Community-based Learning Grows at Dartmouth

On November 5, DCAL hosted a presentation on community-based learning (CBL) at Dartmouth led by Helen Damon-Moore, Director of Service and Educational Programs at the Tucker Foundation. Sean Smith, Associate Professor of Computer Science, described his department’s EPICS course—Engineering Projects in Community Service—a culminating experience option for CS majors. Sara Kobylenski, executive director of The Haven, the Upper Valley’s shelter and support service for homeless people, shared her perspectives as one of Dartmouth’s CBL clients. Finally we listened to a student’s perspective from John Williamson who completed the EPICS course over two terms during his senior year, 2008-2009. Of the faculty members attending, some are just beginning to think about designing CBL components in their courses and several others, including Ivy Schweitzer (Women and Gender Studies) and Matissa Hollister (Sociology), have been teaching CBL courses and course components for several years.

Williamson’s 2008-2009 EPICS course helped to build a useful database for the Upper Valley Humane Society, allowing them to match reports of lost animals with reports of those found. His group turned a mountain of loose-leaf binders into a registry of pets and owners that saved time and money for the UVHS. This year, Professor Smith’s students are helping the Haven repair and upgrade its client database. Williamson and Smith expressed agreement on the following valuable features of CBL courses:

• The work has a real-world authenticity not usually present in other course assignments.
• The project requires collaboration among students and between students and the community client.
• Students learn more about effective communication than they do in most CS courses.
• As is usual in the real world, projects begun by one group sometimes must be finished by another, so students learn the importance of documenting their work, and how to inherit work begun by others.
• Students learn by a process of discovery, a process they share with their community client.
• Students rise to a level of responsibility rarely demanded by other courses.
• CBL courses prepare students for life-long learning as few other courses can.

Damon-Moore helps faculty find community partners for CBL courses and offers consulting in course design, implementation and evaluation. The Tucker Foundation also offers grants of up to $2000 to defray the various costs associated with CBL courses—transportation, communication, special materials and the like. DCAL also stands ready to help faculty in course and assessment design; we also have a small library that includes helpful literature on collaborative work, grading and course management for CBL courses.

Curiously Enough: Dialogic Classroom Discussions

Last Thursday, Dartmouth’s Institute for Writing and Rhetoric sponsored the lunchtime workshop, “Curiously Enough: Dialogic Classroom Discussions,” in which Speech Instructor Josh Compton led twenty faculty through an examination of the role of curiosity in the learning process, offering strategies for promoting and practicing curiosity in our classrooms.

Josh began his workshop by pointing out the many virtues of curiosity, noting the important role that it plays in learning. Josh sees curiosity as a kind of cognitive dissonance that makes the mind crave resolution, instilling the desire to know. When our students are curious, they will be willing to expose themselves to new information and will work to fill in the gaps between what they know, and what we want them to know.

Josh offered useful advice for practicing curiosity in class discussions. He noted that faculty need to begin by asking open-ended questions and then allowing students sufficient time for their curiosity to grow. This strategy sounds simple enough—until we think about the way that we actually respond to students during class discussions. Josh revealed some interesting research findings regarding these responses. For instance, when we respond to students with an encouraging phatic response (like “oh?” or “really?”), students respond with an average of 4.6 words; when we respond with a one-second silence, students respond with an average of 7 words; and when we respond with three seconds of silence, students respond with an average of 28 words. In sum, students need time: time to formulate their thoughts, and time to practice their curiosity.

Dialogic Classroom Discussions

Josh also pointed out that we should not be afraid of conflict in our class discussions. He cited a study in which two groups of elementary school students were invited to work together on a task. One group was encouraged to debate and to engage in healthy conflict; the other group was told that they must work without any conflict whatsoever. When it was time for recess, the students were given a choice: they could go out to play, or they could continue with their discussions. 45% of the students in the group that permitted conflict chose to give up their recess, while only 18% of the students in the non-conflict group made the same decision. Clearly, conflict (healthy conflict) engages students: sustaining their curiosity, improving their learning.

