Teaching Undergraduates

Roger L. Dominowski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135677473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This practical guide is designed to help college teachers plan their undergraduate courses and deliver high-quality instruction. The book's theme is that teaching is a creative, decision-making, idea-testing enterprise whose purpose is to facilitate student learning in all of its facets. Its goal is to help instructors understand the multiple kinds of learning taking place in their courses so that they can select, devise, evaluate, and modify teaching techniques to improve their effectiveness. Based on research on human learning, memory, thinking, and problem solving, as well as studies of teaching and less-formal reports of teaching practices, the book offers concrete advice about all aspects of college teaching. *Part I is devoted to course planning. It outlines the many decisions instructors face in defining a course as their own and discusses the larger issues that shape a course and constrain some specific choices. Selecting course content, choosing learning goals, deciding how to pace a course, and scheduling tests are some of these issues. A workable timetable for preparing a course is included.
*Part II is a mini-course on human learning, memory, and thinking. It provides the conceptual foundation for making teaching decisions, for selecting instructional strategies, and especially for inventing new techniques that might particularly fit a specific course.
*Part III deals with the "nitty-gritty" of college teaching, including how to choose a textbook; lecturing and conducting classroom discussions; types and purposes of writing assignments, and how to structure and evaluate them; dealing with plagiarism; strengths and weaknesses of different types of tests, the relation of tests to learning goals, and guidelines for constructing good tests; and grading systems.
*Part IV addresses professional and ethical issues of importance and consequence to instructors. New college instructors, more experienced faculty who would like to reflect on their teaching practices and consider making some changes, and teaching assistants will all find this book relevant and useful.

I

Introduction

1

Course Planning

What’s Needed Before Your First Class

Course Content: What Will the Course Cover?

Determining Course Goals

Choosing a Course Format

A Planning Timetable

Course planning serves two purposes: First and most important, it allows an instructor to organize the course to promote the goals that the instructor has for the course. Second, it encourages preliminary work that will reduce stress when the course is taught. Many decisions must be made and materials created before you hold the first meeting of your course. Here is a reasonably complete checklist. The purpose is to give you some perspective on planning a course.

WHAT’S NEEDED BEFORE YOUR FIRST CLASS

Let us assume that the scheduling of the course has been taken care of. Here are the other items deserving attention. They are listed approximately in the order in which they need to be considered.

1. Selection and ordering of a textbook and other reading materials.

2. Deciding what the course requirements will be:

A. Exams

(1) Number

(2) Coverage: Will each cover a specific section or will one or more be cumulative? What weighting will be given to classroom and reading material?

(3) Format: What kinds of questions to include; whether exams will be open/closed book; will any take-home exams be used?

(4) Scheduling when exams will be given.

(a) Determining policy/procedures for makeup tests.

B. What other projects will be required? (Papers, etc.) See 1–4 under A.

C. What rules will you have regarding class attendance, participation, and homework (if it will be assigned)?

3. Constructing a grading system.

A. General form (“curve,” pre-set criteria)

B. Weights to be given to various course requirements

C. Any opportunities for bonus points? On exams? Assignments?

D. Any penalties for late tests, assignments?

E. What will be your policy regarding incomplete grades?

4. It is very advantageous to create, for your own use, a day-by-day plan for all class meetings, filling in holidays, exams, reviews of exams, any special events, and the topics you intend to cover (one per day). Coordinate the reading assignments (typical is one standard chapter per week). You must decide on the relation between assigned readings and class content—that is, where there will and won’t be (how much) overlap. Expect to change this several times, and probably again when you teach your course.

5. Prepare lecture outlines for at least the first two weeks of class. Include materials you will need for your lectures, such as handouts or overheads.

6. Construct questions sufficient for the first test, from the assigned readings and the first two weeks of class. Test construction is quite time-consuming, so the more you can do before classes start, the less stress there will be when teaching.

7. Prepare a course syllabus to be given to students on the first day of class. Preliminary drafts of the syllabus can be made while planning a course, but the final, official version is perhaps the last task completed before a course begins.

8. You’ll need a course evaluation form to be given to students at the end of the term. It’s also feasible to ask for student feedback during a course, a topic we’ll discuss later. This task is perhaps one that could be delayed until later.

All of these topics will be discussed in this book. Much of the book is intended to help you be prepared for the first class meeting of your course. Some chapters concern topics that occur repeatedly when teaching, such as organizing lectures, and others cover issues that might arise very infrequently if at all, such as discipline problems. Course planning logically proceeds from general issues to details. So let us begin by considering matters that concern the whole course.

