thinking to our students.

CREATING SELF-REGULATED LEARNERS
While the first faculty learning community of the spring semester has started meeting, there is still time to sign up for the second FLC that will begin to meet on Tuesday, February 16 at 2 pm. The topic is how we, as instructors, can create self-regulated learners. Dr. Linda Nilson defines a self-regulated learner as a student who is an intentional, independent, self-directed learner who can acquire, retain, and retrieve new knowledge on their own. The FLC will meet for eight sessions over the semester and finish on April 17. If you are interested in joining this FLC, please contact Barbara Linder.

HOW TO LIVE WISELY
Speaking of independent students, one of the best ways to get your students to improve is to spend a little time asking them to think about their thinking. How do they think they learn best? What are the things they have learned about themselves since they started attending college? Richard Light wrote a great story about a process he has used that appears to be a survey of student's wants and needs but ingenuously creates an environment that promotes critical self-reflection. He offers a number of conversation starters and activities that you can use to help your students through this process.

MAKE A CLEAR PATH
Helping under-prepared adult students earn a degree in a STEM discipline can be difficult without the added stressors of work and family commitment. But that is just what the folks in Texas' Rio Grande Valley are doing with a new bachelor's program in biomedical sciences. Because of their urgent need for medical professionals in an area that includes two of the three poorest counties in Texas, the local institution knew they had to respond with something different. Take a look at Steven Mintz's story from Inside Higher Ed.

WHY DO YOU TEACH
Sam Intrator and Megan Scribner are  co-editors of the upcoming book Teaching with Fire, Leading from Within and Teaching from the Heart. They are looking for folks to submit a poem and a brief 250-word commentary describing how that poem inspires you, informs your work, or provides sustenance as you negotiate the complex challenges at the center your vocation. Importantly, this project is not just seeking poems about teaching and the classroom but poems on any topic that intersects with how you think about your life and work as a teacher. The deadline for submissions is February 1, 2013. This book will be a brand-new edition modeled on their best-selling Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach. If you have questions, email megan@couragerenewal.org .

HOVERING SLINKIES AND SCIENCE EDUCATION
Brian Mathews has a very interesting blog post today that suggests that research should be more accessible. He notes that a new physics paper is being promoted using a YouTube video about slinkies. He writes, "This is exactly what research libraries are talking about: data, visualization, modeling, social media, etc. While the open access aspect of the article enables people to read the work, it’s the YouTube video that creates buzz building word of mouth and fueling discovery."

NO CRITICAL THINKING REQUIRED
Kim Blank wants to kill the use of term papers as a type of assessment. Blank notes that the term paper is a practice adopted from the Germans in the early 20th century and writes, "It was one way for students to demonstrate that they could absorb what they had read, in a form fairly close to what we now call a research paper. The practice exploded in the second half of the century, and it continues today, having also devolved into variations of the now ubiquitous five-paragraph essay." Blank argues that the term paper has no connections to what students will encounter in the work place as one of the reasons (there are others) that we should discontinue the practice.

YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUESTED
You have one more opportunity for faculty professional development before the fall semester ends. Lisa Hibner, Director of the Career Center at BRCC, will present a fascinating seminar on how you can integrate career activities in your courses. Helping your students to discover their strengths and abilities is a rewarding endeavor. Providing students with the knowledge they need to be productive citizens has always been a hallmark for community colleges. The seminar will be held on Wednesday, November 28 at 3:00 PM in the Teaching+Learning Center (311 Magnolia Building). You can register now but walk-ups will be accepted. Your participation provides you with one professional development credit.

TEACHING SCIENTIFICALLY OR SCIENTIFICALLY TEACHING
Take a look at the picture on the left to see your colleagues engaged in an active learning environment. The faculty development seminar, Active Learning Methods Revealed, held yesterday in the Teaching+Learning Center was both active and filled with learning opportunities. The participants learned from the presenters Drs. Marcella Hackney and Margaret McMichael and from each other. Although the subject matter used to illustrate the process was about life science (specifically diabetes), the methods employed could be implemented by anyone in any sort of course. Hackney and McMichael used their classroom experiences and lessons learned from the Gulf Coast Summer Institute they attended earlier this year to illustrate the effectiveness of using active learning experiences to enhance student learning. Your next opportunity for faculty development comes on November 28 at 3:00PM when Lisa Hibner presents Integrating Career Activities in the Classroom. The event will be held in the T+LC (311 Magnolia Building).

