FC_Publishing_Your_Work_The_Editor’s_Perspective_04_26_13_W

The workshop will consider how we respond to reviewer comments after submitting an article for publication. Understanding the editor’s point of view can help u successfully navigate this stage of the publication process.

Profs. Richard Hanley, editor of the Journal of Urban Technology, and Aaron Barlow, faculty editor for Academe http://www.aaup.org/reports-and-publications/academe, will lead a panel discussion on perspectives of the editor. They will describe strategies for submitting articles, responding to reviewer comments, and share some of their experiences and insights. Hope that you can attend.

If you can participate please RSVP to facultycommons@citytech.cuny.edu.

Apologies for not being able to make this last week’s gathering, but I wanted to offer some thoughts concerning Dr. McGuire’s talk. I appreciated the emphasis that she put on reflective practices. It’s something that all students can use to get better control and personal investment in their own learning.

One thing that I have not done that she woke me up to was the idea of group reflective practices. Typically, when students work in groups and complete collaborative assignments, I have them evaluate themselves after the assignment, and, if the grade is tied to the effort of the group, I have them evaluate the effort of their group mates. I ask them, in their evaluation form, if they believe that their peers contributed an equal amount of effort to the overall task, and if they feel each member of the group deserves equal credit. Typically, students respond by saying that everyone should receive the same grade. Occasionally, they can be self critical and say that other members deserve more credit. This assessment practice typically works fine and it does have students assess and evaluate their own contributions. What they don’t do, however, is reflect on their work together as a group, and after listening to this gem from Professor McGuire, why shouldn’t they? I really like this idea and plan to use it with my collaborative assignments.

I just came across this set of excellent bibliographies on Teaching and Learning and  hope that the scope of the resources will be valuable to you. If you do use any of the sources please share what you learned with us. We will all benefit when we collaborate!

http://www.nyu.edu/cte/Library.html

I would agree with the previous comments posted about Dr. McGuire’s presentation last week. What made an impression on me was her emphasis on creating an environment in the classroom that fosters self-confidence in students. She talked about giving students opportunities to do well and most importantly acknowledging their accomplishments, especially students that struggle with the subject matter. I could not agree more. Over the course of a semester there is a significant amount of information presented in the limited time-frame of a class. This can be isolating to students who take longer to process information and struggle to keep up. For such students receiving praise from an instructor can go a long way to boost the ego – something I believe to be an essential ingredient in the leaning process.

Dr McGuire had plenty of good things to say about increasing our students’ motivation, but the notion of teaching our students Bloom’s Taxonomy had the greatest impact on me. I don’t think that Dr. McGuire was literally suggesting that we take a day of class to teach Bloom’s to our students, rather that we take advantage of “teachable moments” to enlighten our students and challenge them to analyze their learning process. I found myself, in the week following the seminar, pointing out to students where they were stuck at the memorizing stage of Bloom’s, and challenging them to think about how they might develop understanding. It also just so happened to be a week where my lecture topics were about applications and I found myself similarly trying to ask questions that would push my students into analysis and evaluation.

Of course, it is quite understandable that our first-year students come to us stuck in the first (maybe second) level of Bloom’s. With the current nearly exclusive focus on standardized exams, the concept of learning has been twisted into this grotesque notion that the purpose of education is to be able to vomit facts onto a scantron. Convincing our students otherwise is one of our greatest and most important challenges, and training our students to think about their learning process is the key.

Parts of Dr. McGuire’s presentation really resonated with me. The students I have in the last course prior to graduation and taking the licensing examination often feel defeated, neglected, and just plain fried. Some don’t feel they can perform any better than a “C,” and indeed, aspire to barely pass. It doesn’t take all that much to make them feel better about themselves as students, and as individuals. Acknowledging their contributions to the classroom and clinical settings, becoming excited when they try to successfully put the pieces together, and promoting that they have worked hard to occupy the seat in class, all go a long way in making a positive difference in how students see themselves as well as the educational process. As Dr. McGuire emphasized, many students really do not know the difference between learning and studying. Having discovered that to be true long ago, I always start the first day of the semester discussing and illustrating learning, studying, reading, teaching, and Bloom’s Taxonomy. We discuss the autonomy, accountability, responsibility, and persistent discovery inherent in the educational process. These students need to appropriately assess how people learn, because they need to teach people all facets of health, and then evaluate the outcomes of their efforts. So, much of the presentations validated why we do what we do as educators, as well as what we call it, so we can properly name it. Before we can change things, we must give it a name. Dr. McGuire helped to do that.

Dr. McGuire had a very enlightening presentation.  Much of the presentation did not directly relate to the students and materials that I teach, except for her part on enhancing involvement and creating a positive approach in the classroom.  With over a decade of teaching in the Architectural Technology department, I have tried a variety of projects and in classroom activities to engage the students into the course.

One of the activities I have added to my Design V studio course happens during the residential project, where the students are designing a single family house. The students are responsible for designing a house for a family, including all the interior and exterior material and furnishings.  The first semester I taught this project the students were excited to design a house, and did the work as required.  The second semester I let the students pick out of a hat their family – different occupations, number and sex of children, pets, extended family members…  The students embraced their families, giving them names, hobbies, images.  They wrote a description of their family and included images of how they live and what their needs are in their new house.  They brought them to life. They did not design houses, they designed homes.

Dr. McGuire’s talk was very informative and inspirational. The single biggest take-away for me was how to help our students with their reading. Material I teach in both my classes (anatomy and pharmacology) is not the easiest reading, and its is not enough to read superficially to sort of ‘get the idea’. It requires deep concentration, analyzing of the material, and, unfortunately, memorization of new terminology, each time. A simple suggestion she shared, to read each paragraph and try to put what is written in your own words, seems to offer the solution to prevent the mind from wandering away from the subject, to keep the attention, and to also decipher complex scientific texts. I actually tried this method myself and it worked for me. I will talk to my students about this type of slow, attentive reading and its benefits, and I hope it will be a very helpful strategy for them. This can be especially beneficial to our ESL students, who often do exactly that – read and translate the material, paragraph by paragraph – but instead of translating it in their own native language (which is absolutely not helpful) – they should ‘translate’ the text in a simpler, more manageable English.

Many of us also reflected on her suggestion to show the students Bloom’s Taxonomy and discuss with the students what level of learning is expected, and how our tests focus on the different types of learning. I think this is very helpful and I will do it with my new groups in the upcoming courses.