Strategies for Enhancing Your Teaching Effectiveness

1. School of Public Health and Information Sciences December 2, 2011 Strategies for Enhancing Your Teaching Effectiveness Marie Kendall Brown, Ph.D., Assistant Director Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning

2. Workshop Goals Sessions are designed to accomplish the following goals: • Share best practices and emerging scholarship in teaching and learning, • Strengthen a unit-wide culture of conversation about teaching and learning, • Provide an interactive and collaborative learning experience, • Offer participants concrete teaching strategies and “take-aways” for immediate implementation, • Disseminate relevant resources and scholarship for further exploration and learning.

3. SPHIS Workshop Summary Since October 2010, ten workshops have been offered on topics such as: Active Learning Instructional Technology Rubrics Syllabus Design Assessing Critical Thinking Improving Retention of Information 45% of SPHIS faculty have attended 5 or more sessions

4. My Key Assumptions • You are an expert and critical thinker in your field. • You are open to thinking in new ways about teaching content that is very familiar to you. • We are sharing ideas, strategies, and insights as teachers and learners. • Talking about teaching effectiveness is part of an ongoing, intentional conversation that is critical to enhancing student learning.

5. Session Objectives • Discuss four lenses of practice for becoming a critically reflective teacher and explore your own development in each area of practice • Gather resources and strategies for documenting your own good teaching • Identify an action plan for enhancing your teaching effectiveness

6. Chalk Talk What makes an effective teacher? Student Perspective Faculty Perspective

7. Seven Principles for Good Practice Good practice: • Encourages student-faculty contact • Encourages cooperation among students • Encourages active learning • Gives prompt feedback • Emphasizes time on task • Communicates high expectations • Respects diverse talents and ways of learning • Chickering, A. W., & Gamson, Z. F. (1987). “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education.” The Wingspread Journal. Racine, WI: Johnson Foundation.

8. Critically Reflective Practice • Demonstrates that you are reflective and purposeful about your teaching • Allows you to articulate and make explicit your goals as a teacher • Helps you identify and use appropriate teaching approaches to achieve your teaching goals • Helps you think through the specific ways you want to make a difference in the lives of your students • Gain greater awareness of your progress and development • Guides you in determining your path to professional improvement In short: It promotes genuine reflection about teaching.

9. Why be a critically reflective teacher? To garner an increased awareness of one’s teaching from as many different vantage points as possible.

10. Reflective Practice Process • Questioning what, why, and how one does things and asking what, why, and how others do things • Seeking alternatives • Keeping an open mind • Comparing and contrasting • Seeking the framework, theoretical basis, and/or underlying rationale • Viewing from various perspectives • Asking “What if..?” • Roth, R. A. (1989, March-April). Preparing the reflective practitioner: Transforming the apprentice through the dialectic. Journal of Teacher Education, 40(2), 31-35.

11. Some Questions for Reflective Practice • What worked well? • Why? • What did not work well? • Why not? • What will I do the same next time? • What will I do differently next time?

12. Brookfield’s Four Lenses of Practice Critically reflective teachers seek a greater awareness of teaching by gathering information from: • Self-reflection • Students’ eyes • Our colleagues’ perspectives 4. Theoretical literature • Brookfield, S. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. • San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

13. Think-Pair-Share • What is one thing that you have learned about teaching from each lens of practice? • How has each lens influenced how you think about your own teaching effectiveness?

14. Self-Reflection: Tools and Resources • Analysis of what works and what doesn’t and why (formal and informal) • Course portfolio • Teaching portfolio • Philosophy of teaching statement • Your own teaching and learning experiences • Teaching Perspectives Inventory: http://www.teachingperspectives.com/

15. Students’ Eyes: Tools and Resources • Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) • Classroom assessment techniques (CATs) • Student reflection papers • Course pre- and post-tests • Prior knowledge probes • Mid-semester feedback questions • Formative feedback

16. A few words about SETs WARNING: There are limitations! SETs are: • a snapshot of students’ reactions and experiences at one moment in time • student self-report SETs don’t: • assess the developmental progression of your course (e.g., curriculum design, teaching development; your ongoing professional development) • assess student motivation • Clayson, D. E. (2009, April). Student evaluations of teaching: Are they related to what students learn? A Meta-analysis and review of the literature. Journal of Marketing Education, 31(1), 16-30.

17. Our Colleagues’ Experiences: Tools and Resources • Conversations with those both in and outside of your course/practicum setting (informal) • Unit-wide or university-wide cohorts, committees, groups, etc. • Mentoring relationships (in or outside of UofL) • Peer classroom observations and debriefing • Programs with peer-to-peer sharing • Chronicle of Higher Education • Inside Higher Education

18. Theoretical Literature: Tools and Resources Teaching and Learning Center Websites • MSU: http://fod.msu.edu/OIR/index.asp • U-M: http://www.crlt.umich.edu/tstrategies/teachings.php Teaching Listservs: Tomorrow’s Professor Mailing List • http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/postings.php?way=5 Journals in the Field • New Directions in Teaching and Learning • Journal on Excellence in College Teaching Delphi’s Resource Library • http://www.librarything.com/catalog/DelphiCenter2011

19. Your Action Plan What are the key insights and take-aways you discovered during today’s workshop? What are three things you will do starting today to enhance your teaching effectiveness?