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Pursuing an Academic CareerWebinar SeriesSetting goals for effective & innovative coursesApril 10, 2012 Audio access: Call in 1-800-704-9804 Access code: Alternate number: 1-404-920-6604 (not toll-free) Please mute your phone by pressing *6 Technical problems? Contact Monica: mbruckne@carleton.edu Program begins at: 1:30 pm Eastern | 12:30 pm Central | 11:30 am Mountain | 10:30 am Pacific You can find information about the event at http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/careerdev/AcademicCareer2012/april_2012.html

Pursuing an Academic CareerSeries conveners and moderators Prof. Rachel Beane Bowdoin College Prof. Mike Williams University of Massachusetts, Amherst Monica Bruckner Science Education and Resource Center (SERC)

Setting goals for effective and innovative coursesPresenter Prof. Barbara Tewksbury Hamilton College

What best describes your current position? • Grad student • Post-doc • Researcher • Faculty member (incl. adjunct) • Other

What kind of course are you designing goals for? • Intro level • Required course for undergrad majors • Elective course for undergrad majors • Course for grad students • Other

Addressing questions from all y’all • What this webinar will address • How do I set reasonable goals? • How do I assess whether students have met the goals? • How do I build a course around goals? • Where do I start?? • What we don’t have time to cover • Specific teaching strategies, engaging students, student retention • Balancing lecture and lab • Developing specific assignments, projects • Challenges of specific settings/courses • Choosing textbooks

Major theme of On the Cutting Edge has been on making courses more effective in terms of student learning

What does it mean to make a course more effective? • Course Audition and Spoken Language at RIT School for the Deaf • For pre-service teachers who will have hearing-impaired students in class • Instructor wanted students well-prepared for future tasks as in-service teachers • Goal: students will be able to analyze pupil characteristics, classroom performance, and learning environments to design, implement, and assess lesson plans that will enhance spoken language learning.

Goal: Analyze pupil characteristics, classroom performance, and learning environments to design, implement, and assess lesson plans that will enhance spoken language learning • Previous organization • Around topics such as nature and physiology of hearing loss, interpreting audiograms, troubleshooting hearing aids, designing lesson plans • Final high stakes project – not successful • New organization • Moderately hearing-impaired child • Severely hearing-impaired child • Profoundly deaf child

Goal: analyze pupil characteristics, classroom performance, and learning environments to design, implement, and assess lesson plans that will enhance spoken language learning • Same topics revisited with increasing complexity in each course chunk • Enables students to have repeated practice toward goals with increasing independence • Same overall content but goals threaded throughout the course • Students better prepared for future

What does it mean to make a course more effective? Example from a Mineralogy course designed at a Cutting Edge workshop several years ago Required course for geo majors Instructor wanted students to do more than just “know about” minerals – wanted students to be able to use knowledge to solve geological problems. Goals: Students will be able to synthesize mineralogical data (visual inspection, petrographic microscopy, XRD and SEM/EDS) to address specific geological problems.

Goals: synthesize mineralogical data (visual inspection, petrographic microscopy, XRD and SEM/EDS) to address specific geological problems. Previous organization Around topics such as crystal chemistry, Miller indices, systematic mineralogy, lattice structures, space groups, etc. Final project to “pull it all together” New organization Core Mantle Crust Content in context, increasing complexity of practice in analysis and synthesis

Making a course more effective • Faculty commonly have “application” goals as well as content goals. • Typical course organization • Teach the content background and techniques for most of the semester. • Assign a high stakes final project - can students apply what they’ve learned and do sophisticated hypothesis-framing, independent data-finding, analysis, and communication on their own? • Success is typically mixed and commonly doesn’t “stick” well

Making a course more effective • If you want students to be good at something, they must practice. • Course is more effective if students have practice toward the “independent analysis” goals threaded throughout the course instead of just in the final project. • Articulation of goals beyond content coverage and technique mastery are important because they drive what kind of practice students need during a course.