An instructor needs to determine three general features of a course that will give a course its particular “flavor” or slant. These are course content, learning goals, and course format. The choices one makes about these features distinguish a particular instructor’s version of a course from others with the same name and number. We’ll consider each in turn.

COURSE CONTENT: WHAT WILL THE COURSE COVER?

At first glance it might seem that course content is well determined by course title, but a title and catalog description greatly underconstrain what a course will actually be when it is taught. The degree of constraint on an instructor’s choices depends on the course’s role in the curriculum. Specifically, if you are teaching a course that is prerequisite to another, constraints increase because teachers of the subsequent course will reasonably expect that certain topics have been covered, and you need to satisfy such programmatic expectations. Even here, considerable latitude remains. For courses that are not the earlier part of a sequence, you need only cover topics consistent with the course title and catalog description; here the range of options is enormous.

How do you choose the topics to cover? A reasonable starting point is your own identification of the important topics subsumed by a course title. It is of course sensible and helpful to seek professional consultation by asking experienced teachers of the course for copies of their syllabi. Discussing the course with an experienced instructor whose teaching you admire can be extremely helpful.

It is worthwhile to adopt the view that your course might well be the students’ only exposure to the topic area. If so, what topics do you want to be sure to include? In thinking about this question, it is essential to keep in mind the level of course, or the type of student that one will be teaching. Let me distinguish three kinds of courses or student groups: general education, majors, and majors who expect to pursue graduate study. Students taking a course to fulfill a general education requirement probably know very little about the area and might well never take another course in this discipline. Their knowledge and instructional needs are quite different from those of majors. Even though majors might know little in detail about the subject of a more advanced course, they bring a body of relevant knowledge to the class. They should more readily learn new concepts and should desire and acquire deeper understanding of the material. Even so, only a subset of majors will pursue graduate study. When teaching undergraduates who are headed toward graduate school, it is understandable and appropriate to focus on research and attention to details, and to introduce the level of information found in journal articles. In general, as the level of course goes up, it makes sense to go a bit faster, covering more topics per unit time, or to increase the depth of topic coverage, considering more details. Novice instructors, primed by their own, recent graduate courses, can be biased toward using a graduate-course approach when teaching an undergraduate course. The result is that they cover too much, in too much detail, and assume too much background knowledge—they present a course that is “over the heads” of their undergraduate students, who suffer and usually don’t learn much. Being forewarned should help to avoid the problem; more later.

DETERMINING COURSE GOALS

Having decided what content to cover, it is still necessary to determine what you want the students to learn about the material. This decision can be made for the course as a whole, or many times with different outcomes as you proceed through the course topics. For most course topics, there are several different orientations that might be adopted for presenting the material and simultaneously for choosing what students should learn. Let me give an example.

Suppose I choose to cover the topic of perceptual learning in a course on child development. The course goal question is: What do I want the students to learn about perceptual learning? Here are some possibilities:

The basic concepts and terms regarding perceptual learning.

The major theories about perceptual learning and how they compare to one another.

The most important, most reliable findings regarding perceptual learning.

How different theories account for the major findings. Which findings pose problems for which theories.

Examples of perceptual learning from both research and everyday life.

Identify new examples of perceptual learning.

The point of emphasizing that any of a variety of learning goals might be adopted for any course topic is to stress both the choices available to an instructor and the need to use different learning techniques depending on what students are supposed to learn.

There are multiple kinds of learning, even within the relatively restricted domain of classroom material. Learning basic terms, comparing concepts, identifying new examples, and solving novel problems are different types of learning and call for different teaching strategies. So, the essential question for an instructor is: Once I have decided what I want the students to learn about this particular topic, what would be a good way to present the material? What tasks should I give the students to do in order for them to learn what is desired? Chapters 2 through 4 discuss the various aspects of learning that can occur in college classes and provide the foundation for selecting and creating instructional techniques.

Different kinds of learning outcomes lead to different forms of assessments. Stated another way, different course requirements or methods of assessment imply different course goals and varying types of knowledge. Although it might be claimed that any aspect of a body of knowledge could be assessed by using, say, multiple choice tests, it is difficult to support this position over the full range of possible course requirements. For example, essay versus multiple choice questions seldom if ever tap precisely the same knowledge. Requiring students to read multiple sources and to organize that knowledge and present it in a paper is asking for different learning and knowledge gaining activities than requiring them to answer questions on a test. Overall, instructors can decide to use one kind of requirement or assessment method in the service of one course goal while using a different kind of requirement for another course goal. We discuss various types of assessment methods later in the book. In planning a course, however, it is useful at the outset to think about what kinds of emphasis you want to give to course material.

