|
5.
Be consistent and
persistent.
Do not give up before you and your students
have a chance to get used to this new style of learning and
teaching and to see the benefits it can have in your class.
Some professors have found that it helps to introduce it
slowly into the classroom routine and to precede it with a
brief discussion of the research that lays out some of the
benefits. Look for research that shows how it has improved
grades and post college success in industry. Some of our
faculty and expert contributors found that trying to bring
it in too quickly and too often can be a disincentive to
both instructor and students.
Faculty/Expert Commentaries:
P.K. Imbrie
“…. the
hardest part is being not afraid to try something different
and to try it more than one time, because the first time you
do everything, it never works the way you think it's going
to. Either the students don't engage correctly or it takes
a whole lot longer to do the exercise, so your classroom
planning is way different.
“I moved
from a classroom where I thought I knew what everybody was
going to struggle with to one where, when I made it be [a]
more active, cooperative classroom, I actually listened to
what they struggled with, and then we concentrated the class
on that.
“[So,
now,] one, I'm making students more aware of why we're doing
an active, cooperative classroom. Two, I'm trying to lay
out their expectations, or I'm trying to get them to realize
that their expectations and my expectations don't
necessarily coincide; and that they have to move from what
they expect, to what I expect, if they want to be
successful. Making students aware of that expectation, I
think, is really important, especially in the active,
cooperative classroom, because it is so different than what
they are traditionally used to.
“As a
specific example, I use
Bloom's
Taxonomy ,
and I point out the lowest level. That level is knowledge:
it's memorized facts. . . . I put up a slide, and it says,
"How many of you will be successful if you attain this level
of learning?” They don't know where I'm going with this,
and ninety-nine percent of them will say, "That will get me
an “A” or “B,” if I can do that in class.” And then I
unfold, saying that this is the lowest level of learning
that there is, and that in this class you have to be able to
get up to whatever the higher level is.
“I think
it's the expectations that we fall short of, as faculty
members—what we expect of our students versus what they
expect a classroom environment to be. "If I do all my work,
and I do it all perfectly, I deserve an ‘A.’” And you're
saying, "No. If you haven't learned how to work with other
people, then you're not going to do well.” Course
objectives need to include being an effective member of a
technical team. . . . If everybody in the university did
it that way, then you wouldn't have to do that. But
because, generally, you're the only one that's doing it, and
you're doing something different than what they've done
before, you have to get more buy-in from them.”
Darwyn Linder
“Well,
I’m a big believer in doing everything out front, and not
necessarily hiding my purpose or intentions from the
students. And I think treating them as adults and letting
them in on what’s going on is very important. It builds
trust between the instructor and the class. I often
encounter students who are resentful about working in groups
because of the experiences they’ve had in what you [Ledlow]
and others have called “old-style” group work, where you
[teachers] assign a paper to a team of students and give
them no way of actually accomplishing that task other than
[telling them that] somehow they’re supposed to figure it
out. So I explain to students who are reluctant that
cooperative learning is really different than group work;
and we try to construct groups that are effective, that work
together well, and that really produce, and that the
learning then is enhanced for everybody. Usually they’re
willing to give it a try, and if we have some early
successes and people begin to enjoy the process, then that
phase [of reluctance] goes away after awhile.”
Russ Pimmel
“There’s an
article by
[Richard]
Felder
that
talks about the improvements he observed. So I show them a
little of that data about how grades have gone up, how
attitudes improved, and so on. I don’t spend a lot of time
on that—five to ten minutes. I also talk about the
importance of teaming and show a few things—employers’ lists
of skills that we look for when we interview, skills that we
use when we evaluate employees. . . . Teaming is always
very high on that . . . so I use that for an argument. I
even use the ABET [Accreditation
Board for Engineering and Technology
guidelines as an argument sometimes to
justify
it.”
Ron Roedel
“[With] the
freshmen, who may not know about cooperative learning, I do
need to spend more time describing why we do carry out
cooperative learning rather than have a traditional
lecture. I try to explain to them that the process of
learning and working in teams is analogous to how they will
probably find themselves working in the workplace when they
leave the university. Since they are engineering students,
most will go on to work for engineering firms—like Motorola
or Honeywell—and there teamwork is the norm. It is
necessary to learn how to become part of the team, because
the projects that one works on outside the university are
far too complicated for any one individual to accomplish.
The training that they get through team learning will apply
immediately to the teamwork that [they] will have to do in
industry, but it also has additional pedagogical benefits,
too. They will become better learners. . . .”
Susan
Urban
“You’ve
got to look at your own course—the material that you’re
teaching—and you have to decide, “How does it make sense to
fit these activities into what I’m personally doing?” and
then just begin to work it in. Every semester, work in some
cooperative learning activity. As you do it once, you learn
. . . different ways of doing things, better ways of doing
things. You begin to see other ways that you can work
active learning activities into the classroom, but you just
have to give it a try.”
Cesar Malave
“. . . The advice that we give people now is to start
slow. In the Coalition, we changed everything, because we
had a grant, and we had to do . . . the active learning, the
active collaborative learning, the teaming, the use of
technology, all at once. And one of the things that we lost
was the assessment—we could never assess, (the students were
getting better why?) because we were doing five different
things at the same time. And it’s overwhelming.”
Back |
