witzkek « OSU-Cascades Teaching Excellence

It’s week 6 so most of us have given at least one major assessment of our students…but have you given them an opportunity to assess YOU? If not, consider a midterm teaching evaluation. Here are some things to consider:

This is a formative assessment. Midterm course evals are a fantastic way for you to glean meaningful feedback from your students on what is working, what isn’t, and what you could still do to help them learn better.
This feedback can (and should) be qualitative as opposed to the mostly quantitative feedback that we receive on eSETs. If you’re like me, you probably skip right to the comments when reading your end-of-course feedback anyway.
These evaluations are not part of your “official” evaluation record; an even better reason to get honest, constructive feedback from your students while you still have time to make changes.
Midterm evaluations demonstrate to your students that you have their best interests in mind, that you are there to help them learn and that you are very interested in how you can do that better.
Research shows that midterm evaluations actually improve end-of-term student evaluations when the feedback leads to changes in the class (McDonnell & Dodd, 2017). When we give students agency to affect change, they are more committed to their learning process.

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I have been given the gift of first-year students this term. By “gift” I mean that after 22 years of teaching, I have a room full of fresh-out-of-high-school minds. These students are unique in many ways and I could spend the rest of the term writing posts about their uniqueness, but today I’m going to focus on one feature that unites them: FMOOWMP, or “Fear of Meeting One-On-One With My Professor.”

I didn’t come up with this roll-off-your-tongue acronym but I do believe it describes MANY students, not just those in their first year. Watch this 2-minute video produced by ASU (I showed it to my class) and tell me if you agree that the cure to FMOOWMP is FOH.

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I’ve never had a “no use” cell phone policy in my class. I have students use them in class sometimes; The Canvas app is great for submitting in-class work or even for taking quizzes. The research on “distracted learning,” however, is giving me pause. In fact, I’m wondering about other things I’m doing that may be a disservice to my students, like providing slides online, which I believe has caused the art of note-taking to go by the wayside.

But for now, let’s take a deep dive into multitasking. Not gonna lie, I’m all about efficiency. “Hello, I’m Kara and I’m a multitasker.” I grew up with a “non-idle hands” policy that seems to have followed me right into adulthood, so I understand students who also try to do two or three things at once, even during class. But the research doesn’t back me up on my belief that doing two things is better than one. In fact, it states just the opposite; We do tasks slower concurrently than when done sequentially. Continue reading →

“My students aren’t doing the reading.” Sound familiar? I hear this all the time and certainly have experienced this universal phenomenon in my own classes. Students cite a lack of time as the most common reason for not completing the assigned reading, but if we probed a little deeper, I suspect we might learn the real reasons why they opt out. Many students don’t see the value in the reading or more specifically, think they can get by without doing it. This fact alone reveals an important problem – many students haven’t learned how to be self-directed learners.

The good news is that we can help them figure this out. Simply taking a few minutes to describe, or better yet, show them what an article, chapter, or passage might look like if they annotated it, should help. I’ve done this before and was surprised at how many students didn’t read this way.

The main point is to get students to think about what they’re reading and ask questions, relate content to what they already know, and emphasize the “aha!” moments. We can help them do this by Continue reading →

I had the opportunity this summer to attend my very first conference focused solely on teaching. My usual conferences are immersive experiences in the science of the physiology of exercise, but this one was completely different. If you haven’t ever attended a Lilly Teaching Conference, I highly recommend it.

One of the sessions I attended was entitled, “Focus Your Lecture with the One-Sentence Lesson Plan,” led by Norman Eng, a professor at The City College in New York. His premise was that most faculty focus on WHAT they will lecture on rather than on what they want their students to KNOW and be able to DO as a result of what they have learned. The former approach is very content driven and focused on teaching, while the latter approach is focused on learning.

The problem is that students forget most about WHAT we teach. Meyers & Jones (1993) reported that students who took a Psychology 101 class knew only 8% more than students who didn’t take the class. They reasoned that cognitive overload, and a focus on content was getting in the way of real learning.

Eng encourages instructors to ask themselves a simple question, which forms the basis for the one-sentence lesson plan: Continue reading →

OSU-Cascades Teaching Excellence

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Author Archives: witzkek

How Is Your Class Going?

Do your students suffer from FMOOWMP?

Are Students Distracted Learners?

When students don’t do the reading

The One-Sentence Lesson Plan

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