TBers, 

The posting below looks at common teaching mistakes we need to avoid.  it is
by Richard M. Felder, North Carolina State University and Rebecca Brent,
Education Designs, Inc. See also Felder's: RESOURCES IN SCIENCE AND
ENGINEERING EDUCATION at:
http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/

Sadly, I've already made a bunch of these and the semester is just a few
days old!!! 

Looking forward to seeing you this THURSDAY, at 9 AM at the Green Toad
Bookstore on Main St. in Oneonta for our first Teaching Breakfast meeting.

Jim G. 

*********

   The Ten Worst Teaching Mistakes

Like most faculty members, we began our academic careers with zero prior
instruction on college teaching and quickly made almost every possible
blunder. We've also been peer reviewers and mentors to colleagues, and that
experience on top of our own early stumbling has given us a good sense of
the most common mistakes college teachers make. In this column and one to
follow we present our top ten list, in roughly increasing order of badness.
Doing some of the things on the list may occasionally be justified, so we're
not telling you to avoid all of them at all costs. We are suggesting that
you avoid making a habit of any of them.

Mistake #10. When you ask a question in class, immediately call for
volunteers.

You know what happens when you do that.  Most of the students avoid eye
contact, and either you get a response from one of the two or three who
always volunteer or you answer your own question. Few students even bother
to think about the question, since they know that eventually someone else
will provide the answer.

We have a suggestion for a better way to handle questioning, but it's the
same one we'll have for Mistake #9 so let's hold off on it for a moment.

Mistake #9. Call on students cold.

You stop in mid-lecture and point your finger abruptly: "Joe, what's the
next step?"  Some students are comfortable under that kind of pressure, but
many could have trouble thinking of their own name. If you frequently call
on students without giving them time to think ("cold-calling"), the ones who
are intimidated by it won't be following your lecture as much as praying
that you don't land on them. Even worse, as soon as you call on someone, the
others breathe a sigh of relief and stop thinking.

A better approach to questioning in class is active learning.1 Ask the
question and give the students a short time to come up with an answer,
working either individually or in small groups. Stop them when the time is
up and call on a few to report what they came up with. Then, if you haven't
gotten the complete response you're looking for, call for volunteers. The
students will have time to think about the question, and-unlike what happens
when you always jump directly to volunteers (Mistake #10)-most will try to
come up with a response because they don't want to look bad if you call on
them. With active learning you'll also avoid the intimidation of
cold-calling (Mistake #9) and you'll get more and better answers to your
questions. Most importantly, real learning will take place in class,
something that doesn't happen much in traditional lectures.2

Mistake #8. Turn classes into PowerPoint shows.

It has become common for instructors to put their lecture notes into
PowerPoint and to spend their class time mainly droning through the slides.
Classes like that are generally a waste of time for everyone.3 If the
students don't have paper copies of the slides, there's no way they can keep
up. If they have the copies, they can read the slides faster than the
instructor can lecture through them, the classes are exercises in boredom,
the students have little incentive to show up, and many don't.

Turning classes into extended slide shows is a specific example of:

Mistake #7. Fail to provide variety in instruction.

Nonstop lecturing produces very little learning,2 but if good instructors
never lectured they could not motivate students by occasionally sharing
their experience and wisdom. Pure PowerPoint shows are ineffective, but so
are lectures with no visual content-schematics, diagrams, animations,
photos, video clips, etc.-for which PowerPoint is ideal. Individual student
assignments alone would not teach students the critical skills of teamwork,
leadership, and conflict management they will need to succeed as
professionals, but team assignments alone would not promote the equally
important trait of independent learning. Effective instruction mixes things
up: boardwork, multimedia, storytelling, discussion, activities, individual
assignments, and group work (being careful to avoid Mistake #6). The more
variety you build in, the more effective the class is likely to be.

Mistake #6. Have students work in groups with no individual accountability.

All students and instructors who have ever been involved with group work
know the potential downside. One or two students do the work, the others
coast along understanding little of what their more responsible teammates
did, everyone gets the same grade, resentments and conflicts build, and the
students learn nothing about high-performance teamwork and how to achieve
it.

