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Abstract
Evidence has been accumulating for over a decade that approaches such as collaborative and active learning, have potential for creating real increases in student learning. Yet on many campuses these ideas are having little impact on what is actually happening in classes and in the formation of institutional practices. What are the cultural obstacles that are preventing the exploration of new ways of teaching and how can these be overcome? In this chapter we will describe cultural obstacles that prevent the adoption of new ways of teaching. After presenting a few opportunities created by the current sense of crisis in the university classroom that can help offset these obstacles, the Lilly Freshman Learning Project (FLP) is outlined. The main portion of the chapter details the multiple strategies we used to overcome cultural obstacles. The chapter concludes by presenting eight strategic principles for getting new ways of teaching to take hold.
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the authors.
... Further, for some teachers, the demands of covering the National Science Education Standards and preparing students for high-stakes testing can lead to an emphasis on science content over inquiry (NRC 1996). Unfortunately, teaching the "dry, yeast-less facts" (Martel 2001) removes much of what makes science interesting to students and teachers. The process of discovery must be reincorporated into science teaching. ...
... The approach used during the morning sessions of the SRI workshop follows the paradigm described by Middendorf and Pace (2002). Each participant first identifies a student-learning bottleneck. ...
... In summary, we have found that the overall paradigm described by Middendorf and Pace (2002) for college faculty is effective in initiating the transition to inquiry-based teaching for secondary teachers. Whether in summer workshops, staff meetings, or informal teacher partnerships, working cooperatively with other teachers to solve student-learning bottlenecks allows teachers to pool their experience and insight and redefine the way they teach. ...
Teachers can easily identify what subjects their students have trouble with, whether it is transcription and translation, glycolysis and fermentation, balancing chemical equations, or vector analysis of forces acting on an object. Yet, no matter how teachers try to make these complex issues more accessible to students, or how new editions of textbooks provide improved graphics and more lucid descriptions, students still find these topics troublesome. This article describes a method by which teachers can analyze and find solutions for these kinds of "student-learning bottlenecks," and at the same time incorporate more inquiry into the classroom. The method is based on a summer professional development workshop called the Summer Research Institute (SRI) at Indiana University (IU) in which teachers collaborate with their colleagues to remedy learning bottlenecks that they have identified in their courses. (Contains 1 figure.)
... A substantial portion of the first week of the workshop had the teachers wrestling with and discussing the content and pedagogy involved in their student bottleneck lessons using a sevenstep plan. The seven-step plan included the following steps: (1) identify a learning bottleneck, (2) define the basic learning tasks, (3) model these tasks to your students, (4) motivate your students, (5) create practice opportunities for your students, (6) assess student learning, and (7) share what you have learned with other teachers (Middendorf & Pace, 2002). Using this seven-step process, the teachers inquired into why the topic they chose was a problem for their students, discussed how they understood the topic themselves as experts, and how the content could be translated into inquiry-based lessons that would motivate their students to learn. ...
... The professor of molecular biology had taught genetics, cell biology, and the introductory laboratory course for 23 years. He had participated in the faculty enhancement program on which the professional development was based (Middendorf & Pace, 2002) and created the professional development program. The science education professor had a Ph.D. in chemistry and 15 years experience in chemistry education, with 6 years in a College of Education at the time the SRI began. ...
... The larger project out of which th e HL P grew, th e Freshman Lear ning Project (FLP), where Dill was developed, has brough t together scholars both within and across disciplines to shar e their inquiries into student learning. (Middendorf & Pace, 2002;2004) Scholars within disciplines have published collaborative work in English, in history, in biology, in business and in astronomy, while Whitney Schlegel and David Pace have offered an example of collaboration betw een physiology and history (Schlegel & Pace, 2004). Part icipa n ts in the FLP fr om disciplines as diverse as sociology and astr onomy (to say nothing of art education, stu dio art, anthr opology and the university library ), have fo rm ed the Visual Methods in Teaching and Learning Project to explore how visual learning might be applied in th eir various disciplines. ...
