Teaching Award Winners Teaching Philosophies Parts 1 and 2 with Hamzeh Roumani (2009 3M National Teaching Fellowship winner; FSE/Computer Science)
Hamzeh Roumani (2009 3M National Teaching Fellowship winner; FSE/Computer Science)
- Date: Friday, October 30, 2009
- Time: 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
- Location: 1014 TEL
Practicum Category: Course Design or Philosophy and Goals of Higher Learning
Dr. Roumani will be combining parts 1 and 2
Part 1:
If You Want To Teach Me How to Drive, Don't Open the Hood: An Abstraction-Based Approach to Content Organization in Science Curricula
Designing a course or a sequence of courses within a program requires adopting a strategy for material organization. The options include relying on the logical dependencies of topics; going from the familiar to the abstract; and following the historical chronology. These strategies lead to completely different orderings of the topics and it is not obvious, a priori, which is most conducive to learning. In this seminar we introduce an abstraction-based strategy that relies on the what-how paradigm of the scientific method. We argue that it will lead to deep learning and promote both critical and analytical thinking. We show examples of how it can be implemented and report on our experience using it.
Part 2:
Don't teach me the how; help me discover it: Teaching through Guided Explorations
Assessment in Science and Engineering courses is based largely on problem solving. Lectures in these courses, however, are often content based and do not directly nurture the application of knowledge or the synthesis of new approaches. What if we turned this around and used problem solving as a vehicle for teaching? In this seminar we present a pedagogy based on a carefully-designed sequence of guided explorations. We provide guidelines for designing such a sequence so that the choreography of concept discovery can lead to deep learning. We argue that this pedagogy enables students to make connections and take ownership of what they learn.
