Teaching%20Goals,%20Learning%20Styles,%20and%20Course%20Design

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Teaching Goals, Learning Styles, and Course Design

• What are your teaching goals? What do you hope
  to accomplish in your courses?

Heather Macdonald Barbara Tewksbury Robyn Wright
Dunbar
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How Do Students Learn 1?

• They learn by actively participating
• Observing, speaking, writing, listening,
  thinking, drawing, doing
• They must be engaged to learn
• Learning is enhanced when students see potential
  implications, applications, and benefits to
  others
• Learning builds on current understanding

How People Learn (NRC, 1999)
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Learning Styles

• How does the person prefer to process
  information?
• Actively through engagement in physical
  activity or discussion
• Reflectively through introspection
• Questionnaire - Barbara Soloman Richard
  Felder
• http//www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.ht
  ml
• Thanks to Robyn Dunbar and Marcelo
  Clerici-Arias, Stanford University Center for
  Teaching and Learning

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Your Learning Styles (n38)

For comparison Active 60 Reflective 40
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Learning Styles

• What type of information does the person
  preferentially perceive?
• Sensory sights, sounds, physical sensations,
  data
• Intuitive memories, ideas, models, abstract

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Your Learning Styles

• For comparison Sensing 65 Intuitive 35

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Learning Styles

• Through which modality is sensory information
  most effectively perceived?
• Visual pictures, diagrams, graphs,
  demonstrations, field trips
• Verbal sounds, written and spoken words,
  formulas

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Your Learning Styles

• For comparison Visual 80 Verbal 20

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Learning Styles

• How does the person progress toward
  understanding?
• Sequentially in logical progression of small
  incremental steps
• Globally in large jumps, holistically

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Your Learning Styles

• For comparison Sequential 60 Global 40

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How Do Students Learn 2?

• Different people are most comfortable learning in
  different ways
• Multiple representations enhance the learning of
  all students

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Context for Todays Sessions

• Consider your teaching goals in designing courses
• Active engagement is important for learning
• Students have different learning styles
• Expand your toolbox of teaching strategies
• Most students most students
• passive active

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Developing a Course Different Strategies

• Content-centered
• What will I cover?
• Learner-centered
• What will they learn?

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One Course Design Process

• Consider course context and audience
• Articulate your goals and objectives
• Evaluate content options
• Select teaching strategies and design
  assignments/class activities/labs
• Develop assessments
• Cutting Edge Course Design Process Workshops
  and Tutorial Barbara Tewksbury
• http//serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesig
  n/tutorial/index.html

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Consider Course Context and Audience

• Context of course?
• Pre-requisites?
• General education course?
• Course for majors?
• Required course? Elective course?
• Characteristics of course?
• What are your students like?

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Articulate Your Goals I Overarching Goals

• What do you want students to be able to do as a
  result of having taken your course?
• What kinds of problems do you want them to be
  able to tackle?
• How might students apply what they have learned
  in the future?

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Focus on goals that involve higher-order thinking
skills
Evaluation

• Blooms Taxonomy
• Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956)

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Writing Goals

• Use verbs that indicate your goals extend beyond
  recalling, reciting, or explaining what was
  covered in class
• Interpret, construct, formulate, solve, analyze,
  predict
• recognizing plate boundaries vs.
• being able to interpret tectonic setting based
  on information on physiography, seismicity, and
  volcanic activity

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Two Comments

• Translate fuzzy language into skills
  observable/measurable
• Students will learn to appreciate their natural
  surroundings.
• What does that mean? What could students do to
  show they have mastered this objective?
• Focus on higher-order learning skills analyze,
  synthesize, interpret
• Some examples

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Some Examples of Goals

• I want students to be able to
• use characteristics of rocks and surficial
  features in an area to analyze the geologic
  history
• interpret unfamiliar geologic maps and construct
  cross sections
• analyze unfamiliar areas and assess geologic
  hazards (different than recalling those done in
  class)
• predict the weather given appropriate
  meteorological data
• design computer models of geologic processes

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Consider A Course That You Will Be Teaching

• What are your goals?
• When students have completed my course, I want
  them to be able to

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Articulate Your Goals II Ancillary skills

• What skills do you want your students to improve
  on during the course?
• Accessing and critically evaluating information
  on the WWW
• Accessing and reading the geoscience literature
• Working in groups
• Writing (what kind in particular?)
• Quantitative skills (what kind?)
• Oral presentation
• Self-learning
• Peer-teaching

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Evaluate Content Options

• Select topics
• What are the essentials?
• What meets student needs?
• Linked to goals?
• Compare to the wide range of content options is
  something missing that you value?
• An example

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Example from ageologic hazards course

• Overarching goal students will be able to
  research and evaluate news reports of a natural
  disaster and communicate their analyses to
  someone else

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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

• 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

• 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.

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Goals and content topics unite to provide course
framework

• Previous example
• Single goal each instructor could achieve goal
  even though content topics different
• Choice of content topics drives how the
  instructor will accomplish the goal.
• Students will receive different kinds of practice
  during the course even though the overall goal is
  the same

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Select Teaching Strategies and Design Assignments

• Lectures, discussions, small-group work, labs,
  problem sets, research projects,
• Build the course around tasks and assignments
  designed to achieve your goals (rather than
  around a list of content items and topics to
  which you want students to be exposed)
• How will you give students frequent practice in
  doing x (with timely and constructive feedback)?