Spencer's Learning/Teaching Philosophy Spring 2024 by Rachel Watson

Learning/Teaching Philosophy

2024-01-29 20:03:26 UTC

Learning requires a person to be both interested in the material they are learning and for them to value the information they are trying to learn. Therefore, as a teacher you must also find the material interesting and valuable as well as finding a way to convince your students of this. If you can do this the students will actively want to learn and you have done half the work already.

After this you must present the information in a way in which students can engage with it and then find a way to force them to think critically about it. Critical thinking is a vital part of solving any problem in life and so as a teacher your job is to both teach them interesting material, but also teach them how to think properly.

1/29 Reflection

2024-01-30 00:48:27 UTC

Today from reading over other people teaching philosophies, listening to Rachel, and going over the different active learning strategies I think making sure the students have to teach some of the information is one of the most effective ways to help them learn. This is something I want to be sure to integrate into my teaching philosophy and I think specifically the Jigsaw method and directed paraphrasing are great ways to achieve this. The jigsaw method requires students to become experts in different things and then teach each other which ensures that they will remember at least part of the material really well. Directed learning makes students learn something well enough that they can they pick our core concepts and think about how to verbalize that in different ways focused on teaching different audiences.

To ensure that these activities are inclusive I would make sure that there are different options for how the students would be able to teach. For example some students may be comfortable verbally teaching their peers while someone less talkative might want to teach by writing a summary or small poster for their peers.

Reverse the order you make material?

2024-02-01 21:31:27 UTC

Could one method of generating material be to first make up what you want the students to know, potentially in the form of a test and then use this as an outline fore generating lecture and active learning activities?

2/5 Reflection- Collaborative Communication

2024-02-06 00:58:36 UTC

The big thing I have taken away from our conversation today is the importance of making people feel comfortable enough that they want to speak during learning activities.

One good thing that was mentioned was the importance of "shooting the shit" or taking time to have conversations about non class related things which can make people feel comfortable to then talk about class related things later on. Also the importance of teaching peers how to invite their other peers into the conversation. This can make them feel more included than compared to when a teacher or LA invites them in and can make them more comfortable in general. I think the other takeaway is that I need to find a way to figure out if people are comfortable enough to talk and if they aren't figure out how to get them there. Is there a good way to access student comfort and then make individual changes based on this knowledge?

2/12 Reflection- Brain neuroscience

2024-02-13 00:46:01 UTC

Oxygen flow to the brain is super important for learning as it allows for growth and development. This mean that exercise or any extra bloodflow can help to stimulate learning. How can we introduce activities into class that promote bloodflow even if its just standing up to help promote learning? It also upregulates BDNF which promotes cognition.

Long term stress negatively affects the brain by destroying neurons and downregulating BDNF. Can we as instructors find ways to reduce long term stress of our students?

Emotional wellbeing and emotional learning is directly related to scholastic learning. This basically translates to if your students are happy and comfortable they will learn better. I think the groups we have promote this as the students seems to become friends and have engaging conversations. However we have one group with a strange dynamic that I think might be causing problems with this for some of the students. How can we fix this since I think changing groups would be detrimental for some students even if its beneficial for some.

Ask short questions not obvious/rhetorical questions

2024-02-14 19:21:19 UTC

If the question is obvious students will be less likely to answer and if they do you aren't really engaging their brains. Its also awkward because nobody want to say the obvious answer. Instead try to ask questions that get the students thinking and then give them time to come up with an answer. I've really been liking these short questions and they could be good test questions as well. Strategy could be to warn students that these short questions will be important for them to take notes on and that the will be tested on them.

Problem solving definition

2024-02-27 00:03:33 UTC

Guidelines further define problem solving as having the following attributes: clearly define problems, develop testable hypotheses, design and execute experiments, analyze data using appropriate statistical methods, understand uncertainties in experimental methods and draw appropriate conclusions

2/26 Reflection - "Second generation research"

2024-02-27 00:41:15 UTC

Its abundantly clear that active learning is effect. However I'm interested in the next stage of research on active learning. Is there a certain amount necessary to show its effectiveness. Are there different types of active earning that are more effective than others? Are there certain active learning techniques that help develop certain skills ( i.e. Problem solving vs leadership vs content retention). What are the best ways to design studies to answer these questions? Should we be collecting data in all of our classes to get at this even if there isn't a specific study design? I am also sure there are some studies already looking at some of this stuff but I don't know exactly how to find them.

How much can we make students learn when they don't want to?

2024-03-04 18:22:06 UTC

I have been noticing while teaching that many students just dont care to learn. They dont show up to class, they dont participate, and they dont look at the feedback we give them. Should we be designing courses in a way that forces students to actually do what they need to to learn? Or as teachers is it just our job to help the students who actually want to learn? Are there any other ways besides grades what other ways can get students to show up to class and participate so that they actually learn?

