It was a pleasant surprise to listen to Dr. McGuire’s presentation last week. For quite some time, I have been thinking about how to best “motivate” my students, and what is the most efficient way to enhance their learning. It just struck me that students may not know the various strategies for different learning, and led me to re-think about learning improvement. I think this goes well with our college’s movement towards gen ed as well. We talk about students’ learning skills and outcomes, but have we really thought about “how” to improve the learning outcomes?

This week, I shared Bloom’s taxonomy with my students, and found out that students’ expectations of learning were somewhat different than my own. My students and I had a good discussion on the terms on the taxonomy and I found out that how students define the term on the taxonomy was in fact the definition for another term on the taxonomy. We often take it for granted and make an assumption that our students know the terms used in assessment, but my discussion with students showed otherwise.

Dr. McGuire’s presentation was an eye-opening experience for me, and I will integrate some of the strategies to my future teaching.

Many of the workshops this semester are quite inspiring, especially this past week’s presentation by Dr. McGuire from LSU. Her foundational learning strategies can have a profound impact on struggling students, turning likely failure into potential success.

Earlier in the semester we had some debates in our seminars about the range of students we have in our classrooms and the inevitability for some of failure in an academic environment. Dr. McGuire challenges this inevitability, pointing instead to the underlying mechanics of the students’ approach to their academic work. Faculty take it for granted that students come to our classrooms with obvious academic skills and understanding how to apply the skills. When we see them struggle, our assumption is usually that a lack of effort or discipline is the primary cause. I am as guilty of this assumption as anyone. Dr. McGuire shows us, however, that we cannot make these assumptions. Instead, we must recognize the importance of teaching our students the underlying skills and learning strategies that can lead to clear improvement.

I was most struck by the now obvious power of talking to students about their own understanding of levels of learning, especially by presenting Bloom’s Taxonomy. Why should we keep our intensive discussions of learning process to ourselves? Along the long road of our students’ education, how many of their teachers shared the very pedagogical thinking/body of work that guides so many of the activities in the classroom? College is certainly a good place to lift the veil and share openly our pedagogical thinking to our students.

It was very interesting that the assigned reading for the day was also about student motivation and its effect on learning. Listening to Dr. McGuire basically reinforced all those ideas. I have often times thought about how best to motivate my students in a General Biology class and the best I could do was to tell them to work harder in order to get better results. It was a revelation to me that there are these tested and highly effective strategies that can be used in a class room to such good effect. I am certainly going to use some of these methods including methods to build student confidence early in the semester, use strategies in the class to get them involved early, help them learn how to take good class notes etc. After attending the talk, I realized that there is a very fine line between challenging the students intellectually and affecting their confidence and motivation level. I realized that along with teaching biology, it is equally important to teach them about how to study biology; develop good study habits. I am also going to incorporate Bloom’s Taxonomy in my assessment methods and make the students aware of this as well. We all have some general ideas about how we have to remember and understand something before we begin to analyze and evaluate but we never take the time to actually discuss it in the class.I thought this was a great learning experience for myself and it will definitely reflect in my teaching in the future.

I was reminded by Dr. McGuire that it is important to re-iterate the ideas in Bloom’s taxonomy and to instill these concepts into general practice with the students. Teaching General Biology, we often meet resistance from the students. They simply don’t want to be there and they take it because they have to. What is the goal for reading an assignment? “To finish the reading.” We’re reminded of how explanations of expectations and minding the motivational levels of our students can help us adapt to their needs.

The lowest level of Blooms is the act of Remembering. As students come in to the class on the first day, they will tell me that they are not good at the Sciences. They believe that Science is rote memorization. But I remind them to treat Science as a language. In order to excel at a language, one must practice it. When explaining Bloom’s to my students, I often inform them that the things we see in action in stem from Creating and Evaluating. Rote memorization of jargon and differentiating it from the vernacular is the challenge that students should undertake in order to have an ability to seek out a more meaningful appreciation of the course. Does it really help to explain Bloom’s to students? This can influence the way that students prepare for exams. But this also requires them to have a higher awareness of what each level actually means.

Dr. McGuire also focused on the aspect of metacognition that tends to plague the students. They’re assessments of themselves and their prior knowledge challenge their progress in the course. Finding ways of having the students assess themselves when reading their texts so that they are not simply trying to finish is a difficult task and continues to plague any meaningful processing of the material. This is a particular nuisance with first year students since they often invoke numerous incorrect pieces of prior knowledge that can interfere with self-assessment. I feel that this is the greatest challenge and I wished there was greater discussion about this topic during the workshop.

