Instructor's Guide to Learning Skills

Hi all,

This just came across my email today and I thought it important to link here (in the event that LSABCers are showing up to the blog occasionally): Incorporating Learning Skills into Post-Secondary Courses.

Great work on compiling this Arleigh and David! I gather our intentions (here) weren't quite enough to make a go of it...

Hope to see you soon.

Cindy

Making Sense of Social Bookmarking

Hi all,

Thought you may enjoy this video made by Commoncraft. It explains del.icio.us in a no-frills, effective format (with a sense of humor).



Commoncraft has some other similar productions about RSS and wikis. They are definitely worth a viewing and a pass on to your students....

Best to view these with a network connection (a little choppy using wireless).

Happy fall!!

Cindy

Hello LSABC'ers

It's a beautiful Saturday afternoon and David Palmer-Stone and I are just checking out the blog and have some of David's homebrew (very good). Despite that I did manage - with David's help - to get into the
blog. It's not that bad.

And here's the link to the McMaster LS videos incl my 3 on problem solving. though they are called "math"
Cheers

http://csd.mcmaster.ca/academic/index.htm

Book Review by David Palmer-Stone

The Art of Problem Posing
1983 by Stephen I. Brown and Marion I. Walter
The Franklin Institute Press

People tell horror stories about math teachers, and about math in general. Math dysfunctions have new, popular labels -- "math anxiety" and "innumeracy" (from the books by Sheila Tobias and John Allen Paulos). The standard curriculum has failed, according to this view, because of its authoritarian emphasis on the "right" way to get the answers, and its demoralizing judgments of those who make mistakes.

Adequate mathematicians can solve problems. But for some, math is intrinsically rewarding, like art. They don't just tolerate it: they like it, and choose to do it.

This book's authors suggest that good mathematicians have unconsciously developed strategies for fostering mathematical insight (in spite of the school curriculum), and that we can help students learn to consciously adopt these strategies.

This "non-standard curriculum" focuses on process and questioning, not on getting the right answer. With the threat of "judgment" and "failure" removed, self-esteem is no longer on the line, and the student becomes interested in exploring math through the following four interrelated stages:

1. List attributes of the problem, statement, phenomenon, etc., that you are starting with. This list must be as highly detailed as possible. (This first stage of intense observation is essential to any creative or critical-thinking activity).
   
2. Ask "What-if-not?" for the attributes. This is really the core of this process. You are asking, "What if this attribute were different?" There is a virtual infinity of ways that something can be different from what it is. Different people will notice different attributes, and replace them differently, so this and the previous step open the door for individual ideas.
   
3. Explore, ask questions, come up with examples, in the form of data, answers, ideas, etc.
   
4. After the problem is solved, ask "What does this mean or imply?; What have I actually done?; How far can it be extended?; Why did it work?" and so on. Analyze the problem for its significance.

Good mathematicians will look for regularities, generalities, limits and exceptions to rules, new viewpoints, implications, etc. The above steps provide a fertile hunting ground for these.

The authors suggest broad implications of this work:

1. Listing attributes – and then challenging them – can show us our unconscious assumptions that limit us -- our beliefs, our "givens";
   
2. Generating problems is vital for understanding and creating. You only understand something as you change it; just solving problems does not change the "given" that the problem provides. One should question the question itself.
   
3. Observing one's own learning ("metacognition") helps one learn how to learn. The exercises in the book provide an opportunity to watch and explore your own learning and thinking strategies, and to experiment with new ones.

I highly recommend this book. It has interesting ways to get started, and examples, including student work. The exercises (most are aimed at a high-school level) are generally easy enough to get into, yet hard enough to be challenging. The technique is readily transferrable to other, including creative and even practical, activities. It is good-natured, playful, fun, and at the same time profound. And I agree with its philosophy.

Thomas Homer-Dixon lecture review

Review of Thomas Homer-Dixon Lecture

David Palmer-Stone

Thank you, everybody, for the great participation in our LSABC get-together this spring! I think that this blog (we will be eternally grateful to you, Tlell and Cindy, for setting this up) has great potential for us! I received a nice affirmation of this opinion shortly after our meeting. Arleigh sent me a note informing me that Thomas Homer-Dixon was speaking at UVic (for free!) I attended the lecture since I had read his book, The Ingenuity Gap, some years ago, and found it very thought provoking. He argued in that book that we are creating problems that are so complex that we don't have the wherewithal to solve them. Of course this piqued my interest, as a learning specialist, and as a person interested in the ways we address the challenges presented to us by intractable problems. (In fact, I have been pondering this issue over the past few years, off and on, and some of my ideas informed the ways in which I approached my work on developing our recent workshop.)

