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Return to Self-Test
To see the first 58
responses to the survey, click here. (If
you answered this survey since May 1, 2007 and would
like me to update this summary of responses, please
e-mail me -ehrmann at tltgroup.org.)
If you
said that only answer A answered Mary's question, I
agree with you. You may want to skip to section
II of this essay,
What's Worth Sharing, and With Whom, (unless you
provide workshops or assistance for people who might
have picked one of the other answers).
Let's get back to
Mary. She's wondering about gathering data about
her course because, if she knew more about what was
going on, she would have a better idea of what to do
next.
There are levels to
Mary's uncertainty. The first looks something like
this:
If I knew this is what's really
happening...
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...I'd do this
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So to detect whether it's A or B (so I
can then decide what to do next in my
teaching), I could:
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A. If almost all students did do their
homework together online as I wanted |
Then I'd have to wonder whether this
homework exchange was a waste of time. Maybe
I'd ask them if it was helping and discard
the practice if they all agree it doesn't |
..Ask for a show
of hands in class about who received help by
e-mail. Or in the future I might ask that
students mention in their homework whether
they got help online (or face to face).
Better yet I might ask them to include the
advice they received. And I'll give extra
credit to students who provided good help
(and ask for a copy of the e-mailed help,
and the recipient's rating of it). |
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B. If many students are not doing
homework together online, then my strategy
hasn't really been tested |
I'd need to figure out why so many of them
aren't doing it before I could go further.
Now that I think of it, there are so many
reasons why they might do it! So I'll need
to ask more questions |
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If Mary didn't do a study, she'd
have to guess what was going on and take action accordingly
(e.g., tell all students to start including the comments
they'd received and then grade the comments). That might
create a lot of unnecessary work for Mary. Or she might
guess that many students aren't collaborating, and take some
steps to make that happen. Or if she's really uncertain (and
hasn't done an inquiry) she might do both.
As you can see, however,
Mary's first inquiry might reveal that her strategy
hasn't really been tested. Maybe test scores didn't go up
because many students weren't really helping one another
online. She's already decided that, if that's what the first
study reveals, she'll need to do a second study to discover
why they're not collaborating online. Here's a second table
illustrating some of Mary's early thinking:
If This is What's Really Happening...
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...I'd do this
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So to decide whether it's X, Y or Z (and thus
know what to do next):
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| X. Many
students might face technical barriers to
using e-mail for this purpose. They lack computers,
they don't check e-mail often, and/or they don't
know how to attach a file to the message (a
necessary step for exchanging homework). |
If
almost all of them have problems attaching a file
(for example), I'd need to devote some class time to
showing them how to do it. If just a few have the
problem, I'd send them over to technical support -
they offer a workshop on this subject if I ask them
to. If just one or two have the problem, I'd suggest
they call the help desk over there. |
I could
ask students to do a simple homework assignment that
required attaching a file and sending it to me. If
they don't submit it, I'll follow up with them
individually to discover what the problem is - no
access to a computer? no time to do the assignment?
don't know how to attach a file? Or I might send
them all a survey and ask them how confident they
are in their ability to do things like this. And I
could ask them how often they do it for pleasure, in
other classes, or in their jobs. |
| Y. Many
students might have problems dealing with
teamwork problems, especially online. For example,
what if their partner has a history of receiving
help but not giving good help? They might not
know how to cope. |
If I
knew dealing with teamwork problems was difficult
for most students, we could do some role plays or
have a class discussion about how to cope with such
problems. Or if just a few students have the problem
and if I knew who they were, I could provide some
help outside of class. If no one has the problem, I
can relax about this one. |
An
anonymous survey would make some students more
comfortable about 'complaining' about their homework
partner, but then I wouldn't know who needed help.
So I'll ask for their names, and ask if they've had
problems like this in the past. And I'll ask
whether, IF they have problems like this, they'd
feel confident about being able to cope with them. |
| Z. Many
students might feel reluctant to collaborate
because they think collaboration is an inefficient
way to do homework, |
If I
knew many students believed that collaboration was
an inefficient way to learn, I could ask our
Teaching-Learning Center for relevant educational
research that I could show my students.
Or I could tell my
students we were going to learn about learning
together: we would compare the homework scores of
the people who got help and those who didn't. I'm
claiming this practice helps students do better on
assignments - I ought to be able to prove that to
them, if it's true. |
I could
use a survey or a show of hands to find out who's
feeling that collaboration is an ineffective or
inefficient way to do homework. |
The scholarship of teaching
is sometimes like a detective story - creating hypotheses
about 'who done it' and then seeking evidence that might
confirm some hypotheses or eliminate others.
Here are some other simple
examples of this sort of 'inquiry before action':
- If you're a faculty
member teaching a course, you might assign students a
task to perform, a task that has been designed to help
you decide what to do next in the course; this might be
a quiz, a project, a role play in class, or something
else entirely - the point is that you are trying to
figure out who can already do something by asking them
to do it.