Finally, Josh reminded us to model curiosity for our students. Faculty, who are experts in their fields, sometimes forget the curiosity that initially inspired them. Reconnecting with this curiosity—and showing students how to use their own curiosity to motivate themselves to learn—can transform our class discussions into authentic exchanges based on the practice of shared curiosity.

CITE Helps Us Think about Unconscious Gender Bias in Hiring

I have been to at least three Cornell Interactive Theater Ensemble performances on this topic, and I learn something new each time. At the end of this posting I’ll tell you the new thing I learned this time.

For 18 years, CITE has been helping people in industry, business and academia think about unconscious gender and race bias in their workplaces. They do this by performing a short play, sometimes recorded on a DVD, and then inviting participants to put questions to one or two of the actors, in character.

This week’s mini-play, “It Depends on the Lens,” depicted the last 15 minutes of a hiring committee meeting in an academic department as they try to reach agreement on a short list of candidates to invite to on-campus interviews. Up to this point the meetings have gone smoothly, but as they try to settle on three (and the dean has said only three) candidates, it becomes apparent that some members have chosen their short-list favorites without reading some of the CVs and supporting letters as carefully as others. Quite unintentionally, some short-cuts have crept into the process, short-cuts not unrelated to some committee members’ professional friendships and privileged knowledge. The situation is aggravated by the fact that the chair must bring the meeting to a close in order to take an important conference call. The committee comes to a small crisis just at the wrong moment, or so it seems. After the DVD presentation, the committee chair, David (Dane Cruz), joined the Dartmouth participants and answers their questions while in character.

Next, Vivian Relta invited participants to reflect on some of the other characters in the sketch. What did we feel about them and their behavior? What did we notice? Questions about what anyone should do to “fix” the situation Vivian deferred until later. First our task was to try to think in other people’s positions, to try on for ourselves the perspectives of both the characters we admired and those we really disliked. It’s what CITE calls a “no blame—high accountability” analysis of what has happened where everyone has a chance to take ownership of a variety of perspectives.

Finally Cate Taylor, a sociologist, supplied us with an overview of recent research on unconscious gender bias. This research informed the script that underlay the mini-play. Research shows, very convincingly, that well-intentioned, non-sexist people routinely demonstrate unconscious gender bias in most test situations. They show it even more when they are over-worked, when women are rare in their department, when information is lacking or overwhelming, and when criteria for selection are vague or not explicitly articulated and re-visited.

So what bit of information was new to me? I have probably heard this a dozen times before, but only this week did it sink in: women demonstrate  gender bias against women applicants just as frequently as men do, especially under stress. However important it is to have women on your search committees, that alone does not eliminate gender bias.

Learning by Letting Go

Today, DCAL was pleased to host Barbara Sawhill, Director of the Cooper International Learning Center at Oberlin College, presenting Learning by Letting Go. Sawhill shared her experiences teaching Spanish at Oberlin with an approach that turns much of the syllabus planning, goal setting, and assessment over to the students.

After introductions, and an affirmation of her belief in “Practice what you preach, present what you teach, practice what you teach,” Sawhill immediately turned the presentation over to the twenty-two faculty and staff attendees with an activity designed to identify what everyone hoped to gain from the event as well as an exploration of meaningful learning experiences in each of our pasts.

Attendees examining self-described evidence of "learning"

In discussing the outcomes of the activity, Sawhill pointed out the importance not only of drawing out students’ own learning objectives but also drawing attention to the overlaps and shared objectives which can serve as the basis for collaboration and community building within the classroom.