... This cultural confrontation can lead to "student bashing" as faculty mistake students' inability to "decode the discipline" of history for a moral failing. 6 The mismatch between student and faculty expectations was apparent in our interviews. Faculty reported that in lectures students often anticipate a straightforward story, not a complicated history with multiple perspectives and ambiguities, and they find it difficult to distinguish broad themes, evidence/examples, and interpretations/arguments. Students, particularly those close to the first stage of William Perry's scale of ethical and cognitive development (such students are prone to taking a dualist stance, in which answers are either right or wrong), may view the textbook as the central source from which all factual answers for the exam emanate, while professors often conceive of textbooks as secondary tools providing students with a general (sometimes uncritical) narrative that must be compared to more scholarly writings, course lectures, and documentary sources. ...
... The SRI program was designed around a 7-step plan, originally developed for Indiana University's Freshman Learning Project (FLP), a college facultyenhancement program (Middendorf & Pace, 2002). The seven steps are as follows: ...
This paper examines the summer component of a year-long professional development program. The program was developed based
on recent models of effective professional development that indicate that teachers should guide the direction and focus of
the professional development program. Specific activities in the summer program were adapted from a long-running, successful
program for university faculty development. In this study we explore the conceptions of inquiry teachers developed during
the program, as well as the products teachers created. The discrepancies between program goals and the teachers’ products
and conceptions are described and reasons for these differences explored. The results suggest that engaging teachers in identifying
key issues in their own professional development is an effective strategy.
In the 1990s Indiana University Bloomington began an initiative to improve retention by enhancing the experience for first-year students. The changes that took place were surprisingly far reaching and profound.
This chapter explains how to plan a faculty learning community that engages a disciplinary inquiry of teaching and learning. It concludes with a five-level assessment of the Indiana University Faculty Learning Community.
In recent years, a great deal has been said and written about the need to improve teaching in the academy, especially in large research universities. College presidents, national associations representing higher education, private foundations, and individual faculty scholars all have challenged faculty, chairs, deans, campus administrators, and faculty developers to work together to improve support for undergraduate teaching and learning (Bok, 1986; Bowen & Schuster, 1986; Boyer, 1987; Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1989; Diamond & Adam, 1993; Seldin & Associates, 1990). Despite such calls for collaborative efforts to improve undergraduate education, faculty developers still often feel alone in a milieu that does not value teaching and frequently perceive a lack of support from academic leaders, particularly the central administration. Administrators, on the other hand, often recognize the need to improve institutional support for teaching, but are at a loss as to how to effectively intervene to change the environment.
To succeed in getting faculty to accept new teaching approaches, academic support professionals can benefit from the literature on planned change. By understanding the different rates at which faculty accept change, we can also identify the faculty most likely to lead their colleagues to accepting new approaches. Opinion leaders can offer insight into faculty reactions to new approaches; their involvement in project planning can influence acceptance. Innovators, when selected carefully, can demonstrate and test new teaching approaches. Knowledge of when and how to involve these two kinds of faculty can reduce frustration and enhance efforts to spread new ideas about teaching and learning.
In my 20 years of faculty development, I have found faculty learning communities to be the most effective programs for achieving faculty learning and development. In addition, these communities build communication across disciplines, increase faculty interest in teaching and learning, initiate excursions into the scholarship of teaching, and foster civic responsibility. They provide a multifaceted, flexible, and holistic approach to faculty development. They change individuals, and, over time, they change institutional culture. Faculty learning communities and their “graduates” are change agents who can enable an institution to become a learning organization. In this article I introduce faculty learning communities and discuss ways that they can transform our colleges and universities.
Many teaching practices implicitly assume that conceptual knowledge can be abstracted from the situations in which it is learned and used. This article argues that this assumption inevitably limits the effectiveness of such practices. Drawing on recent research into cognition as it is manifest in everyday activity, the authors argue that knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used. They discuss how this view of knowledge affects our understanding of learning, and they note that conventional schooling too often ignores the influence of school culture on what is learned in school. As an alternative to conventional practices, they propose cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newman, in press), which honors the situated nature of knowledge. They examine two examples of mathematics instruction that exhibit certain key features of this approach to teaching.
Some thoughts on reasoning capacities implicitly expected on College Students
Arons
Closer to the disciplines: A model for improving teaching within departments