This past Friday we had our third Faculty Talking Circle. About 20 instructors joined in on the online conversation in Teams. We’ve been using Martin Brokenleg’s “Circle of Courage” as a thematic organizer for these sessions and so, after having sessions on belonging and mastery, we came to the session on independence. We used the following questions to spark both discussion and reflection:
It was interesting to hear the experiences of colleagues from around the college and learn about their efforts to support and sustain their learners in the face of our current situation. One of our instructors said that her students had entered the program with the expectation of a certain amount of hours of face-to-face instruction, these students did not sign up for a distance or online program; they knew that their success was dependent upon the contact and community of regular classes. So she and her department were endeavoring to provide as much synchronous teaching as possible. She wanted to give each student every chance to succeed. Another of our instructors, this one from corrections, shared that a big part of his job is simply trying to restore some confidence in students that have been told they can’t learn and have been ignored or dismissed every time they asked a challenging question. At this point our corrections instructors do not have online access to their students as the rest of our college does, and the extra time has led to a great deal of reflection and recalibration as they anticipate returning to their classrooms. Overall, it was a very rich discussion with a variety of perspectives. We explored:
What became very clear is that our students need scaffolding and support as they develop confidence and competence in their chosen field of study. Many of our NorQuest students have often had to overcome a number of challenges just to get to college. Our student population has its fair share of: new immigrants, economically disadvantaged, international students, single parents, students with learning challenges, and students returning to school after a long hiatus in the world of work.
And how can we do this? Well, there are a number of ways:
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I hope you all had a wonderful and relaxing long weekend. I spent mine doing a lot of yard work. It was great to get outside and away from this computer! The first thing we did was tear down our old garage. We had already made a new larger garage on the same property, so the old beast had to go! Saturday morning at 8, my nephew and his friend showed up with a very large trailer and, with the help of my son and son-in-law, they attacked the old structure. Within two hours, the old garage was gone. Four guys, a couple of power tools, several crowbars and sledge hammers and a structure that had lasted almost sixty years was reduced to a heap of rubble and on its way to the dump. The boys had a bit of motivation; they wanted to go dirt biking. The old garage was not going to interfere with that! The demolition made me think of one of the recent sessions I had given on feedback and on how easy and quick it is to tear something (or someone) down. I know the previous owner had spent quite some time building that old garage, and I know how long it took to build our new garage, but all it takes is a few motivated young men and some sledge hammers. It made me think of the many times that I had used my words like a sledgehammer when I was providing feedback to my students on their work. I could reduce their essays and their confidence to rubble with a few well-placed slams. It’s not something I’m proud of. When providing feedback to your students there’s a few things we should keep in mind:
As Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black proved over 20 years ago, timely and meaningful feedback is critical in raising student achievement. But there is a difference between feedback that encourages and feeds forward and feedback that can only tear down. (Black, P & Wiliam, D, 1998, Inside the Black Box: Raising standards through classroom assessment, School of Education, King's College, London, United Kingdom.) Planning with the End In Mind! This past week I gave a session on “Powerful Planning”. It was based upon the principles of backwards design and followed a model established by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in their seminal work: Understanding by Design. Wiggins and McTighe suggest that, if we want to take our student on a learning journey, we really need to think about our destination and then, plan our trip backwards! Furthermore, we need to decide upon the most important sights or stop-overs. In every course of study there are big ideas or “enduring understandings” that students need to grasp in order to become fully competent in that areas. These big ideas could be important conceptualizations, skills or attitudes. Often such ideas can be found in the GLOs found in our curriculum guides or curriculum maps for the courses we teach – but not always. Sometimes we have to dig into professional standards, consider pre-requisites for follow-up courses, or reflect on our own professional experience to determine what is “enduring” or “essential”. Unfortunately many of us are just too busy to think about the “big ideas” in our coursework until we get quite far along into the term. Often the course is assigned shortly before we start teaching it, and we begin a frenzied cycle of familiarizing ourselves with the content, preparing lessons (often content laden PowerPoint slides) and delivering lessons, in an effort to stay one step ahead of our students. Engagement, support and assessment can become after-thoughts. It is an unfortunate reality of post-secondary teaching. However, Wiggins and McTighe would have us step back to see the big picture and, at the outset of planning a course or a unit, follow three important steps:
An integral part of “Understanding by Design” is the generation of essential questions. Big Ideas can often be explored more fully when we take our students on an inquiry process, interrogating the important ideas and their underpinnings together with our students, rather than just summarizing a few key ideas for them. So getting a handle on the content of our courses is simply not enough. If we truly want our students to connect with the content and make sense of it, we need to begin with the end in mind, and think about not just the “what” but the “how” and “why”. And if we identify the big ideas, enduring understandings and essential questions, we will be able to provide a clear framework with touchpoints that students can come back to again and again. (If you are interested in learning more about the backwards learning process, don’t hesitate to contact the PD team or the Curriculum team – we would be more than happy to share our resources and insights with you.) Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (Expanded 2nd). Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Learning with and from Faculty…
This past week I had the chance to learn a lot from our faculty. On Friday we held the second Faculty Talking Circle. While the first Talking Circle focused on “Making a Community Online” (Belonging), the second circle dealt with “Learning about Teaching – courtesy of COVID” (Mastery). Eighteen faculty participated in the exchange of teaching ideas, tips and tools. A business instructor said that she builds community in her classes through the use of WhatsApp (instant messaging). Many of our students are already very familiar with this app and creating groups so you can share ideas, remind students of deadline, and just chat has proved invaluable. As one participant remarked: “Email is something that old people use to communicate, if you want to connect with students - you need something instant”. Several other instructors suggested just picking up the phone and calling individual students; the time investment pays off in the relationships built. One nursing instructor shared that she promotes engagement through Mentimeter (an interactive presentation app). She said that Mentimeter was easy to use and was not as competitive in nature as some other programs like Quizlet. Other applications and tech tools shared were Jeopardy Labs, VoiceThread and Loom. If you don’t know what these are or how you might use them, just google them. Or send me an email and I will connect you to a faculty member using them! But a significant part of the conversation just circled back to practices we know to be effective in both face-to-face teaching and online environments. Connections are built and interest sustained when you engage emotions, inject humor, and promote creativity. And the care and attention paid to setting expectations, clarifying roles, giving intermediate and overall deadlines, and ensuring contributions are just as important when putting student into online groups, as when we put students in group in our classrooms. In fact, perhaps even more important. It is easier to “supervise” groups in a classroom than it is to do so online. Joan shared that it is helpful to develop some simple “participant guidelines” for many different online tasks (wikis, forums, breakout groups, group project work, etc.), in order to avoid confusion and promote effective, on-task work. Last week I was also able to participate in Allison Fieldberg’s “Teaching Wheel” presentation for FSCS. Allison used the four main characters from “the Golden Girls” (a sitcom from the 80’s) to explain four different zones of online teaching. While teaching synchronously using Blackboard Ultra, Microsoft Teams, or other presentation programs seems to be “sexy” (like Blanche Devereaux), it can be difficult to get full participation, it can be hard to schedule, and it takes a fair bit of preparation. Alison advocated a more balanced approach so that teaching isn’t just concentrated presentations and Moodle assignments. Students can be supported through layers and levels of activities such as independent readings, online activities, collaborative documents, group chat, asynchronous discussion (forums and blogs), and pre-recorded audio and video. These activities were compared to the other three golden girls (Sophia, Rose and Dorothy), they may not be sexy, but they are golden all the same! Taking the challenge extended by Allison’s presentation (not everything needs to be sexy and synchronous!), and the need to “engage emotions, inject humor, and promote creativity” I decided to make a simple little music video using PPT and saving it as an MP4. The task would allow me to explore how best to share recordings (Dropbox, Google Drive or YouTube) and, at the same time, act on the Culture Q our that team was focusing on for the week (“Work at play and play at work”). The result was “Empty Chairs & Empty Classrooms” my cheesy interpretation of a song from Les Miserables. Here’s the link, https://youtu.be/9IfE_PiPoLs. Let me know what you think! I hope that it brings a wistful smile to your face. By the way, the best way that I found to share a big file like this is through personal YouTube accounts and making sure that students control their links. Other ways can work, but this is simplest. |
AuthorJeff Kuntz Ph.D. ImagesExcept where indicated, images used in the blog posts are personal photos, images from NorQuest College or images from Pixabay. Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright free images, videos and music. https://pixabay.com/ Archives
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