So it was with interest that I attended Homer-Dixon's lecture. And I was not disappointed -- in fact it struck me as fortuitous to have had the opportunity to hear what he had to say, in the aftermath of our LSABC conference. For those of you who are unfamiliar with him, he is from The Island, and received his undergraduate degree from UVic. He has a Ph.D. from MIT, and seems to be interested in quantifying global problems, somewhat along the lines of Jared Diamond (Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies, and Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed; both engaging books to read); although Homer-Dixon says that he is not as pessimistic as Diamond.

Homer-Dixon has written a new book -- Upside of down: creativity and regeneration in the face of collapse -- and his talk was based in the concerns that he addresses in this book. I will not discuss the problems that he presented. You can check out the book on your own if you want to (I intend to!). What I was more interested in was a nice instance of synchronicity. He was very enthusiastic about the potentials of such technologies as "wikis" and "blogs" as tools for addressing intractable problems, and it struck me as a nice coincidence that we, as learning specialists, have just now taken the plunge to use these technologies ourselves.

I will summarize what I can remember of his comments here -- perhaps adding a few of my own -- because I think they are pertinent to our work with our students, our profession, and our position as professionals within the academic community. (Don't rely on these comments as a source of factual information about the lecture -- I didn't take notes during the lecture and I am basing this on mind maps that I made the next day from memory to review the lecture -- I figure this learning skills strategy works fine for me -- the gain in critical thinking is worth the cost of loss of detail.)

Homer-Dixon had what I thought was an interesting comment in response to a question from a member of the audience. He said that there are two paradigms in our society for addressing problems: 1. The top-down hierarchical approach, in which experts solve problems and apply their solutions in a hierarchical power system; 2. The bottom-up, democratic, "grassroots" approach in which people act responsibly and autonomously, with the designated "leaders" eventually following their initiatives. Homer-Dixon suggests that both approaches are necessary and that Internet systems that use "open architecture" provide a venue within which such work may be engaged. He was enthusiastic about such applications as Wikipedia and noted that in spite of nay-sayers, that system has done very well in developing -- through diligent self reflection -- systems for fostering accurate, unbiased information.

He mentions four serious problems, however, that such systems must address, to be able to work effectively; and I thought that it would be relevant for me to pass these along: 1. Being hijacked. Wikipedia recognizes the need to moderate content, and the people who run the service reserve the right to bar topics or individuals. He refers to such individuals as "extremists," which he defines as people who will not listen or engage in discussion. (I recall reading an article about instances of abuse, for example, in topics of an emotionally volatile political nature.); 2. The role of experts. These systems need to be set up so they will not stifle democratic discussion by deferring to experts, as a matter of course; but at the same time, they will not work properly if "ranting" gains the upper hand, and if expertise is disdained; 3. "Winnowing." This is to do with information overload and is a problem addressed by all information systems now. He suggests that out of 10,000 submissions, only 10 may be worth considering; but how does one narrow down the selection in an effective way? 4. Cooperation and synergy. After the number of items has been winnowed down, they must be enabled to amalgamate into something more intricate and better than even "the sum of the parts."

It seems to me that there are a number of areas of crossover between Homer-Dixon's thesis and our area of work as learning specialists: 1. If anyone is interested in solving intractable problems, not so much as far as content is concerned, but in a generic, process-oriented way, it is us; 2. We delight in collaborative work. If there's one thing I value about our group, it is that there is a complete lack of competition -- we share freely, we are open-minded, we are curious about our own and one another's learning and working processes, we enjoy one another's company when we work together on tasks related to learning, and we are happy to share our learning experiences with one another; 3. We value "high-level" learning in which emergent meanings are fostered. If humanity is to stand a hope of addressing intractable problems, then we must turn our attention to developing ways of developing increasingly complex, adaptable, transferable, applicable, elegant, formulations of understanding; 4. We value, and engage in, self reflection about learning, such that we may discover what works so that we can do more of it. And we often do this as learners, ourselves, "from the learner's point of view."

To my mind, Homer-Dixon's lecture lent great support to our vocation as learning specialists. In fact, if he had known about us, I think he would have said that we are doing cutting-edge work. That is why I am excited about our move into this new medium of blogging, and perhaps developing a "learning wiki," and about our intention of connecting with people involved in the scholarship of teaching and learning. As Homer-Dixon suggested, catastrophes can be the birthplace of insight. I think that the emergence of insight is something we all, in this area of work, value passionately. And the world has never needed it more than right now.

