Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Turning Around an Institution in Challenging Times
Alas, it's a pleasant surprise when a journalist who understands enough about higher education to "get a story" is given enough space to tell it. Here, Charlayne Hunter-Gault describes challenges facing Howard University. One of her interviewees hints that women's colleges face some of the same issues as HBUCs in terms of adapting to demographic shifts and a changing higher education "marketplace."
Monday, February 3, 2014
A Book Called "How College Works" by Two Authors Who Get It
My friends' Chambliss and Takacs' book How College Works (Harvard University Press 2014) has just come out (previous coverage in ). I worked on a small piece with Chambliss at the beginning of their Mellon funded research in assessment project many years ago and have followed along as the book took shape. It's well written, well reasoned, and their's is a perspective that does not delight the higher ed assessment industrial complex. That is, you will find it an interesting read if you work in the kind of institution I work in.
See also
- Q and A with Chambliss in the "Hechinger Report" (2012)
- "Succeeding in College: the Problem of Motivation (3)" (2012) a blog post by Doug Bennett, President Emeritus of Earlham College
- "Majoring in a Professor" (Inside Higher Ed, August 2013 by Scott Jaschik)
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
The Cartwheeling Classroom
Cathy Davidson is the author, most recently, of Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. She is a prof at Duke University where she co-directs the Ph.D. Lab in Digital Knowledge.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
What List Is This?
What do these 25 institutions have in common?
- Alverno College
- Antioch College
- Bennington College
- Bard College
- Brown University
- Burlington College
- College of the Atlantic
- The Evergreen State College
- Fairhaven College, Western Washington University
- Goddard College
- Hampshire College
- Johnston Center for Integrative Studies, University of Redlands
- Marlboro College
- New College of Florida
- New Saint Andrews College
- Northeastern University School of Law
- Oxford University
- Prescott College
- Reed College
- Residential College, University of Michigan
- St John's College
- Sarah Lawrence College
- University of California, Santa Cruz
- University of Washington: Community, Environment, and Planning
- Yale Law School
Monday, January 20, 2014
Is "Flipping the Classroom" New? What's Good About It?
In this post on Tomorrow's Professor, Marilla Svinicki, University of Texas at Austin, asks "Flipped Classrooms— Old or New?" She describes the technique, notes its roots in conventional practices, and suggests three concrete benefits.
Perhaps the most important assumption of the flipped classroom ... is the idea that learning is strongest when the learner is actively involved in the creation of understanding and the application of understanding to real problems....
Is it a new technique? Not really. Instructors have been assigning readings and asking questions in class for a long time. But the quality of work students can do and the ability to monitor the students' actual outside of class learning has been greatly enhanced through technology....
Which leads us to the second idea of the flipped classroom - coming to the learning with a prepared mind. This idea derives from the principle of learning that having a preview of what is to be learned before attempting to use it makes for a much deeper level of organization in which to insert (or attempt to insert) new ideas and concepts....
One last benefit of the flipped class design is that instructor expertise is used in ways that are most valuable....
Flipped Classrooms— Old or New?
"So is flipping the classroom a new or old teaching strategy? The principles are old and valuable, but they haven't been usable because of constraints of time and effort on the parts of both students and teacher. It is the possibility of implementing these key principles that is new, and often enabled by technology's ability to capture their essence. Now we have to reframe the mindsets of both instructor and student about the role of face-to-face class time. Is it a time to receive information or to use it? I vote for the latter. That would be the new part. "There has been a lot of buzz in higher education lately about the flipped classroom model for teaching and learning....
Perhaps the most important assumption of the flipped classroom ... is the idea that learning is strongest when the learner is actively involved in the creation of understanding and the application of understanding to real problems....
Is it a new technique? Not really. Instructors have been assigning readings and asking questions in class for a long time. But the quality of work students can do and the ability to monitor the students' actual outside of class learning has been greatly enhanced through technology....
Which leads us to the second idea of the flipped classroom - coming to the learning with a prepared mind. This idea derives from the principle of learning that having a preview of what is to be learned before attempting to use it makes for a much deeper level of organization in which to insert (or attempt to insert) new ideas and concepts....
One last benefit of the flipped class design is that instructor expertise is used in ways that are most valuable....
Friday, January 17, 2014
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