It was great to hear the relevant advice and anecdotes from Dr. Saundra McGuire last Friday. It was an especially rich experience to listen to the workshop after having read the assigned reading for Living Lab. A central theme that stood out to me in both the reading and Dr. McGuire’s talk was the importance of achieving that delicate balance of challenge and encouragement that students need to succeed. This is particularly difficult in my Developmental Writing classes since students often begin the semester with a strong sense that they have already “failed” by being placed in my class (rather than in English 1101). This is often exacerbated by the departmental practice of administering a “diagnostic” essay exam in class during the first week of the semester. This helps to determine the students’ strengths and weaknesses, but it also serves as another reinforcement of their poor performance. As a result, students in Developmental Writing often significantly lack motivation. I have been focused on clarity and organization in my classroom, but now I will consciously integrate strategies to increase student confidence from the beginning of the semester. Perhaps, I might integrate a low-stakes writing assignment before the diagnostic, or I might develop another confidence-boosting activity to start things off. Hopefully, this will begin the term by reinforcing the students’ potential rather than their deficits.

http://bigbayfest.org/

It seems not very long ago, we were all nervously watching weather reports on TV waiting for the arrival of hurricane Sandy in New York area. I am originally from a part of India where weather related calamities are extremely rare. Therefore anytime there is a hurricane in the weather forecast or even high velocity winds, for that matter, I tend to get extremely nervous. Mercifully, Sandy did not have any major impact on our neighborhood but the devastation was only a few minutes drive from where we live, mainly in water front communities of Long Island. Most of the devastation caused by the hurricane was something that we saw on TV. For the most part, it was no different than watching the devastation of a major storm in some other part of the country. Visiting Sheepshead Bay on March 15 and listening to the first hand accounts of the devastation made me realize how real the impact was and that there are people who have yet to recover completely from the damage. It was remarkable to see the dedication of local volunteers who showed us around in the neighborhood. I was amazed at the resiliency of people who live there and their determination to move on with their lives as much as they can. This community effort made me appreciate the importance of giving back to the community because we are all part of this human community. I realized how helpless we can be in the face of such extreme events like hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes. It also made me realize how important it is to have emergency preparedness in communities that are the most vulnerable to such natural disasters. It was encouraging that most responders to our surveys did realize the importance of having such emergency plans for their neighborhood. Hopefully we all learned from this hurricane that the only way to minimize loss of life and property is to have efficient emergency response plans in place and that we as citizens should always heed to the warnings issued by the local authorities and respond appropriately before the disaster strikes and it is too late.

— arrive early, find parking -easy-, look for signs of Sandy few at first then many, smell the ocean, feel the quiet morning streets, watch as the reality replaces preconceptions  —

remember the impact of going to a real place

— anticipation plus first-time-nerves “can we actually do this, how will it work, what will it be like, will it be worthwhile, what are we forgetting” —

think of what your students will be thinking

— our morning meeting place is closed – ack!  my word it’s cold here on the sidewalk, where will we go to the bathroom? rescued by community partner + local business,  (is Best Western ‘local’?) and who is supposed to be helping whom here —

logistics are key, have a backup plan, be ready to think on your feet

— who are these new people, ‘field guides’, nobody told me!  roll with it, rearrange groups, reconfigure plans, off we go —

 be flexible, be open, build a good relationship with your community partner

— these teeny tiny alley entrances!  a different world, a forgotten, sunken world.  first house, deep breath, knock knock nobody home, second house mean dog + haze of smoke + ‘no thanks’, third house nobody home, is this it? —

stepping out of your comfort zone is disturbing…

— fourth house, friend of our guide, doors open, mouths open, eyes and minds open, the survey gets done but the story is the real thing, images so strong, the water pouring over the mouth of the alley, the shouts of neighbors, the uselessness of hip waders in neck-high water, rescuing people, rescuing dogs, gathering in the tall building at the far end of the alley, the aftermath, the rebuilding, the bureaucracy, where is the aid?, opportunistic politicians,  heroism from the department of sanitation —

…which can open you up to powerful experiences

— one more house, no english, limping half-remembered-spanish through the questions, kids laughing show off english skills when we get stuck, leave with survey data and a smile —

your life skills might turn out to be essential – what a message

— lunch, reflection, pretty windows & water, stories, a shared understanding —

can we give our students this?

For me, the activity that The Living Lab Fellows participated in with volunteers of the Bay Improvement Group (BIG) in Sheepshead Bay on March 15, 2013 created a long lasting impact on my experience and understanding of the people who live on the water front of New York City and on creating an academic service learning project.

Like many of us, I too survived the direct impact of Sandy. Living in a waterfront community myself that will be forever changed but was thankfully not devastated, many memories were brought to life again on this day. I, like so many people in the rest of the City, have move on to other poignant issues ranging from gun control to soda consumption, However, this day reminded me that our attention must remain with rebuilding what makes our diverse city so appealing to so many people from around the world.

Surveying members of the the community provided significant importance to the experience of the community and how we as faculty members can help support communities in need with the added benefit of supporting our course learning objectives as well. Our students are too at a point in their lives that service can help  develop a meaning of importance and empathy to those around us and help build greater purpose in what we have to offer our communities.

What I learned about academic service learning on this day and through the process of planning the activity was that the needs of the community must come first and that there must be well defined learning objectives and communication with all the people involved in the project. It also became important to me to make sure that even if there is a long term goal set for the project that immediate action can make a huge impact as well. May it be

that food is donated to a local food bank or that local businesses are patronized. The immediate “give back” helps in as many ways as the long term project will.