Paraphrasing to Teach and Learn Discipline-Specific Vocabulary

Aspect of Learning: New Vocabulary

Strategy: Paraphrasing to teach and learn discipline-specific vocabulary

Underlying Principle: Experts (teachers) tend to quickly revert to their discipline-specific vocabulary. Novices (learners), however, must access their “new” knowledge of the vocabulary while also trying to listen to and understand the instruction. Teachers need to model the use of discipline-specific vocabulary, but they also need to provide plenty of scaffolding and encouragement to students who are learning to recognize it, recall it, and use it appropriately. Students should be discouraged from trying to memorize textbook definitions and should be encouraged to focus on understanding the meaning of the terms.

How to Teach the Strategy:

• Explain the importance of understanding and using the language of the discipline.
  Also explain that whenever possible, you will be paraphrasing in “plain language” until a term becomes familiar.
• Provide examples of ways to learn unfamiliar terms.
• Flash cards: Write word on one side and on the other side write the definition in own words, a brief example of use, and other forms of the word. Colour code flash cards according to type of word. Separate piles into know well, sort of know, don’t know and put time into the last two, only reviewing the know-well pile once in a while.
• Word parts: Break the words into parts and look for roots, prefixes, and suffixes that provide clues to the meaning of the word.
• Categorizing and classifying: Since items are categorized according to characteristics, it makes more sense to learn the characteristics of the category than to try to memorize the characteristic of each item individually.

How to Incorporate the Strategy into Coursework:

• Model the use of paraphrasing and of discipline-specific language.
• During class, give students a chance to explain to the group (or to each other in pairs) what the class is about. Allow them to use whatever language is necessary to communicate the meaning.
• Re-phrase what they say, using discipline-specific language.
• On quizzes, put the plain-language definition rather than the textbook definition and test students’ ability to connect what they are learning to what they already know.
• In-class quickie: For a few minutes at the beginning of each class, ask students to explain to each other the meaning of selected vocabulary words (put on board).
• Assignment idea: Ask students to hand in a list of vocabulary definitions written in their own words, to ensure comprehension of the terms.

Resource: Models for Interactive Learning Modules. Hugh Morgan, Mildred Cody. Division of Distance and Distributed Learning at Georgia State University. http://www.webct.com/service/ViewContent?contentID=2338975

Notes:

Preface

Preface

This collection of learning strategies has been developed by learning specialists to help instructors in higher education ensure that their students will effectively learn the course content that they teach. Arleigh Trail conceived of producing this material, and it was initially developed during a workshop attended by members of the Learning Specialists Association of British Columbia, facilitated by Arleigh and myself (David Palmer-Stone).

Arleigh, through her work as a learning specialist, and through her involvement with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, realized that material such as this would meet a rather pressing need in higher education, and that learning specialists were uniquely qualified to create such material. This preface is intended to explain why this is the case.

Learning specialists are a loosely amalgamated group of professionals who bring a wide range of qualifications to an equally broadly-defined set of roles and functions in institutions of higher education. Under various capacities, we are typically involved with helping students learn effectively in institutions of post secondary education, such as colleges, technical schools, and universities. Most of us meet individually with students to discuss and address their learning concerns; we also conduct workshops on specific topics related to learning, and many of us teach learning skills or similar courses, often using curricula and materials that we develop ourselves to meet specific student needs at our institutions. We may also be involved with offices or resource centres for students with disabilities; orientation; tutor training and coordination; wellness programs; various counselling activities; "help centers" of all sorts (math assistance, writing clinics, etc.); as well, we may be involved in development, administration, and staffing of "learning commons," information technology, and other areas. We typically develop, collect, and make available various forms of learning resources for students; and many of us "wear numerous hats" in our institutions, functioning also as faculty and as administrators.

We are a diverse group: even academically. Many of us hold graduate degrees; but our areas of specialization may be in the humanities, education, sciences, social sciences, or one of the helping professions. Many of us are also artistically inclined in one way or another.

So, in the face of such diversity, how can I argue that there indeed exists a commonality amongst us, such that we are uniquely able to contribute, on the basis of that commonality, to higher education in the way embodied in these strategies? I think that the following features (which I must admit I have created off the top of my head, with no empirical support) explain, to a large degree, how it is that we can identify ourselves as learning specialists, and qualify us to put forward this contribution. (The following comments are borrowed from notes for my introduction to the session in which we took on the task of developing these strategies):

1. We identify ourselves as "learning specialists" because, aside from the work we do, we are interested in learning, as such, wherever, whenever, and however it may occur. In my opinion, this shifts our consciousness in profound ways when we engage in our work: It seems natural for us to turn learning in on itself -- as well as seeing it as something students do, we also see it as something we do ourselves – we engage in "learning about learning" – we discuss our own learning processes as a matter of interest and consider the experience of learning – learning from the learner's point of view. So, we, as a group, are naturally self reflective with relation to the learning process.

