Quick Hits for New Faculty: Successful Strategies by Award-Winning Teachers available in Paperback
Quick Hits for New Faculty: Successful Strategies by Award-Winning Teachers
- ISBN-10:
- 0253217091
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253217097
- Pub. Date:
- 09/15/2004
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0253217091
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253217097
- Pub. Date:
- 09/15/2004
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
Quick Hits for New Faculty: Successful Strategies by Award-Winning Teachers
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253217097 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2004 |
| Pages: | 152 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Quick Hits for New Faculty
Successful Strategies by Award-Winning Teachers
By Rosanne M. Cordell, Betsy Lucal, Robin Morgan
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2004 Indiana University Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in TeachingAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-21709-7
CHAPTER 1
Getting Started
Remember that the reason you teach is because you love it. Your passion for teaching will always come through to your students.
Paul Pittman & Doug Barney
Truths My Father Told Me
Catherine Larson
Spanish & Portuguese
Indiana University Bloomington
My father retired a few years ago after teaching in the same college for fifty years. Teaching for fifty years is hard to imagine, and it's probably fair to say that during that last year his cognitive skills were not what they once were. Still, I can tell you that he was universally considered the institution's treasure: he was consistently deemed the best instructor on campus and, over the course of half a century, was one of the most active in the areas of research and creative activity. When I first began teaching, he gave me a lot of good advice, and I have tried to build upon his wisdom in the intervening years. What follows is less about what to include in a course syllabus than it is about what he called basic survival lessons. Some are Big Issues and others are small, but individually and collectively, these common-sense ideas can help us get a leg up on how to acclimate to life in academe. Here are some of the basic truths my father told me:
Think often-and reflectively-on the kind of teacher/researcher/ colleague you want to be, and consider the myriad ways in which you can achieve those goals. Be prepared to revise your goals and strategies over time.
Watch assuming anything. Consult; give things time.
Treat the staff well. They are the ones who make the entire enterprise work well, and they know how to help you. Let them know how appreciated they are.
How do the students in your department address faculty? What messages do forms of address send? Sometimes the little things really do make a difference.
What rhetorical strategies do people use in department and committee meetings? What can you learn from the ways others communicate?
Actively seek mentors and a peer group. You may even want to consider two sets-one from inside your department, and one from outside.
Reflect on the culture of your department and your campus. How do these cultural and political dynamics relate to you and your situation?
Think from time to time about your own professional role models. What decisions were made by the best of the people who influenced you?
Find balance in your life, including balance between your professional and private lives; keep open time to grow intellectually and have a healthy, quality life outside your department.
Within your professional life, make conscious choices about the amounts of time you will be able devote to research/creative activity, teaching, and service. Ask your chair and mentors to recommend reasonable expectations for service, and consider thoughtfully the rewards of service inside and outside the department vs. the consequences of taking on too many obligations. In like manner, think about the ways you can get the most "bang for your buck" in your teaching (and this is intended as a positive statement about teaching)-how can you reflectively and creatively make the time that you devote to your teaching help you achieve your goals and those of your students? In other words, stop occasionally and consider time management issues lest you fall victim to burnout.
Keep the paperwork. Organize files for your annual reports; teaching evaluations; letters attesting to your research, teaching, or service contributions; exemplary teaching projects; etc. It really is hue: when it's time to assemble materials for your annual review, tenure or promotion case, or a teaching award nomination, it will be infinitely easier if you know where to find the documentation.
Think about ways to view and talk about our profession in a positive manner. Some academics — we all know the type — have the studied habit of speaking negatively about academe, their students, their colleagues, the administration; the list goes on and on. The ways in which we frame our ideas, handle disagreements, and talk about who we are and what we do say a great deal about us to others, and they surely also affect how we see ourselves.
That's the list, and I know that there's nothing revolutionary in any of it; sometimes we just need to hear it again. I hope it helps....
