From content delivery to facilitating learning: the changing role of the educator

Isis Brook and Florence Dujardin

Why the change

• • • • • Better understanding of how students learn.

Changing conception of what counts as knowledge and who can create it.

Greater focus on skill development.

More complex demands (the increasing IQ conundrum). Availability of learning resources for content delivery.

Traditional model

• • • • • • Content delivery by expert, students mainly passive Expectation that students read more or consolidate their knowledge in some way in own time Task to prompt and test learning – essay Teaching to the test for exam preparation Exam tests memory Assessment allows surface learning to pass

Flipped classroom

Illustration from: http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/01/23/6-expert-tips-for flipping-the-classroom.aspx

Supporting the flipped classroom

Blooms taxonomy

Image from http://ileighanne.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/flipped-classroom-blooms.jpg

Easy transition – the interactive lecture

• • • Allow spaces for thinking, responding, framing questions, analysing, predicting, using what has been presented. More effective if collaborative as stuck students can catch up by learning from others and all stretch their understanding . We know that even a gap with nothing is more effective overall than a non-stop lecture

Johnson, A. H., and F. Percival. 1976. Attention breaks in lectures. Education in Chemistry 13:49–50.

Polls and Quizzes

Problem-Based Learning (PBL)

• • • • Began in 1960s Classic definition – “learning that results from the process of working towards the understanding of a resolution of a problem”. (Barrows and Tamblyn 1980:1).

Usually in student groups Problem design is crucial to success

Three key aspects of the problem

• • • Problem triggers understanding of threshold concepts Problem provokes liminal space Problem is a stimulus for hard fun

Threshold Concepts

• • • • • Irreversible – once grasped can’t go back Integrative – enable integrated thinking, appreciate complexity and relationships Usually bounded - concepts that bind a subject together, key ways of thinking in that discipline, define its edges.

Transformative – change how we think, involves letting go of prior assumptions or unexamined aspects of one’s own understanding.

Troublesome – inherently difficult, can involve specialist language (jargon), counterintuitive, and can be unstable

Examples

• • • • From economics – opportunity cost From politics – hegemony From history – history is written by the victors Generic – knowledge is unstable and can be overturned Not just key important ideas in discipline but concepts that change how we think in that discipline (and beyond).

TCs as Jewels in the Curriculum

“Threshold concepts can be used to define potentially powerful transformative points in the student’s learning experience. In this sense they may be viewed as ‘jewels in the curriculum’ inasmuch as they serve to identify crucial points in the framework of engagement that teachers may wish to construct in order to provide opportunities for students to gain important conceptual understandings and hence gain a richer and more complex insights into aspects of the subject they are studying” (Rust 2005:57).

Liminal space as an uncomfortable portal in the learning journey

Safe in what I know Scary liminal space where I have to let go of what I know New more sophisticated understanding

Short exercise

• • Think about your own discipline and identify 1-2 threshold concepts.

Can be hard because you now think through them, so remember what was hard for you as a student, what changed your view, what do your students struggle to grasp or seem to grasp but struggle to apply.

Threshold Concepts

• • • • • Irreversible – once grasped can’t go back Integrative – enable integrated thinking, appreciate complexity and relationships Usually bounded - concepts that bind a subject together, key ways of thinking in that discipline, define its edges.

Transformative – change how we think, involves letting go of prior assumptions or unexamined aspects of one’s own understanding.

Troublesome – inherently difficult, can involve specialist language (jargon), counterintuitive, and can be unstable

Sharing resources

PBL should be Hard Fun

• • • Expect laughter and joking Encourage freedom and creativity Allow playfulness • • • --------------------------------------------------------------- Expect intense activity Use difficult/complex problems Cope with resistance and tears

What does PLB look like

• • • • Tutor provides prompt – something complex that, when investigated fully, will need the threshold concept(s) and is ‘ill-formed’ (no right answer, or only one way to approach it) Students work in groups Could last one session or whole module Tutor meets groups to check on progress, provide guidance.

Good quality problems are:

• • • • Engaging and motivating Authentic, real-world, from professional/ social life Ill-structured, open to multiple ideas/hypotheses, sustain discussion Multi-dimensional with physical, cognitive, social, emotional, ethical dimensions • • Stimulate a web of collaborative enquiry Challenge students to achieve learning outcomes, understand threshold concepts, work on problems • Graduate attributes-focused: enhance teamwork, info. Literacy, critical thinking, creative problem solving. (Barrett and Moore 2011:18)

Think of an example you could possibly use in your teaching

• • • • Prompts can be things like: a newspaper cutting an experience related a video a photograph

Pinboards

Is getting students involved in research another way of flipping the classroom?

Students as participants Emphasis on research content Emphasis on research processes and problems Students as audience Healey (2005a)

The research-teaching nexus

Students as participants Research tutored Emphasis on research content Research led Research based Research orientated Emphasis on research processes and problems Students as audience

Students as participants Emphasis on research content Students assist tutor in component of their research or discuss results Students undertake their own inquiry based learning Emphasis on research processes and problems Curriculum teaches (cutting edge) subject content including tutor’s own research Students as audience Curriculum emphasises teaching the processes of knowledge production Adapted from Healey 2005a

Example of ‘Hot’ Science

New problem from client Tutor doesn’t know answer (authentic problem) Students engage in finding out: what it is, how it happened, likely impact, future projections, means of prevention. And can even be involved in advising the client.

from John Cullum, Post Harvest Technology, Writtle College

Position of the mouldy satsumas on the Healey Axis?

Students as participants Emphasis on research content Not here!

Students as audience Emphasis on research processes and problems

Is the literature right?

Few academic staff would fully understand the learning, employability, student satisfaction, dispositional, and research gains from moving to here Visser-Wijnveen, et al 2012 Many academic staff, if asked to integrate research and teaching, would gravitate to interpreting the meaning here Grant & Wakelin 2009

E-Portfolios

http://gettingsmart.com/2013/04/students-shine-through-digital-portfolios/

http://ileighanne.files.wordpress.com/2013/ 01/flipped-classroom-blooms.jpg

What could ‘150’ traditional learning hours look like?

• • • • • • 13 x 3 hours of class time 1-4 prep for class exam = 39 hours = 02 av 5-32 on essay prep and writing = 20 av = 03 Revision 3-32 Total = 12 av = 100 hours With poor attendance, little prep, overnight essay writing, last minute cramming for exam, could be as low as 32 hours of surface learning and still pass.