Importance of goals to course design • Example from an art history course • Survey of art from a particular period Vs. • Enabling students to go to an art museum and evaluate technique of an unfamiliar work or evaluate an unfamiliar work in its historical context or evaluate a work in the context of a particular artistic genre/school/style • Content coverage is not enough to enable students to achieve 2nd set of goals

Importance of goals to course design • Example from a bio course • Survey of topics in general biology Vs. • Enabling students to evaluate claims in the popular press or seek out and evaluate information or make informed decisions about issues involving genetically-engineered crops, stem cells, DNA testing, HIV AIDS, etc. • Requires very different kinds of practice to enable students to achieve the 2nd set of goals

Common denominator • What sorts of things do you do simply because you are a professional in your discipline?? • I use the geologic record to reconstruct the past and to predict the future. • I look at houses on floodplains, and wonder how people could be so stupid • I hear the latest news from Mars and say, well that must mean that….

What do you do?? • Physicist: predict outcomes based on calculations from physics principles • Art historian: assess works of art • Historian: interpret historical account in light of the source of information • English prof: critical reading of prose/poetry

Approaching it from the standpoint of what you do • Your course should enable your students, at the appropriate level, to do what you do in your discipline, not just expose them to what you know. • Start by answering the question • In context of the general topic of your course, what do you do? What does analyze, evaluate, etc. involve? • Or, what is unique about your world view? • Type responses in chat window • Keep text short!!! Start with “I …..” • Timer will be on, and we will resume when the timer runs out.

Goals: student-focused or not? • Teaching is commonly viewed as being teacher-centered. • Reinforced by the teaching evaluation process • Commonly reinforced by how we phrase course goals: “I want to expose my students to….” or “I want to teach my students about…” or “I want to show students that…”

Goals: student-focused or not? • “It dawned on me about two weeks into the first year that it was not teaching that was taking place in the classroom, but learning.” Pop star Sting, reflecting upon his early career as a teacher

Goals: student-focused or not? • We can’t do a student’s learning for him/her • Exposure does not guarantee learning • Students learn when they are actively engaged in practice, application, and problem-solving (NRC How People Learn)http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853

Goals: student-focused or not? • Focus should be on what the students are able to do as a result of having completed the course • Not just what the instructor will expose them to or show them. • Need to set course goals for the students, not the teacher.

Goals: student-focused or not? • We’ll set student-focused goals • We’ll answer the question what do I want my students to be able to do?? • I want my students to use their strong background in order to ____ rather than just • I want my students to have a strong background in ____

Goals involving lowerorder thinking skills • Knowledge, comprehension, application list identify recognize explain describe paraphrase calculate mix prepare

Examples of goals involving lower order thinking skills • At the end of this course, students will be able to: • list the major factors that can lead to slope failure. • identify common rocks and minerals. • recognize examples of erosional and depositional glacial landforms on a topographic map. • cite examples of poor land use practice. • know how to read phase diagrams. • calculate standard deviation for a set of data.

Examples of goals involving lower order thinking skills • At the end of this course, students will be able to: • discuss the major ways that groundwater can become contaminated. • compare and contrast the features of the three major types of plate boundaries. • describe how pressure and temperature influence the behavior of rocks during deformation, and give an illustrative example. • explain how the greenhouse effect works and explain why burning of fossil fuels increases the greenhouse effect.

Examples of goals involving lower order thinking skills • While some of these goals involve a deeper level of knowledge and understanding than others, the goals are largely reiterative.

Goals involving higherorder thinking skills • Analysis, synthesis, evaluation, some types of application derive design formulate predict interpret evaluate analyze synthesize create

Examples of goals involving higher order thinking skills • At the end of this course, students will be able to: • evaluate geologic risk in an unfamiliar area and make an informed decision about where to live. • identify interconnections in systems and predict how changes in one part/aspect of the system will influence other parts/aspects of the system. • analyze the evolution of a region over time. • use data from recent Mars missions to re-evaluate pre-2004 hypotheses about Mars geologic processes and history/evolution

Examples of goals involving higher order thinking skills • At the end of this course, students will be able to: • Make an informed decision about a controversial topic, other than those covered in class. • Frame a hypothesis and collect appropriate field data to address a research question. • Design models of ___ • Solve unfamiliar problems in ____ • Find and evaluate information/data on ____ • Predict the outcome of ____

Examples of goals involving higher order thinking skills • What makes these goals different from the previous set is that they are analytical, rather than reiterative. • Focus is on new and different situations. • Emphasis is on transitive nature of skills, abilities, knowledge, and understanding

Why are overarchinggoals important? • If you want students to be good at something, they must practice; therefore goals drive both course design and assessment

What kind of goals to set? • Higher order or lower order thinking skills? • Measurable outcomes or not? • Abstract or concrete goals?