The challenge facing all of us is coming to understand the general disconnect within the “academy,” from k-12 and all the way up, between what we do and what we say or believe that we do, as often described on course syllabi or in the mission statements of our schools. Sawhill continued with the delineation between “schooling” and “learning” and the misplaced efforts to assess the latter by only evaluating the former. In pursuit of learning, there are barriers that get in the way. The biggest are the top-down institutional structures that are designed to manage institutional time and resources, which end up creating teacher-centric learning. For example, a certain amount of material (a textbook) must be covered over the course of a term with an expectation that Teacher A will deliver to Teacher B students that are “ready” for the next phase. Looking at foreign languages, it is estimated through research that it takes 720 hours to be minimally proficient in a foreign language that is at least somewhat similar to one’s native language (e.g. Spanish for an English speaker). In a class of 20 students, what fraction of that 720 hours can really be delivered or experienced by an individual student over the course of a term or year? The result is that too often faculty will have students “snorkel” through the syllabus, racing through a superficial or shallow covering of the materials. Instead, says Sawhill, we need to encourage more opportunities to “scuba dive” into the content areas, sacrificing some coverage for deeper more meaningful experiences or interactions with the materials.

With that as a framework, Sawhill next described how she has begun teaching her classes, starting with her second year conversational Spanish course for non-majors. Except for administrative information, the class syllabus develops with student input on their learning objectives. Common goals are “structured from the chaos,” as students discover their overlapping and/or complementary interests. The task is not necessarily an easy one, as students so often expect the instructor to define the objectives and the process. But, in such a traditional teacher-centric approach, how are teachers preparing students to become the “lifelong learners” that so many of our mission statements allude to?

Students are asked to identify a short-, medium-, and long-term learning goal for themselves in the course. In clarifying the distance between “where I am now” and “where I want to be, ” Sawhill explains to the students that the process requires “lots & lots of work.” As the syllabus and goals emerge, one of the key tools Sawhill requires students to employ are blogs, both individual ones for students as well as a class blog that is collaboratively constructed. More importantly, the blogs are “open” to the world, inviting and encouraging comments from native speakers from around the globe. Sawhill notes, though, that  it often takes about two weeks for external feedback to begin appearing and requires that students seek out and contribute comments or links to blogs outside of the class. Most of the commentary comes from class peers, who gradually begin to understand more and more that they gain from their contributions and from the feedback they receive, in the spirit of true community and collaboration.

At the end of the course, students are required to submit a short (250-500 words) essay, in English or in Spanish, that evaluates the progress that they made towards their goals, highlighting the factors contributing to or against their achievement. They also submit evidence of their efforts and give themselves a grade. In all cases, no one gave themselves an “A.” And in one case, a student felt she earned only a C, yet provided evidence of over 40 hours of Internet voice chat with native speakers, as well as 55 pages of text chat transcripts. Based on their overall course performance, self evaluation, and evidence, Sawhill assigns the final grade, consulting with the students when she finds her evaluation at odds with their own.

In closing, Sawhill made the following points:

• Blogging is hard work
• It’s not about “you.” It’s about “us.”
• Mark Prensky’s notion of digital natives and digital immigrants is wrong. Our students have as much trepidation about technology as we often do
• Making the curriculum relevant to the “out there” experience is hard. But, it’s worth it.

For those who are interested Barbara Sawhill, continues to write about her teaching experiences at her blog site Language Lab Unleashed http://www.languagelabunleashed.org/ and there are links to some of her class blogs from the Cooper International Learning Center site at http://languages.oberlin.edu/.

Fall term TWIT

Teaching with Technology, affectionately known as TWIT, is one of DCAL’s regular offerings. Held once every term, TWIT features 3 or 4 faculty presenters who briefly showcase an interesting or novel use of technology in their teaching. Here’s a synopsis of today’s presentations:

• Jonathan Chipman (Geography) gave an “Eight-minute introduction to mapping and spatial analysis tools” – complete with a live demo (how to create a Google map from a data set in five minutes or less), and several examples of curricular applications of mapping technologies. As Tom Luxon remarked, in the Q and A section, “maps can tell stories” – and that’s of interest not just to geographers, but in a variety of disciplines. Faculty interested in the use of mapping technologies in their field should feel free to contact jonathan.chipman@dartmouth.edu. And here is Jonathan’s handout
• Ivan Aprahamian (Chemistry) talked about lecture capture in a large lecture course with difficult subject matter: organic chemistry. He demoed the Camatasia Relay software which he used to capture his powerpoints, as well as the audio of his presentations, and showed some interesting data collected from a student survey of the technology. Overall, students were very enthusiastic of the technology and found it to be a valuable tool for reviewing and increasing mastery of difficult material.
• Michael Bronski (Women’s Studies and Jewish Studies) shared his experiences of using clickers to facilitate discussion on racial or cultural identities. Michael used clickers in a large Intro the Women’s Studies course, as well as in asmaller Jewish Studies seminar, to do poll students (anonymously) on their accuracy of identifying faces as “gay” or “Jewish”. The clickers allowed anxiety about the subject matter and stereotyping to be contained, and, in the end, facilitaed meaningful discussion in an environment taht was perceived as “safe”. Michael’s in-class polling exercise was inspired by the research of Nicholas Rule.
• Joshua Kim and Susan Simon (Academic Computing) summed up their use of video mashups in a recent Intro to Sociology course. Students created mashups in order to teach key sociology concepts to each other – and effectively to the world, since all mashups were posted on a public You Tube channel created for the course. By taking on the role of knowledge creators, rather than consumers, students were challenged to master the material at a deeper level; and sharing their work with the world gave their assignments a new level of authenticity. One interesting twist of the course was that the students’ video mashups were shared with the author of one the course’s textbook – who was delighted to see students take ownership of the key concepts.

Faculty interested in Camtasia Relay and presentation capture, clickers, or video projects, should contact curricular.computing@dartmouth.edu for help getting started.

Joshua Kim and Susan Simon summing up the intent of their student projects

Studio Seminars – a DCAL practicum

A Small, Silent Ode, by Sarah Parkinson '09

Today’s DCAL practicum was an inspiring presentation by Alex Halasz (English) of her COCO 11 Book Arts Studio Seminar, co-taught last spring with Lynne Avadenka (book artist, Studio Art). Alex shared with us her syllabus, as well as her methodology and course structure, which rests on three legs: project work, reading (and writing), and research. She also shared many photographs documenting the student work produced throughout this course – impressive in its creativity and variety, and demonstrating that the students had no trouble going up a considerable learning curve during the course.

Alex’ presentation reminded all of us of the power of authentic assignments, produced through a transparent process (in public); she also stressed the importance of tactile and visual elements in learning. Some of the positive outcomes she could point to, other than the tangible project work produced by her students, were:

• increased attendance
• successful team work (with all group member contributing)
• individual research activity becomes an integral component of project work
• very high student ehgagement, motivation and sense of ownership

The main question raised during discussion was how best to replicate some of these principles and successes in other courses. Here are some of our suggestions for transferable principles:

• make student work public and shared
• cover less content, and incorporate more project-based learning
• structure projects and assignments so that students have choices, within a controlled framework
• fold research organically into project work
• when creating student group, try to distribute skills equally
• change the role of the professor: s/he needs to set up the right framework and conditions for the course, but then be able to et go and become a mentor and evaluator, rather than an instructor in the traditional sense
• think about incorporating media projects, poster projects, student-curated exhibits and other “non-traditional” assignments
• think about round table presentations for courses where “deliverables” or projects are very text-focused (final paper)

Teaching Statements and Communicating Research

Graduate students and postdocs have been coming to DCAL workshops this fall to talk about being a TA, presenting a science cafe at a local middle school, writing a teaching statement, and communicating their research to broader audiences.  Peer feedback is an important part of most of our workshops for future faculty.  In the workshops on teaching statements and the series on communicating research (which was developed by Nancy Serrell, Director of Outreach), we ask participants to use the technique of reading as a common reader to give feedback to their peers.  Each reader tells the writer 1) what they felt as they read the teaching statement or research description, 2) what words, phrases or sentences made them feel that way, and 3) why they felt that way.  Our participants were usually interested in their peers’ teaching ideas and big picture of their research.  However, they often felt confused by technical language outside their disciplines and curious about how their peers might accomplish some of their teaching goals.  In response to peer feedback, participants crafted teaching statements that included goals, examples, and plans for assessing their students, and research descriptions (often including analogies) that were clear to their peers in biology, computer science, psychology and astronomy!  Next time we hope to have postdocs and grad students from non-science disciplines to join us in the research communication series as they did for the teaching statement workshops.