* * *
Getting Started
Pat Ashton
Department of Sociology
Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne
"Covering the Material": Depth vs. Breadth
How much material should you cover in a given course? The obvious answer is "as much as possible." Given the constraints of time, however, you won't be able to cover everything. Inevitably you will have to compromise as you decide to leave things out. What compromises are appropriate? How much breadth of subject matter should you trade off for going into depth on particular topics? My bias is to err on the side of depth. To speak of "covering all the material" reminds me of painting a wall. Working quickly with a good supply of paint, you can "cover" a lot of wall. But all you have done is to apply a thin layer to the surface of the wall. And although the wall looks really nice immediately after being covered, the paint rather quickly wears off, leaving little trace of either the paint or the painter. An emphasis on "coverage," then, can leave students exposed in the future. But if students become interested and enthused over a relatively smaller number of topics and — more importantly — they learn the methodologies of investigation appropriate to your subject matter, they will always have the motivation and the tools to investigate further. I'm not suggesting that decisions about what to include and what to leave out are not difficult and even painful, but if you design with the end in mind, keeping the focus on what you want students to be able to do with the material, then you will inevitably make good decisions about course organization.
Some Principles of Good Course Design
When designing a course — especially when designing one for the first time — it is tempting to begin with concrete features The syllabus for a course represents an implied contract with students. — e.g., "Let's see. ... I'll have a midterm and a final exam and maybe a short paper." But this pragmatic approach is short-sighted at the very least, and contrary to the best teaching and learning practices. You should design a course with the end in mind. That is, what do you want students to be able to know and do when they have completed the course? The answer to this question becomes the guiding principle on which all important decisions about the course turn. Below are some questions that will help you identify and stay true to this principle.
Identify your goal for the course. How does the course fit into your department, campus, and/or disciplinary curriculum? What are students supposed to get out of taking the course, and what do you expect to get out of teaching the course?
Develop learning objectives that fit the goal. The learning objectives should be concrete and stated in clear behavioral terms. This means that each learning objective describes something that students will be able to do when they successfully complete the course. Objectives that state "Students will understand. ..." are not very useful. How will you know that students "understand"? What will students be doing to demonstrate that understanding? The activity of demonstrating understanding — whatever it is — is what goes in the learning objective. Sometimes when you do this you discover that the expectations you have for students are superficial or trivial. This is important feedback; it tells you to throw that material/activity/ objective out or reinterpret your course goal. Instead, some instructors revert to vague learning objectives. But this just means that they are not taking responsibility for their role in student learning. No wonder students say they are confused about what we're trying to teach them!
Select assessment tools that fit your learning objectives. Once you know the behaviors you expect from students, then you can select what activities will best measure those behaviors. And you may find that testing — or at least some kinds of testing — are not appropriate. Or you may find that tests serve an important function in meeting your learning objectives. The important thing is to make sure that everything you ask the students to do is designed to further the course goal.
Design the course activities to help students accomplish the learning objectives. Now you have an important measuring stick to make decisions about what goes into a course and what gets thrown out. And you're much more likely to draw students in when you can show them that what they're learning and what they're being asked to do is related to accomplishing course objectives. This is so much more than "teaching to the test" — it's designing teaching and learning with the end in mind!
Key Elements of a Course Syllabus
There are, of course, a variety of acceptable styles and approaches to the course syllabus. Some instructors in some courses will keep the goals, objectives, and/or assessments open-ended and subject to collaborative negotiation with students. Others will feel the need to lay out the course in advance. Either way, however, the syllabus for a course represents an implied contract with students. And there are certain things that should be made clear in writing. Here is a checklist:
Goals and objectives. Students need to know what the instructor's vision of the course is and what they are going to be expected to learn.
Assessments. Students should be given clear guidelines on how they will be evaluated in the course.
Course Calendar. Due dates for all assignments should be given. While flexibility is always required, these dates should not be changed lightly.
Course Policies. It is important to give students information on rules and regulations that will potentially affect their learning in the course. Possibilities include: attendance policy, including what students should do if they miss a class; classroom decorum, including a statement on civility and respect; definition of plagiarism and how it will be treated; how and where assignments will be turned in and turned back, including policies on late work.
Student Expectations of the Instructor. After telling students what you expect of them, it's only fair to let them know what they can expect of you. Possible topics include: enthusiasm, knowledge, availability, organization, major responsibility for the learning environment, extent to which you can/will accommodate disabilities.
Sources of Help and Support for Students. This may include tutoring, developmental learning, writing centers, computer consultants. You may want to include room numbers, phone numbers, and websites.