The way to make group work work is cooperative learning, an exhaustively
researched instructional method that effectively promotes development of
both cognitive and interpersonal skills. One of the defining features of
this method is individual accountability-holding each team member
accountable for the entire project and not just the part that he or she may
have focused on. References on cooperative learning offer suggestions for
achieving individual accountability, including giving individual exams
covering the full range of knowledge and skills required to complete the
project and assigning individual grades based in part on how well the
students met their responsibilities to their team.4,5

Mistake #5. Fail to establish relevance.

Students learn best when they clearly perceive the relevance of course
content to their interests and career goals. The "trust me" approach to
education ("You may have no idea now why you need to know this stuff but
trust me, in a few years you'll see how important it is!") doesn't inspire
students with a burning desire to learn, and those who do learn tend to be
motivated only by grades.

To provide better motivation, begin the course by describing how the content
relates to important technological and social problems and to whatever you
know of the students' experience, interests, and career goals, and do the
same thing when you introduce each new topic. (If there are no such
connections, why is the course being taught?) Consider applying inductive
methods such as guided inquiry and problem-based learning, which use
real-world problems to provide context for all course material.6 You can
anticipate some student resistance to those methods, since they force
students to take unaccustomed responsibility for their own learning, but
there are effective ways to defuse resistance, 7; and the methods lead to
enough additional learning to justify whatever additional effort it may take
to implement them.

Mistake #4. Give tests that are too long.

Engineering professors routinely give exams that are too long for most of
their students. The exams may include problems that involve a lot of
time-consuming mathematical analysis and/or calculations, or problems with
unfamiliar twists that may take a long time to figure out, or just too many
problems. The few students who work fast enough to finish may make careless
mistakes but can still do well thanks to partial credit, while those who
never get to some problems or who can't quickly figure out the tricks get
failing grades. After several such experiences, many students switch to
other curricula, one factor among several that cause engineering enrollments
to decrease by 40% or more in the first two years of the curriculum. When
concerns are raised about the impact of this attrition on the engineering
pipeline, the instructors argue that the dropouts are all incompetent or
lazy and unqualified to be engineers.

The instructors are wrong. Studies that have attempted to correlate grades
of graduates with subsequent career success (as measured by promotions,
salary increases, and employer evaluations) have found that the correlations
are negligible 8; students who drop out of engineering have the same
academic profile as those who stay 9; and no one has ever demonstrated that
students who can solve a quantitative problem in 20 minutes will do any
better as engineers than students who need 35 minutes. In fact, students who
are careful and methodical but slow may be better engineers than students
who are quick but careless. Consider which type you would rather have
designing the bridges you drive across or the planes you fly in.

If you want to evaluate your students' potential to be successful
professionals, test their mastery of the knowledge and skills you are
teaching, not their problem-solving speed. After you make up a test and
think it's perfect, take it and time yourself, and make sure you give the
students at least three times longer to take it than you needed (since you
made it up, you don't have to stop and think about it)-and if a test is
particularly challenging or involves a lot of derivations or calculations,
the ratio should be four or five to one for the test to be fair.10

Mistake #3: Get stuck in a rut

Some instructors teach a course two or three times, feel satisfied with
their lecture notes and PowerPoint slides and assignments, and don't change
a thing for the rest of their careers except maybe to update a couple of
references. Such courses often become mechanical for the instructors, boring
for the students, and after a while, hopelessly antiquated.

Things are always happening that provide incentives and opportunities for
improving courses. New developments in course subject areas are presented in
research journals; changes in the global economy call on programs to equip
their graduates with new skills; improved teaching techniques are described
in conference presentations and papers; and new instructional resources are
made available in digital libraries such as SMETE (www.smete.org), Merlot
(www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm), and the MIT Open Courseware site
(http://ocw.mit.edu).

This is not to say that you have to make major revisions in your course
every time you give it-you probably don't have time to do that, and there's
no reason to. Rather, just keep your eyes open for possible improvements you
might make in the time available to you. Go to some education sessions at
professional conferences; read articles in educational journals in your
discipline; visit one or two of those digital libraries to see what
tutorials, demonstrations, and simulations they've got for your course; and
commit to making one or two changes in the course whenever you teach it. If
you do that, the course won't get stale, and neither will you.

Mistake #2. Teach without clear learning objectives

The traditional approach to teaching is to design lectures and assignments
that cover topics listed in the syllabus, give exams on those topics, and
move on. The first time most instructors think seriously about what they
want students to do with the course material is when they write the exams,
by which time it may be too late to provide sufficient practice in the
skills required to solve the exam problems. It is pointless-and arguably
unethical-to test students on skills you haven't really taught.

