“To fill a gap in my teaching I hadn’t realized was there.” Personal Connections A fringe benefit of my CPLC involvement has been the happenstance connections I’ve made with other faculty and staff. I’ve met several interesting and talented people from diverse disciplines and far flung places. During that first session on June 4, when …
Author Archives: Michael Davidson
Authenticity
“We do not create artificial assignments for babies. There are no lectures on how to eat. They grab an actual spoon, fling some food around, and experiment until they get it in their mouths.” Eyler, Joshua. (2018). How Humans Learn. The word authenticity may turn off the more jaded academic reader. Admittedly, it carries an …
Peer Instruction: Right for Wicked Problems?
Peer Instruction is a teaching method invented in 1991 by Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard University. Mazur found that, in spite of his award-winning lectures and his students’ high test scores, the students failed to grasp the concepts he was teaching. They could crank out formulaic answers by rote, but couldn’t explain the …
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A Social Classroom
Without first building a social classroom, it will be more challenging for any of the other teaching strategies to take hold.” Eyler, Joshua. (2018). How Humans Learn. In How Humans Learn, Joshua Eyler extols social pedagogies, a concept found in Bass and Elmendorff: course designs that make the representation of knowledge to an authentic audience …
Natural Pedagogy and the Social Classroom
“Place our social natures as human beings front and center in the learning process” Eyler, Joshua. (2018). How Humans Learn. In his book How Humans Learn (2018), Joshua Eyler devotes one chapter to each of five attributes he says are key to human learning: Curiosity Sociality Emotion Authenticity Failure In a couple of previous posts, …
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The Power of Stories
“The impulse to repeatedly tell and listen to stories appears to be a lock-and-key mechanism of intergenerational information transfer.” Cozolino, L. (2013). The social neuroscience of education : Optimizing attachment and learning in the classroom (First ed., Norton books in education). New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Storytelling, easily dismissed as the domain of fantasy …
Student Evaluations: A Curious Finding
I stumbled across a provocative tidbit while reading sections fromWhy Don’t Students Like School? by cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham. “College professors typically get written student evaluations of their teaching at the end of every course… Researchers have examined these sorts of survey to figure out which professors get good ratings and why. One of the …
Asking the Right Questions
The Question Formulation Technique “Our methods often presume students can pivot effectively from an information need to information discovery. The QFT does away with that presumption.” I’ve devoted a fair amount of time to studying a classroom activity that has the potential to strengthen a soft spot in my teaching. The Question Formulation Technique (henceforth …
Classroom segregation: An extreme exercise in sociality
“Remember to walk a mile in his moccasins…We will be known forever by the tracks we leaveIn other people’s lives.” Judge Softly by Mary T. Lathrap, 1895 On April 5, 1968, third-grade teacher Jane Elliott launched a controversy that still simmers today. More on that in a minute. The subject of chapter two in How …
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Children are Curious; Students are not
“Intellectual curiosity becomes a casualty of the education and status wars.” Joshua Eyler. How Humans Learn. 2018 I mentioned psychologist Susan Engel in an earlier post. As recounted in Joshua Eyler’s How Humans Learn, Engel documents a drop-off in curiosity between kindergarten and fifth grade. Eyler points to other research that corroborates an age-related decrease …