CHOOSING A COURSE FORMAT

The question here is how your course should be structured. The focus is on the organization and pacing of course material, the number, nature, and timing of tests, the use of other assessment techniques, and the choice of lecture/discussion procedures. These considerations typically alter the way in which a course is organized on the basis of content and learning goals alone. In part, one needs to incorporate tests and other kinds of assignments so that the course runs smoothly. Perhaps more fundamental questions concern students’ mastery of course material and the issue of individual differences.

To what extent do you want students to master course material? It is extremely easy for anyone to assert their strong desire that students learn everything, that as instructors we would be so pleased to observe such high levels of accomplishment. But I mean the question seriously. Taking seriously the question of student mastery means that an instructor makes decisions about the rate at which material will be presented, about how often and in what ways students’ learning will be assessed, and about what will and won’t be done to accomodate students individual learning needs. Let me explain. An instructor assigns a certain amount of material to read for a topic and presents in class particular material about that topic. If everything went perfectly, all of the students would know about that topic what the instructor wants them to know. Probably, this scenario never happens in a classroom. Therefore, the question for an instructor is what if anything should be done when some students have not mastered the material after the initial study/teaching/learning episode has been completed.

It’s important to notice what is involved here. We can take for granted that an instructor would have chosen a reading assignment and precisely what to present in class. The first real issue arises with respect to finding out that at least some students haven’t mastered the material. If an instructor waits too long to obtain information about students’ learning, it will not be possible to take useful corrective steps to improve students’ mastery. The implication here is that an instructor needs to decide how often, and how formally to check students’ learning.

An instructor will decide, formally or informally, on the relative importance of different aspects of knowledge about a topic. That is, for any topic in any course, an instructor will care more or less about whether students learn one or another aspect of topical material. For example, instructors are likely to care very much that students learn basic concepts. Instructors might well care not as much that students, at the undergraduate level, can explain a theory. So an essential part of inquiring about student learning is to make judgments about what is more or less important in the course material.

An instructor makes an initial decision regarding the amount of material to cover in a specified time period. Alternatively, the instructor decides how much time—both study time and class time—to allot to a specified amount of material. Assuming that the instructor has some indication of students’ mastery of the material, the question is how little mastery should lead to some kind of remedial activity rather than proceeding ahead with the next course topic.

A critical facet of considering students’ learning is deciding how many of the students in a class need to master some item of course material in order for the instructor to be satisfied. Suppose an instructor has 50 students in a class. If the initial presentation of material results in only four or five students achieving the desired level of learning, what good reason could there be for continuing on to the next topic? In contrast, if only one student does not grasp the material, stopping the course progress to rectify that student’s deficiency would be unfair to the other students. These are examples of two extremes of pacing the coverage of course material. In one case, the course is geared to the best students, a pace that will leave the vast majority of students in a state of inadequate knowledge. At the other extreme, the course proceeds only as fast as the slowest student. In this case, all the other students are bored and their learning time is not properly used. Most college classes fall between these extremes. No matter what pace an instructor chooses initially, that pace will be too fast for some students, too slow for others. If the class goes too quickly, too many students will be left behind. It is easy, if an instructor pays no attention to students’ learning, to simply choose a pace for presenting course material and stick to it, making no changes whatsoever. Finding a proper level at which to initially cover material is not easy, and deciding how to adjust and adapt a course to students’ learning rates is more difficult. Nonetheless, the problem needs to be faced rather than ignored.

Instructors should, even if only informally, monitor their students’ comprehension of course material. Assuming they do so, instructors need to decide what level of noncomprehension will lead them to go over material a second time. Pacing the course slowly will minimize the need to repeat material in one way or another. If the course pace is slow, however, what opportunities will be made available for additional learning to those students who could learn the material more quickly? As the course pace quickens, the likelihood of needing to repeat coverage of course topics will increase. Of course, fewer students will be bored and more will find the required rate of learning to be reasonably challenging.

The way in which an instructor deals with this issue might vary with the particular course being taught. One issue is the extent to which earlier material must be mastered in order to learn later material. For example, in a broad survey course, there might be little connection between topics covered early in the course and those covered later. In this case, an instructor might be m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART I: INTRODUCTION
• PART II: LEARNING, MEMORY, AND COGNITION
• PART III: IMPLEMENTING INSTRUCTION
• PART IV: PROFESSIONAL ISSUES AND CONCERNS
• Closing Note
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index