* * *
Creating a Syllabus
Sharon K. Calhoun & Angela H. Becker Psychology
Indiana University Kokomo
The course syllabus is often the first written document you share with your students. Many faculty members view the syllabus as a contract (Altman and Cashin 1992; Smith and Razzouk, 1993), giving information about students' and instructor's responsibilities. Instructors hope that students will use the syllabus (and the instructor's in-class introduction of it) to make an informed decision about whether to take the course and what they must do to be successful in the course Others (Gunert 1997; Lyons, McIntosh, and Kysilka 2003) advocate for the syllabus as a learner-centered document, whose purpose is to provide information, advice, and tools to help students learn. Their approach is to develop an "extended syllabus," with a table of contents to help direct students to the many pages of information included in the document. The syllabus also serves as a permanent record of the course (Parkes and Harris 2002), and so must contain information to help students, faculty, and administrators make informed decisions about the nature of the course. The dilemma for faculty members is to put enough information in the syllabus to serve all these functions, but not so much that students cannot access the information they need.
Our research (Becker and Calhoon 1999) on students in introductory psychology courses at four Midwestern colleges and universities suggests that students routinely ignore some information included in the syllabus, and that the information they find important varies according to their age (traditional vs. nontraditional) and experience in college (firstsemester freshmen vs. continuing students). Our findings for all students (regardless of age or college experience) were that they viewed the most important items in the syllabus to be those associated with procedures for determining grades: examination/quiz dates, assignment due dates, reading material covered by the exams/quizzes, number and types of exams/ quizzes, types of assignments (e.g., readings, presentations, papers), times of required out-of-class events, and class participation requirements. The least important items to these students were title/authors of readings, withdrawal dates, course identifiers (course title and number, etc.), and the instructor's academic dishonesty policy.
Non-traditional age students, as compared to traditional age students, reported they paid more attention to the kind of assignments a course required and the course objectives, and less attention to policies regarding late assignments and academic dishonesty. First-semester students, as compared to continuing students, paid more attention to the late assignment policy, prerequisite skills and courses, where class materials are located, available support services, and the academic dishonesty policy. Continuing students paid more attention to the types of exams and quizzes and the kinds of assignments that were required by the course.
Given that the syllabus has multiple purposes (contract, learning tool, permanent record), it must contain a fair amount of information. Yet students do not attend well to all of that information. How then can you create a more effective syllabus? We argue that a good syllabus must be student-centered in that it does not overwhelm the student. We believe the syllabus must contain contractual and permanent record information, and that a second document (perhaps a "Student Guide") could contain additional information and learning resources for students.
Therefore, to create your syllabus, we recommend you list all the information you believe students need to make an informed decision about taking your course. Then list information that describes your course to interested third parties (e.g., administrators, review boards, evaluators of transfer students' prior course work). Next, consider what information you believe students need to be successful in your course. Finally, decide which information from these lists would be most useful in the syllabus, and which might be better presented in a Student Guide, course website, or other format.
At a minimum, we recommend the following items be included in your syllabus:
1. Course identifying information: List the official course title, number, and section number.
2. Instructor identifying information: List your name, position (e.g., Assistant Professor of Biology; Instructor in English), office location, office hours, office telephone number, email address, home phone (if students may contact you at home), and the course website, if there is one.
3. Required readings: Although our research suggests students do not attend as much to this item (they probably get this information from sources such as the bookstore's text list), this can be an indication of the scope and depth of the material covered in the course, and therefore is part of the permanent record function of the syllabus.
4. Course description: This may be the official course description in the course catalog, but usually is an expanded version of this description. Often this section will include information on prerequisite or co-requisite courses and/or skills. Avoid, as much as possible, using course specific terminology or jargon in this description. It should be understandable to people who are not experts in the field of study covered by the course.
5. Course goals: List ways in which your students will be different as a result of having taken your course. Lyons, et al. (2003) recommend one to five broad goals, which may come from any of the three domains of learning: cognitive (changes in thinking), affective (changes in attitudes, ethics and morals, appreciation for beauty or diversity), and/or psychomotor (changes in physical skill). They suggest forming goals by completing this sentence: "As a result of being participating members of my class this semester, students will ____."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Quick Hits for New Faculty by Rosanne M. Cordell, Betsy Lucal, Robin Morgan. Copyright © 2004 Indiana University Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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