Metacognitive questions for students about their learning

2024-03-05 00:41:50 UTC

Students should be able to answer the following questions during an activity.

What are you doing?

Why are you being asked to do it?

What will it help you do?

How does it fit in with what we've previously done?

How will you show that you have learned it?

3/4 Reflection-Learning outcomes

2024-03-05 00:45:02 UTC

Have specific learning outcomes is essential to building a curriculum to reach those outcomes. I think coming up with these outcomes or potential even writing question you want them to be able to answer first and then designing the course around being able to answer those questions could be one way to do this. I think this method of designing the test or assignments first could be an interesting way to design a class rather than making the lectures or activities and then designing the test/assessment afterwards.

Foundations for learning

2024-03-18 16:59:33 UTC

(a) Learning is
promoted when learners are engaged in
solving real-world problems.

(b) Learning is
promoted when existing knowledge is
activated as a foundation for new knowledge.
(c) Learning is promoted when new knowledge
is demonstrated to the learner.

(d) Learning is
promoted when new knowledge is applied by
the learner.

(e) Learning is promoted when
new knowledge is integrated into the learner’s
world

3/18 Reflection - Instructional design

2024-03-18 23:56:55 UTC

I like the idea of analyzing what students know to then help design a class around it. It falls in with the ADDIE model as well as on of the first principals of instruction. I do think this is tricky as you usually want to go into a class with material already prepared, but if you have extra material prepared and can select what you think is right for a specific group of students this could be a powerful tool for making sure maximum learning is achieved. I also like the idea in theory of presenting the type of problem you expect students to be able to solve, but I feel like for lower level courses this is more difficult as often you are providing them with lots of baseline information and not specific real world problems. In my animal biology classes I did give them some real world problems, but its not that easy for them to solve problems that nobody has solved when only given a short amount of time. I think that this focus on being able to completely solve a problem that is covered in he first principals may be less important than the students ability to think critically about a problem and at least come up with some ideas more than fully being able to solve it.

4/15 Reflection - Place Based Learning/ Experiential Learning

2024-04-15 23:45:15 UTC

I think the idea of place based learning is very interesting but the literature we read on it still made it feel a bit abstract. I think as a biologist most of my interest in biology came from placed based /experiential learning as I would observe things outside and become interested in why those things were the way the are and how everything fits together. I think that as I began to learn about science in school it gave me the tools I needed to think more critically about these questions and even come up with ways to answer them. Effectively I have been going through Kolbs cycle my whole life but my science classes gave me the told to more effectively conceptualize and experiment to test all of these questions I have had from basically all of my life experiences. I think showing students that they are always doing this already and then giving them a specific task to do this type of thinking and learning could be a great activity to do in almost any biology class.

4/1 Reflection - URM persistence in STEM

2024-04-17 22:12:44 UTC

It is clear from the data that there is a lack of URMs that finish STEM degrees, but there doesn't seem to be a great answer about exactly why this is. The universal design ideas about teaching and letting students show their knowledge in different ways is great, but seems like it would help students across the board and doesn't specifically address the increased URM dropout rate in STEM. Perhaps this has already been done, but I think that an effort to interview and ask students who dropout of STEM degrees is essential for finding the reason that STEM students in general have low success rates (only 40%!?!) and why its even lover more URMS (only 20%!?!?!). If you know of any studies that have one this I would love to read them but in my searching I couldn't find a single one that summarize reasons for dropouts and allowed for a comparison to URMs. Without this information all of the cool new course design and inclusiveness ideas may not be addressing the core issue of this problem.

4/29 reflection- Growth mindset

2024-04-29 22:10:08 UTC

How do we foster a growth mindset? How do we show students that they are growing? Be sure to explain the idea behind a growth mindset to students otherwise they might not realize that they actually can improve and then they wont put in the work.

Growth mindset is very similar to just having a positive attitude. If you have a positive attitude towards something you will likely have a growth mindset when thinking about it.

Praise the process not intelligence. Praise students for trying hard putting in effort and willingness to try new things. Convey they growth mindset. I like they way you are communicating. I like the thought prosses you have on that. Success feels better the harder you work at at/ completing a hard task or question gives more satisfaction than an easy one. Goes back to the importance of emphasizing that we are teaching students how to learn now just a bunch of information and making sure we do emphasize this in our curriculum.

I think making these judgments about people is tricky you dont really know. So, really they way to think about it is that everyone "could" have a growth mindset and everyone "could" be gritty. That was as a teacher you can encourage these positive mindsets and no matter where people are on the scale for these things hopefully you can help them to move up the scale.