2. A portion of our work involves dealing with students individually. In this way we meet with students holistically, and acknowledge with them the impact on their learning of such issues as career concerns, social and family expectations, divergent academic interests, learning difficulties, nonacademic passions and interests, deeply held personal values and commitments, personal life history and circumstances, and so on.

3. By meeting with students individually to help address their learning issues, we are uniquely able to see them engaging, moment by moment, in their learning challenges. In this way, we are privileged among university professionals in being privy to the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of learning from the learner's point of view.

The idea of being a learning specialist also seems to me to be a little at odds with the general approach of our educational institutions. Most people at colleges and universities are specialists in particular areas of knowledge – and even in those areas of knowledge, they may not be particularly interested in, or attentive to, the learning processes by which that knowledge is acquired or emerges.

So I am saying that to the extent that we see learning as a process that can and should be self-aware and that can and should range across all areas of human endeavor, I would suggest that our way of engaging with learning changes, also in a way that might be at odds with the rest of higher education. For me, sometimes the interest in learning may seem at odds with the valuing of knowledge since if one already knows something, one doesn't have to learn it; and if one doesn't know it, then one has no business teaching it. In a sense, we could be said to be defining ourselves as perennial novices. This has great appeal for me. As a learning specialist, I value the quest that moves through areas of what is not yet formulated as knowledge…and I hold that this stance is complementary – I would not say "opposed" – to the valuing of expertise that is the standard currency at institutions of higher education. As academics, we value what is already known; and as learning specialists, we know that we may approach the unknown, the inchoate, through the already-known.

I think that our conversations with one another and with students are characterized by features that are congruent with these observations, and that they are more associated with the attitude of the novice, primed to learn, than with the expert, ready to teach or profess. Again, I don't have any empirical evidence to back this up, but I like to think that our ways of engaging involve the following:

• we tend to have a variety of interests -- everything is "grist for the mill" when it comes to learning
• we are able to hold a wide range of possibilities in mind, provisionally
• we are open to others' thoughts, feelings, and experiences
  we do not attempt to avoid ambiguity, tension, the unknown
• we are willing to say that we don't know, or to admit we were wrong
• we are comfortable with intricacies and divergent implications
• we hold positions tentatively, not rigidly
• we tend toward being pragmatic, because our work is grounded in application, not abstraction
• we value theories to the extent they can be used; we value functionality and evidence for it
• we tend to be cooperative and facilitative
• we listen and explore, and we hold our judgments and conclusions and recommendations provisionally or as hypotheses to be tested
• we value integration: the formation of meaningful connections among divergent topic areas
• and so on…

I see us now as participating in a brilliant and newly emerging opportunity for collaboration between learning specialists—who are passionate about learning in its own right, regardless of other factors—and faculty, who have demonstrated their ability to learn successfully, but who, from my point of view, tend to see learning as a means to an end.

I see an opportunity for us to engage in this work by joining the conversation that has developed in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Our contribution will be collaborative; grounded in our appreciation of learning in its own right; in our valuing of learning as a potentially self reflective activity; and in our consideration of learning as an experience of the learner: after all, primarily (I believe) we come to learning from the point of view of the learner. And we respect that point of view.

I see our possibility for contribution as profound. Presumably everyone, every person in every discipline, is a learner, from the first-year student to the tenured professor. Everyone in a discipline is engaged in learning (at various levels) within the discipline. This is the observation of a learning specialist. In this way, I see a shift in focus to learning in the various disciplines as providing one possible source of a sense of community within the disciplines; and also a basis for interdisciplinary discussion.

Now, as I mentioned, there is one other feature for conversations that I value above all others, and I hope that today that feature will be evoked and fostered. I don't think we have a standard term for this feature. An artist friend of mine calls it, "following your nose." I believe that our conversations are a sort of quest for insight -- and we are often successful.... There is a sense, when things are going well, of being on the trail of something rich, profound, intriguing, valuable... and new. We are not looking for you to apply a bunch of stuff that you already know. We hope that you will bring that to bear -- but we also hope that you will draw on your own vast wealth – breadth, depth, and intricacy – of experience, in new ways, moving to the problematic areas, the questions, tensions, indeterminate relationships, areas of intrigue... follow your gut responses, that vague sense of "What's that about…?"; "What's going on there...?", "How do these things fit...?" Our conversations are a sort of quest for insight, an attempt to enable the emergence of something new and good—we hope that we have set up an environment, a task, which will foster this quest...

I have written this preface not only for faculty who might be interested in familiarizing themselves with these strategies. I have also taken this opportunity to articulate my vision of the "identity" of learning specialists, for those of us to identify ourselves as such, and for all participants in the community of higher education. I hope that this contribution will reveal something of our capacity, such that we, as learning specialists, will come to be identified as a designated and recognizable group of participants in higher education, with our unique commitment, vision, sense of value, and areas of expertise.