BENEFITS OF MENTORING
Have you ever offered to mentor a new colleague? Organized mentoring programs are beginning to gain traction as a proven method for providing the assistance necessary to help new faculty succeed in the academic arena. Research shows than an organized mentoring program promotes faculty productivity, advocates collegiality, and advances a broader goal of attracting, retaining, and advancing faculty members (Perna, Learner, & Yura, Journal of Education). Mentoring supports professional growth and renewal, which in turn empowers faculty as individuals and colleagues (Luna & Cullen, ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Reports). It also serves to reduce the chances that a newcomer will experience isolation or job dissatisfaction (Boyle & Boice, Innovative Higher Education).  Stress is also lessened for the new faculty member when there is a reliable mentor to address the initial uneasiness or potential impediments. An effective mentoring program promotes collaborative liaisons between junior and senior faculty and is generally felt to have a positive impact on building community within and among a campus population.

THRIVING IN THE COLLEGE CLASSROOM
In their book The Adjunct Professors Guide to Success (LB1778.2.L96), Lyons, Kysilka and Pawlas distill their research findings into useful nuggets of information. For instance, they describe what college students want and expect from college instructors in a straightforward and concise manner. Specifically, they note that students need the following: expectations of their performance that is reasonable in quantity and quality and consistently communicated; sensitivity to the diverse demands on them and reasonable flexibility in accommodating them; effective use of class time; a classroom demeanor that includes humor and spontaneity; exams that address issues properly covered in and outside of class, are appropriate to the level of the majority of students in the course, are punctually scored and returned, and are used fairly to determine final class grades; and, consistent positive treatment of individual students, including a willingness to spend extra time before or after class to provide additional support. The flip-side of this is what the teacher expects of the student. Our premise is that the education process is a 50/50 partnership that requires our students to take ownership for their academic career. As you develop your expectations, it is important to consider both sides and to communicate those to your students.
 
BAD TEACHING OR VALUABLE DATA
CourseSmart, the digital textbook provider that is partnered with five major publishers, recently announced the launch of CourseSmart Analytics. The Program, which is currently being piloted at three colleges, tracks students' engagement with their e-textbooks and provides and allows professors and colleges to evaluate the usefulness of learning materials and to track student work. The debate now begins. John Warner blogs that he thinks it is a bad idea. Alexandra Tilsley is mostly positive in this news article.

nside Higher Ed

TEACH THE STUDENTS YOU HAVE
Yesterday's seminar Engaging Millennial Learners was well attended and the participation during the session was terrific. The seminar focused on the active learning experience of class discussion and how to best implement that very effective method. Here are just a few of the many responses we got on the evaluation sheets from the seminar participants. Becky Adcock, Veterinary Technician program, said that she intends to use the Muddiest Point learning experience along with more discussion and less lecturing in her classes. Mary Miller, Science Department, plans to utilize more videos in her classes. Kathryn Arrington, CSSK instructor, plans to give her students a test covering the topics on her syllabus and will work to build a more conducive climate in her classes. Marty Lensing, Criminal Justice Program, plans to allow his students to think about the questions he poses to them for a few minutes, asking them to write down their thoughts, before he calls on them to respond. What I learned was how terrific and devoted our faculty are at BRCC. We were all united on the fact that our focus is all about improving student learning.

BECOMING THE GREAT MOTIVATOR
Elizabeth Barkley, in her book Student Engagement Techniques (LB 2342.92 .B.34), offers a number of tips for fostering motivation in your students. She notes that "Teacher personality and behavior have a powerful impact on whether students feel motivated in a course." Building on studies by industrial and organizational psychologists, educational researchers have found that even students who are intrinsically motivated by their studies will put forth reasonable effort if they like and admire their teacher, just as they may become apathetic or resistant if they view their teacher negatively (Brophy, 2004). She concludes, "This does not mean that you have to be false to your basic personality but it does suggest that students will be more likely to engage in your class if you cultivate and display attributes of well-liked and respected teachers, such as energy, enthusiasm, passion, approachability, fairness, and optimism."

