University Teaching & Learning 5000

Course Design Tutorial

The On-line Course Design Tutorial developed by Barbara Tewksbuy and Heather Macdonald that I used in this morning’s class is available here. The specific page of the tutorial that we worked with in class is available here. Visiting this latter page would allow you to read more of the developers’ comments about the course goals we were looking at.

Writing a Philosophy of Teaching Statement

Today I came across a website devoted to the topic of Writing a Philosophy of Teaching Statement. It is a creation of the Faculty and TA Development Program at the Ohio State University and is embedded in a broader set of materials about creating and maintaining a teaching portfolio. The site contains links to a variety of teaching philosophy statements and to a guide for preparing a teaching philosophy statement that suggests several alternative ways of approaching the task. Click on the links above to go to the website or to the embedded link.

Discipline-specific articles on teaching
Last week I mentioned that I would post a list of disciplinary-based journals that publish articles on university teaching. The list I was thinking of is on page 50 of an article by Maryellen Weimer, and you can reach it by clicking on the title in the reference below. The article is dated so if you find that a particular journal listed is no longer published, please let me know. I would also appreciate hearing of any other relevant journals with which you may be familiar.

Weimer, M. (1993). The disciplinary journals on pedagogy. Change, 25(6), 44-51.

Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives

The reading for today included an item on Bloom’s Taxonomy and embedded in that piece is a link to a list of “verbs to use in assignments” similar to the list of “question cues” that I put on the screen in this morning’s class. To see the list I used in class, click here. Bernadette refers to another such list in her post on the Dialogue Forum for May 26 Response Papers. And here is yet one more that I have used for workshops on course design.

Creating a syllabus

If you are looking for some additional guidance on the construction of a syllabus, review the Readings and Exercises page for May 12. I modified it today to include an additional set of materials with advice on this topic.

Ramsden, in Chapters 4 and 5 of his book, mentions the “Approaches to Studying Questionnaire” which he and others employ to assess the use of deep and surface approaches to learning and the conditions that promote each. If you are interested in seeing the questions themselves, you will find a short form of the questionnaire in the Appendix to this article:

Richardson, J. T. E. (1990). Reliability and replicabiity of the Approaches to Studying Questionnaire. Studies in Higher Education, 15, 155-168.

Welcome again

Grade Definitions

I hope to expand this post later, but I wanted to put up a link to York’s grade definitions before I forgot about it. If there are other things mentioned in this morning’s class that you would like to have posted, either comment here or send me an email.

Thanks to Yan for giving me a fix for the link to the film I’ve asked you to watch for Wednesday, and my apologies for taking most of the day to get around to doing the fix. The link on the Reading and Exercises page should work now or you can just click the following title to view Teaching Teaching and Understanding Understanding.

ron

Teaching Philosophies and more

Yesterday I mentioned that graduate students completing the CST’s Teaching Practicum submit portfolios to the CST containing teaching philosophy statements and that these might be available there. I asked Stephanie Marston from the CST and she confirmed that anyone in the class is welcome to come in and look over the dossiers that have been completed; the only restriction is that they can not be removed from the Centre. You can contact Stephanie by e-mail at smarston@yorku.ca, by phone at (416) 736-2100, x22117, or in person in 1050 TEL.

I also mentioned yesterday that I would post a link to the full “Seven Principles” article by Chickering and Gamson. I have decided to ask you to read the article for Monday’s class, so a link is posted on the May 12 page; but you could also go straight to it from here. If you are interested in the use of technology in teaching you might enjoy a followup article by Chickering and Ehrmann on how various technologies can be used as a “lever” in implementing the seven principles.

The following is the reference for one of Nevitt Sanford’s book’s on higher education:

Sanford, N. (Ed.) (1962). The American College: A psychological and social interpretation of the higher learning. New York: Wiley. (online version available here)

Sanford is the person I mentioned in conjunction with the notion of support and challenge Read More »

Links for May 7 class

This morning I read from the Epilogue of Ken Bain’s book, What the Best College Teachers Do. You can listen to a recording (12 mins.) of the full Epilogue by clicking here. The book is available at Scott Library (LB 2331 B34 2004) The reference is as follows:

Bain, K. (2004). What the best college teachers do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

The talkers and listeners exercise that we did is described in a post on the Tomorrow’s Professor Mailing List. You can read it by clicking here.

I mentioned that in the Centre for Academic Writing and in a few courses I have used a form that helps to guide peer feedback on writing in a useful direction. You can find a copy of that form here. The questions on this form are very generic, but I think they are good ones for building a dialogue that can take both the writer and the peer deeper into the ideas. If you were teaching writing per se, you might want a peer feedback form that was more specific to the way in which the ideas are expressed, such as the one here.

Ramsden Text

Jason wrote to tell me that the York Bookstore seems to have ordered a very limited number of copies of the Ramsden text and that they are now sold out. I suggest that if you don’t have the book, then ordering a copy online through Chapters or Amazon is probably your best bet. A few weeks ago at least one person received their copy in the mail less than a week after ordering from Chapters. One thing you can do now is go to Google Books and read their preview of the Ramsden book. It provides most of the first three chapters, though it skips every third or fourth page; but you will be able to at least get the gist of his arguments. I will make some photocopies of the missing pages for Wednesday and figure out some rearrangement of materials to give people a chance to get their copies before moving on in the book. You can get to the Google Books search page by clicking here. Once there, enter “Paul Ramsden” and then choose our book, Learning to Teach in Higher Education, from those that come up. It was the first one in the list when I tried it. If you have other suggestions, don’t hesitate to send them to me or post here as a comment.

Now that there is more than one post on the website, I should mention that the way you scroll through them is by clicking on the light gray area to the side of the post. Clicking on the right side takes you back to earlier posts; the left side will take you forward if you are reading something other than the most recent post.

Welcome

Welcome to the website for UTAL 5000. I hope that you will find everything that you need for the course here. The Course Outline is available by clicking on that title under “Pages” below. I have also posted some weblinks that we will use in the course. As the course proceeds I will use this space to post additional links, all those ideas that only come to me after class is over, and thoughts about relevant topics that occur to me between classes. It is possible for you to comment on the posts that appear here, though to do so you first have to register on the blog. You do that clicking on “Register” in the “Meta” section below and following the instructions. The first time a person comments, I have to approve the comment; but once that is done any subsequent comments that the same person posts will appear on the site immediately. There is no need to register on the blog or to log in unless you intend to post a comment.

The Ramsden textbook listed in the course outline is available at the York Bookstore. You will find it about midway down Aisle 8 on a bottom shelf at the end of the Education courses. The label on the shelf is UTAL 5000.

More soon. See you on Monday morning in 1005 TEL!

Ron