4th Annual New(ish) Faculty Hike

Organized by Assistant Professor of sociology Matissa Hollister, this year’s New(ish) Faculty hike broke with three years of tradition. After three years of hiking Mt. Mousilauke and dining in the Ravine Lodge, this year we tackled nearby Moose Mountain, Hanover’s highest peak, then we enjoyed a potluck dinner and overnight at the comfortable new Class of ‘66 Lodge on October 3rd.

The hike was rainy, but not cold. One group, led by Hollister,  hiked all the way from campus; the others, led by Tom Luxon, contented themselves with the short loop over the south summit, then back to the lodge where fires, food and good fellowship prevailed until late into the evening.

The New(ish) Faculty Hike began in 2005 when Matissa Hollister suggested to DCAL’s new director, Tom Luxon, that faculty, like students, could benefit from an outdoor experience that oriented them to Dartmouth’s rich sense of its place in the north woods, to the Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC) facilities and to each other. This year more than twenty new (and not so new) faculty took advantage of what is becoming one of Dartmouth’s newest “old traditions.”

Teaching Science Seminar

George Wolford, Lincoln Filene Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, initiated this year’s seminar with a challenging discussion of three articles by Robert A. Bjork on memory, training and meta-cognition. Bjork’s research offers solid evidence for a number of claims we teachers may find counter-intuitive. Introducing “desirable difficulties” into learning experiences of all kinds can “enhance long-term retention and transfer” (Bjork, “Assessing Our Own Competence,” 452). Some of the desirable difficulties he describes include:

• reducing feedback to the learner
• sequencing materials and tasks in ways that cause “contextual interference”
• spacing out practice sessions
• increasing the incidence of student errors on self-tests and practices
• avoid supplying answers and solutions during review sessions
• varying the conditions and contexts of practice and testing

Bjork argues convincingly that students who do very well on routine quizzes and tests may not have processed concepts deeply enough to apply what they have learned in new contexts or succeeding courses. As course designers, we often fail “to realize that people learn by making and correcting mistakes” and “there is a tendency to assume that errors and mistakes made during training reflect fundamental inadequacies of the learner” (454). So students who make very few mistakes on quizzes and midterm exams may not really be learning as deeply as those who make more mistakes and have adequate opportunities to correct them.

We had quite an interesting time discussing what such findings might mean for designing courses and assessments in the sciences. Some of us think that designing reviews and quizzes that increase the likelihood of mistakes will not play well with students, nor will it bring us positive student evaluations. But we know it enhances long-term learning. What, then, should we do?

Check the DCAL Newsletter for upcoming topics in the Teaching Science Seminar!

“Contextualizing Knowledge” — professional development workshop

Workshop description:
When doing research, students must be able to place their sources in context before they can understand them, evaluate them, and put them to good use. In this workshop, librarians Peter Carini and Laura Braunstein demonstrate context-building exercises using both primary and secondary sources.

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What comes to mind when you hear the phrase “archival materials”? Go ahead, think about it.

Did you think “murder mystery” or “scandal”? Did you think of archival materials as pieces of a puzzle? That’s just the role these documents played in our workshop today. Peter divided us into groups and gave each group some primary source documents. We read them, speculated on their contexts, and then pieced all our separate documents together to uncover an exciting, albeit tragic, tale from Dartmouth’s history. Peter regularly does this type of exercise with Dartmouth students in order to expose them to archival materials, to demonstrate how primary sources can be utilized in research, and to help them develop critical thinking skills to apply to primary and secondary sources.

Laura Braunstein then lead us in a discussion on the ways in which we can achieve similar outcomes while exploring secondary sources. She shared ideas with us, and we brainstormed our own. By leading students in critical readings of texts we can help them discover the research process from the inside out and ask questions of the text (Why was X interpreted this way by the author? Why is Y not present in this argument?). They can do this type of critical reading on the papers of scholars and of their peers, and then apply what they learn to their own writing.

Note: This workshop was sponsored by the Institute for Writing & Rhetoric and led by Karen Gocsik.