WHAT IS ACTIVE LEARNING
Drs. Marcella Hackney and Margaret McMichael will present a faculty development seminar on Monday, November 19 at 2:00 PM in the Teaching+Learning Center. Active Learning Methods Revealed will offer insight into a variety of the best teaching methods that can help you to improve student learning while increasing the tools in your teaching toolkit. Hackney and McMichael participated in the Gulf Coast Summer Institute this past summer held on the LSU campus. Look for more information in your email-box soon.

LIGHTING THE FIRE OF INQUIRY
Here is a great learning experience utilizing video clips offered by fellow blogger Julia Phelan. We often start a topic, at least in the sciences, by outlining the background of the topic, creating a simple picture, and building up an understanding of something complex.  But what about starting with the complex, interesting thing, and then gaining the tools to understand that complex idea through a variety of  activities?  You might show students an object, picture, or video of something a little confusing or curious and ask them to generate a series of “I wonder” questions.  In the sciences, this could be achieved with many existing YouTube or other videos of interesting phenomena by simply turning off the sound, leaving students to view the phenomena without hearing the explanation.  These “I wonder” questions can then be used to lead into activities or lecture, tailored to students’ innate curiosity and questions.  They can also be used to generate inquiry questions for a laboratory or other hands-on activity, providing authentic motivation for students to explore a phenomenon.  For example, a video showing a levitating superconducting magnet could lead into questions such as “is the magnet cold?”  “What kind of material is that?”  “Will it still float if you put a piece of paper between the two magnets?”  These questions could be used to generate inquiry activities about magnets and superconducting magnets.

LEARNING LIKE A VIKING
EDUCAUSE has an interesting article on the future of higher education. Here is an excerpt: The basic model of higher education that exists today was created in the 11th century, operates on a 19th-century calendar, yet is supposed to prepare students for life in the 21st century. Far too often, students are the passive recipients of content delivered by experts who lecture, a practice used since the 11th century but increasingly inappropriate today. School calendars, created two centuries ago, apparently remain resistant to change. And schools that are supposed to prepare a generation to confront today's challenges far too often fail at that task: only 63.2 percent of students who began college in 2003 earned a bachelor's degree by 2009.

DO IT YOURSELF CHEMISTRY
A study in Colorado has found little difference in the learning of students in online or in-person introductory science courses. The study tracked community college students who took science courses online and in traditional classes, and who then went on to four-year universities in the state. Upon transferring, the students in the two groups performed equally well. Some science faculty members have expressed skepticism about the ability of online students in science, due to the lack of group laboratory opportunities, but the programs in Colorado work with companies to provide home kits so that online students can have a lab experience.

WHAT ARE YOU TESTING
Testing your students is an essential part of the process to determine if they are indeed learning anything. Constructing a test is a learned behavior that needs practice and can usually benefit from assistance. In fact, creating good tests has become such a valuable skill that it has grown into a career for some folks. The test researchers note that true/false tests are the least effective for assessing learning and determining if you are indeed teaching your students. True/false tests are typically easy and you need a large number of items for high reliability. In addition, your students have a 50-50 chance of guessing the right answer and it is difficult to discriminate between students that know the material and students who don't. If you are looking for some assistance with test construction, contact the Teaching+Learning Center at 8534.

HIDDEN PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE
Samuel Arbesman, author of The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date, writes that "since scientific knowledge is still growing by a factor of ten every 50 years, it should not be surprising that lots of facts people learned in school and universities have been overturned and are now out of date." Arbesman, a senior scholar at the Kaufmann Foundation and an expert in scientometrics, looks at how facts are made and remade in the modern world. And since fact-making is speeding up, he worries that most of us don’t keep up to date and base our decisions on facts we dimly remember from school and university classes that turn out to be wrong.