We’ll set goals with higherorder thinking skills • Overarching goals involving lower order thinking skills are imbedded in ones involving higher order thinking skills • “being able to interpret tectonic settings based on information on physiography, seismicity, and volcanic activity” has imbedded in it many goals involving lower order thinking skills

Why is it important to articulate higher order goals? • Students learn more when they successfully use their knowledge to do higher order thinking skills tasks. • Higher order goals tasks are hard for students. • If you want students to be successful, they must practice. • Assignments and activities need to give students repeated, relevant practice related to the goals that you value. • Can’t design effective activities if you don’t have the goals in mind.

We’ll set concrete goals withmeasurable outcomes1 • Clearer path to designing a course when overarching goals are stated as specific, observable actions that students should be able to perform if they have mastered the content and skills of a course. • A: Students will be able to interpret unfamiliar tectonic settings based on information on physiography, volcanic activity, and seismicity. Vs. • B: Students will understand plate tectonics. • A is measurable; B requires a proxy. 1You can design a task that students can do that will allow you to measure directly whether they have have achieved the goal.

We’ll set concrete rather than abstract goals • Abstract goals are laudable but difficult to assess directly and difficult translate into practical course design • Students will appreciate the complexity of Earth systems. • Students will be able to think like scientists.

Do these goals meet our criteria? • Students will be exposed to the main concepts in structural geology. • Students will understand that global warming is a complex issue. • Students will be able to identify rocks and minerals. • Students will be able to apply their knowledge of groundwater contamination to analyze reports and claims in the popular press.

Course goals draft • Write a draft of one higher order goal for the course you’re working on today. • We will follow this with discussion of several examples – if you’re willing to share a goal for discussion, please type the goal into the chat window in the following form: • For an XXX course: students will be able to XXX • Timer will be on, and we will resume when the timer runs out.

Getting from goals to a course • Goals should be more than text at the top of a syllabus • Goals should underpin: • Selection of content • Design of assignments and activities • Assessments of student learning • Goals phrased as we’ve written them make it easier to design a course that effectively addresses those goals

Goals and choosing content • Example: environmental geo course • Goal: students will be able to research and evaluate news reports of a natural disaster and communicate their analyses to someone else • What content framework would be effective for achieving the goals?

Be able to research and evaluate news reports of a natural disaster and communicate analyses to someone else • Instructor #1 chose four specific disasters as content topics • 1973 Susquehanna flood • Landsliding in coastal California • Mt. St. Helens • Armenia earthquake

Be able to research and evaluate news reports of a natural disaster and communicate analyses to someone else • Instructor #2 chose four themes as content topics • Impact of hurricanes on building codes and insurance • Perception and reality of fire damage on the environment • Mitigating the effects of volcanic eruptions • Geologic and sociologic realities of earthquake prediction

Be able to research and evaluate news reports of a natural disaster and communicate analyses to someone else • Instructor #3 chose to focus on a historical survey of natural disasters in Vermont • Historical record of flooding in NW Vermont • 1983 landsliding • 2-3 other places in Vermont that have had natural disasters of different types.

Goals and content topics uniteto provide course framework • Previous examples • Same goals. • Different content topics mean that each course will be different. • Choice of content topics drives how the instructor will implement the course. • Students will learn different content in the context of the same kind of practice.

Goals and content topics unite to provide course framework • How about a different goal for the same environmental geo course? • Students should be able to evaluate and predict the influence of climate, hydrology, biology, and geology on the severity of a natural disaster. • Could we use the same topics? Yes! • How would the courses be different? In both content and the type of practice that students do!!

Intersection of context,goals, and content • Research & evaluate news report or evaluate and predict influence of climate, hydro, geo, bio on the severity of a natural hazard??? • Which have the right imbedded lower order goals for your students or curriculum? • Which content topics make the most sense for your students, your setting, your experience, your students’ futures?

Accomplishing goals Assignments and activities are the vehicle for accomplishing course goals Well-designed assignments allow students to Build their knowledge base Engage in goals-related practice Demonstrate their progress toward achieving the goals

If you want students to be able to design an informed community action plan on an environmental issue Acceptable measure would be that each student is able to design an informed action plan How will you get them there? Not fair to teach them about related topics during the semester and then ask them to pull it all together at the end. Course should give them practice to build their abilities relative to the goal, not just increase their knowledge base. Accomplishing goals

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