- For a faculty member who
wants to students to collaborate online, surveying
students about their use of e-mail, their attitudes
about collaboration, and their confidence in dealing
with 'freeloaders' in learning groups (and then using
that data to decide what to do to help all students in
the class collaborate online successfully).
- Interviewing a diverse
collection of students each week about what has most
excited them, and most confused them, about the course
the preceding week
- For a faculty curriculum
committee in an engineering program, spot-checking the
frequency of design assignments and the nature of
feedback on those assignments, before deciding about
what sort of faculty and course development to support
in the coming year.
A teacher, I'm told, once
proudly declared, ""I do; I don't reflect."
That's not an attitude that lends itself to the scholarship
of teaching. Granted, most of the time, we observe while
we act. Then we act on those observations (while observing
some more). Then we act on those observations... In
other words, the observation can often be virtually
unconscious -- a seamless part of the action. Perhaps for
that reason, some educators have trouble imagining pausing
long enough to ask a question about the situation. What I
hope the tables above illustrate is that, while asking
questions take time, acting on guesses (and perhaps spending
many hours to solve a problem that hasn't happened) can
waste even more time.
In short, the scholarship of
teaching begins by becoming conscious of useful
uncertainty. I'd suggest that useful uncertainty has at
least four characteristics:
- It's possible to
reduce the uncertainty - you can find out more with
a reasonable investment of effort
- If you knew more, you
could more confident about what to do next. For
example, if Mary discovers that all her students know
how to attach files, she doesn't need to spend class
time on that subject. If she discovers that only a few
students are concerned about freeloaders, she can work
with them individually. If she discovers that most
students are having trouble finding a homework partner,
she might devote some class time to solving that
problem.
- The difference among
your options is educationally important. It would be
worth effort to undertake the inquiry because the
potential gains for you and your students (and maybe for
your colleagues) is worth more than the time it will
take to get the information. (This is even more likely
to be true if the inquiry could help you avoid doing
some work that you'd otherwise be doing, just to play it
safe.)
- It saves time, or is
safer, to clarify the uncertainty before deciding what
to do about the problem or opportunity. There are
costs to doing as study before acting. But there are
also costs to acting without a study (e.g., if you're
not sure whether students are really having a problem
attaching a file, it may waste a lot of time to plan a
lesson on how to attach files.)
If you, as a teacher, face
this kind of uncertainty, it makes sense to do some kind of
study in order to see what you're doing. Many faculty
hesitate to do such studies because "I don't have the
time." However, when facing this kind of uncertainty,
a study can actually save time and work. Without a study,
the faculty member must guess what's going on, taking a real
chance that all the ensuing work will have been wasted if
the guess was wrong.
That's the most basic form of
scholarship of teaching, in my view: inquiry to help improve
education. The next level is an inquiry into one's own
course or instructional program that somehow also
helps colleagues elsewhere. There are at least two ways
that could happen:
- Discovery of a
phenomenon: Suppose you discover a something going
in your own program; let's imagine that this is
something you hadn't imagined before and that it's been
useful to you discover it. Further, let's assume that,
so far as you know, no one else has noticed something
like this happening in their programs. By alerting other
folks to this possibility, you can get them looking to
see if this sort of thing is happening in their area,
too. For example, Patti Derbyshire at Mount Royal
College in Calgary noticed in her study that students
sometimes had trouble with computing in a course when
they'd had too much experience with computing. Their
overconfidence prevented them from paying attention to
helping resources on computing that were targeted to
this particular course. Another example: Susanmarie
Harrington, while at IUPUI, did a
study
of several large, multi-section courses. Because
there were not enough computer classrooms for all
sections, some were taught in computer classrooms and
some in traditional rooms. Her data helped her notice
that the sections in computer classrooms were encouraged
to use the same teaching-learning approaches as the
other sections. Another part of her study showed the the
sections taught in computer classrooms were more
expensive per student. So local practices, intended to
assure equity, were also making sure that the expensive
investment in these classrooms was largely being wasted
for these students. I've talked about both of these
Flashlight studies over the years and I often see eyes
opening wide in the audience as some people realize,
"That might be happening at our place, too. We'd
better study the issue and check!"
- Methods transfer:
Mary faces the same questions as many other faculty
members. So if she comes up with a good routine for
studying (and lowering barriers) to online
collaboration, other faculty members can probably use
the same questions. (They can't assume the answers will
be the same because their students and courses are
different; that's why the scholarship of teaching has to
be so local.)
So that's my primer on the
scholarship of teaching. Because this is on the Web, I can
rewrite this piece to improve it, so I hope you'll do me the
favor of sending me e-mail at
Ehrmann@tltgroup.org.
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References
Thomas Angelo and K. Patricia
Cross, Classroom Assessment Techniques : A Handbook for
College Teachers, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994.
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