DO YOU HAVE AN OPINION
Are you looking to integrate active learning into your course or perhaps you want to use inquiry-guided learning in your class? Do you know why Millennial students are different from students you may have taught in the past? Did you know that student engagement has proven to be the most important deterrent to student attrition according to the latest research? These questions are just part of the Teaching+Learning Center's Needs Assessment survey now being collected. If you have not had the opportunity to complete the short survey, please take a few minutes to do it today. 

CONNECTING NEW INFORMATION TO MEMORY
Speaking of student engagement, there are a number of resources that can help you create a student-friendly classroom. Elizabeth Barkley says that engaged students are involved in the academic task at hand and are using higher-order thinking skills such as analyzing information or solving problems. In her book Student Engagement Techniques: A handbook for college faculty, Barkley notes that engagement is linked to active learning because learning is about making sense and meaning out of new information by connecting it to what is already known. Although the BRCC Library does not have access to Barkley's book, you can view large portions of it using the Google books feature. She concludes by saying that there is "no single tip, technique, or strategy that offers a magic formula or blueprint for student engagement. Yet some approaches and activities do engage students better than others." 

YOU CAN USE THIS NOW
If you are looking for a way to enhance the question and answer portions of your class, you might want to try to the Waiting Game technique. Tell your students that once you ask the question, they must wait until you say it is okay for them to answer. The wait time should generally be short (15 seconds or so) - but research shows this is one of the hardest things for faculty to do yet it creates a better learning environment for many reasons. It is important to insist that no one raise their hand (or shout out the answer) before you give the okay, in order to discourage the typical scenario in which the five students in the front row all immediately volunteer to answer the question, and everyone else sighs in relief. Waiting forces every student to think about the question, rather than passively relying on those students who are fastest out of the gate to answer every question. When the wait time is up, the instructor asks for volunteers or randomly picks a student to answer the question. Once students are in the habit of waiting after questions are asked, more will get involved in the process. 

DOCTORS OF THE FUTURE
A $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health has been awarded to LSU and BRCC to establish a new biomedical and behavioral sciences education initiative called the Bridges to the Baccalaureate Program. The program will encourage underrepresented students in the biomedical and behavioral science fields to complete their associate degrees at BRCC, and then move on to complete bachelor's degrees at LSU.

WORDLE TIPS
Rebecca Wesley, Clinical Coordinator and Instructor in our Veterinary Technology program, says that she and her students love using Wordle in the classroom. I have heard from a few of you since talking about that online resource at Vice Chancellor Cross's fall semester kickoff meeting. Wordle does not provide a way to save your projects but there are ways around that. Of course you can print it but you may also want an electronic copy. The best way to create your file is to use this technique. In Windows you can always hit the Print Screen button. Next open up Word, Open Office, or graphics program such as Paint and paste it in. Use the cropping tool in that program to get what you want. In Windows 7 you may wish to use the Snip It Tool which gives you a lot more options including the ability to save as an image and crop. Send me some of your favorites and I will post them to the blog.

CONFERENCE OPPORTUNITIES
The call for proposals is now out for the 5th annual conference on Higher Education Pedagogy to be held at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA on February 6-8, 2013. Proposals are due by October 8, 2012. The conference showcases the best pedagogical practice and research in higher education today. Sessions address disciplinary and interdisciplinary instructional strategies, outcomes, and research. Registration is now open for the Designing and Improving an Effective Online Science Course annual conference to be held November 1 and 2, 2012 at Parkland College in Champaign, IL. This conference will allow for the sharing of ideas, experiences, and research on online education in the fields of physics, chemistry, astronomy, earth science, and biology, focusing on courses which are both 100% online and hybrid. The goals are to promote a high quality online science education and to improve student learning in the online environment. If you have taught online classes and have something to share, or are new to online delivery and need a few pointers, this workshop is for you. 

YOUR OPINION MATTERS
If you have not completed the Teaching+Learning Center's needs assessment survey, I urge you to take it now. The survey is short but will provide valuable information as we move to begin programming for the coming months.