A key to making courses coherent and tests fair is to write learning
objectives-explicit statements of what students should be able to do if they
have learned what the instructor wants them to learn-and to use the
objectives as the basis for designing lessons, assignments, and exams.11 The
objectives should all specify observable actions (e.g., define, explain,
calculate, solve, model, critique, and design), avoiding vague and
unobservable terms like know, learn, understand, and appreciate. Besides
using the objectives to design your instruction, consider sharing them with
the students as study guides for exams. The clearer you are about your
expectations (especially high-level ones that involve deep analysis and
conceptual understanding, critical thinking, and creative thinking), the
more likely the students will be to meet them, and nothing clarifies
expectations like good learning objectives.

Mistake #1. Disrespect students.

How much students learn in a course depends to a great extent on the
instructor's attitude. Two different instructors could teach the same
material to the same group of students using the same methods, give
identical exams, and get dramatically different results. Under one teacher,
the students might get good grades and give high ratings to the course and
instructor; under the other teacher, the grades could be low, the ratings
could be abysmal, and if the course is a gateway to the curriculum, many of
the students might not be there next semester. The difference between the
students' performance in the two classes could easily stem from the
instructors' attitudes. If Instructor A conveys respect for the students and
a sense that he/she cares about their learning and Instructor B appears
indifferent and/or disrespectful, the differences in exam grades and ratings
should come as no surprise.

Even if you genuinely respect and care about your students, you can
unintentionally give them the opposite sense. Here are several ways to do
it: (1) Make sarcastic remarks in class about their skills, intelligence,
and work ethics; (2) disparage their questions or their responses to your
questions; (3) give the impression that you are in front of them because
it's your job, not because you like the subject and enjoy teaching it; (4)
frequently come to class unprepared, run overtime, and cancel classes; (5)
don't show up for office hours, or show up but act annoyed when students
come in with questions. If you've slipped into any of those practices, try
to drop them. If you give students a sense that you don't respect them, the
class will probably be a bad experience for everyone no matter what else you
do, while if you clearly convey respect and caring, it will cover a
multitude of pedagogical sins you might commit.

References

1. R.M. Felder and R. Brent, "Learning by Doing," Chem. Engr. Education,
37(4), 282-283 (2003), <www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Columns/Active.pdf>.
2. M. Prince, "Does Active Learning Work? A Review of the Research," J.
Engr. Education, 93(3), 223-231 (2004),
<www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Papers/Prince_AL.pdf>.
3. R.M. Felder and R. Brent, "Death by PowerPoint," Chem. Engr. Education,
39(1), 28-29 (2005), <www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Columns/PowerPoint.pdf>.
4. R.M. Felder and R. Brent, "Cooperative Learning," in P.A. Mabrouk, ed.,
Active Learning: Models from the Analytical Sciences, ACS Symposium Series
970, Chapter 4. Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 2007,
<www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Papers/CLChapter.pdf>.
5. CATME (Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness),
<www.catme.org>.
6. M.J. Prince and R.M. Felder, "Inductive Teaching and Learning Methods:
Definitions, Comparisons, and Research Bases," J. Engr. Education, 95(2),
123-138 (2006), <www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Papers/InductiveTeaching.pdf>.
7. R.M. Felder, "Sermons for Grumpy Campers," Chem. Engr. Education, 41(3),
183-184 (2007), <www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Columns/Sermons.pdf>.
8. P.A. Cohen, "College Grades and Adult Achievement: A Research Synthesis,"
Res. in Higher Ed., 20(3), 281-293 (1984); G.E. Samson, M.E. Graue, T.
Weinstein, & H.J. Walberg, "Academic and Occupational Performance: A
Quantitative Synthesis," Am. Educ. Res. Journal, 2
21(2), 311-321 (1984).
9. E. Seymour & N.M. Hewitt, Talking about Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave
the Sciences, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.
10. R.M. Felder, "Designing Tests to Maximize Learning," J. Prof. Issues in
Engr. Education and Practice, 128(1), 1-3 (2002).
<http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Papers/TestingTips.htm>.
11. R.M. Felder & R. Brent, "Objectively Speaking," Chem. Engr. Education,
31(3), 178-179 (1997),
<http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Columns/Objectives.html>.