The Scholarship of Teaching: What's the Problem?

My friends Laura DeLong Frost and Don Slater and I caught up on research ideas while eating a high-carb lunch of sandwiches, pasta, potato chips, and apple pie with buttery flaky crust. By the time our keynote speaker began, we were starting to feel the effects and I just wanted to nap. So, if I missed anything critical, you will know why.

Randy Bass wrote The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: What’s the Problem? back in 1999. He mentioned from that artilcle, “the culmination of nearly a decade of discussion that began with the 1990 publication of Scholarship Reconsidered (Boyer), and then refined later in Scholarship Reassessed (Glassick, Huber, Maeroff, 1997)” and drew attention to the theme that we have “ideas worth spreading,” playing a clip from TED talks by Sir Ken Robinson. This 18-minute video provides a perspective on the purpose of education.

Randy emphasized the need for communal work in the intersection of teaching, learning, and technology, and the need for the visible knowledge of scholarship of the teaching and learning process, referencing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons, The Visible Knowledge Project, and abundant other resources available at the Gallery of Teaching & Learning.

Randy reminded us of the original value of the educational system, designed to meet the needs of industrialization, and how often students have been benignly told to take courses that will lead to a job, as “you’ll never get a job doing that” in which “that” represents what the student was really good at doing and enjoyed. He thinks our education system has “mined our minds” for a particular academic commodity, and that the paradigm shift from “providing instruction” to “producing learning” back in 1995, has made progress. The concern by both Robinson and Bass is the loss of creativity.

Barr and Tagg in their 1995 publication of From Teaching to Learning – A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education sparked a movement. Yet, looking at one example of progress since then, he pointed out that the “high impact activities” of NSSSE include activities such as internships and extra-curricular activities, leading him to wonder, “So, what are the low-impact activities?” "Would those be our courses?!" Students are learning even if we are not teaching. What progress have we really made?

The Carnegie Foundation also provides resources at Strengthening Pre-Collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC). From this project, Randy played a clip from The Think Aloud project to illustrate the difficulty and complexity of the learning process even for basic skills (select “Think Aloud with Jay’s Commentary” to view the clip). Other sample cases on basic skills are available at Windows for Learning: Resources for Basic Skills Education.

Randy elaborated on the meaning of The Middle of Open Spaces: Generating Knowledge and Learning through Multiple Layers of Open Teaching Communities by Bass and Bernstein (or see the chapter among a list of related articles). These “middle spaces” between practice and published literature are “informal and not tied to high stakes.” In addition to the Visible Knowledge Project, Randy encouraged use of the KEEP Toolkit available for developing Web sites with visually appealing representations.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has valuable resources to support scholarly teaching and the development of scholarship at CASTL Higher Education. Another resource is Collaboration across Disciplines on a Digital Gallery. As an example of collaborative inquiry, Randy referenced the “Lesson Study Project” at the University of Wisconsin, La Cross (select Makoto video, if interested in viewing the interview about lesson study research) and focused on Lesson Study: An Experience in Collaborative Inquiry.

Randy asked “How would you change your study to ask your question collaboratively?” and “Who else is asking some version of the same question?” And, he directed us to the Faculty Inquiry Toolkit.

He next drew attention to The Gap between Ability and Sustainability by Hern who had noted “The gap between students' ability to perform and the performance they actually sustain over the semester. Chronic condition in community colleges whereby students earn passing grades on individual assignments then withdraw or fail class.”

He mentioned digital stories as an emerging “signature pedagogy” of new ways of communicating as in multimedia authoring such as student posters and digital stories of student learning like those at gnovis journal (the example shown at the keynote was of a reflection on the role of makeup in a coed’s daily routines).

Randy emphasizied that we must deal not with just the “how’s” and “what’s” but the “why’s” of what we do. And, we need to move from the “knowledgeable” to “knowledge-able,” including new models of assessment such as those described by Wesch in From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments.

Keynote speaker: Randy Bass, Georgetown University

The Power of Course Design

Goodson and Ahn reviewed the threads of design elements that make a variety of support technologies effective for learning, including instructional television, audio, computer applications, and particularly online learning. Russell after a review of over 355 studies about online vs. classroom, concluded that the power was in the design. Recent research suggests the same (Zhao, Let, Yan, & Tan, 2005) where advantages of online seemed due to differences in design, not in technology. Fink's recent work (2007) also shows the power of design in several studies that produced improved learning through a design process that aligns goals with activities and assessments and feedback for "significant learning" outcomes.



In this session, the case study of the design of an aesthetics course was analyzed to show the progression of decisions and the evolving architecture for the course content, the learning activities (including quizzes), and the assessments. The first stage was the question of what constitutes significant learning? The former course design focused on fashion for body types in restrictive stereotypes; the new course design focused on authentic design processes that lead to fashion design (not just choosing fashion), beginning with sources of inspiration and leading to analysis of fashion elements such as line, balance, rhythm, complexity, and color. In this process of deciding on "significant learning," the human dimension was deepened, and a sense of caring was embedded in the images and language structure of the course.

Shifting to meaningful "significant learning" was beginning with the "why" of what we teach. This then triggered decisions about the course goals, leading to the major modules in the course. Quizzes, discussions, and assessments were designed to match each other and required responses from students that often did not have a "yes" or "no" or distinctively correct answer, but required the application of knowledge and principles.

Feedback was staged to allow students to take the quizzes with automated feedback, in the form of correct answers for multiple choice questions, and in the form of "Did you cover...? If not, you may need to..." for more "open" questions.

Discussion questions asked for examples of concepts and reasoning; the process was to allow discussion without response from the instructor until near the end of the week, who would then summarize the main ideas from the discussion. The instructor also would intervene if a concept was not being addressed correctly so that students would not go down a dead end.

In this session, the group reviewed several module structures to follow the design and architecture of the "information and question pages" and they listed and viewed a Camtasia component of instruction, noting the explicit character of the steps and the use of audio to give directions.

Goodson and Ahn returned to the simplicity of the concepts of design, and the power they possess in transforming the learning - first, determining what is significant learning, then aligning all components of the course with this decision.

Results in this case study as compared with the older edition of the course included: significant learning and insights expressed by students in discussions about "the aesthetics of fashion design" rather than "body type," a "world of fashion" rather than restricted stereotypes or parochial fashions, authentic images inclusive of multiple cultures and both male and female gender rather than females only, a larger distribution of higher grades, and no failures.

Presenters: Ludwika A. Goodson, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, InSook Ahn, Georgia Southern University