Teaching philosophy
From GeoClasses
Summary of Teaching Responsibilities/Philosophy
Contents |
Fundamental principles
The two fundamental principles that underlie my teaching philosophy are:
- active, epistemological learning tends to be much more effective than passive learning, and,
- different students learn better in different ways.
These principles I originally derived from the National Research Council's summary of the educational and psychological literature in the series titled "How People Learn" (Bransford et al., 2000), however, the second principle is also informed greatly by the theories of social cognition described by Gee (2003) in his book "What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy". The work reported by Gee goes beyond the traditional visual/verbal/kinesthetic learning styles and posits that a major part of scientific education is teaching the context and idiom of the language of science to students who start with their own different, socially constructed literacies. The major implication of this is that instructors need to be familiar with student's use of language to effectively teach scientific literacy.
As a result, class size is the fundamental determinant of teaching strategy. While my smaller classes tend to be project-based, larger introductory classes are more likely to have students with a larger diversity of learning styles and backgrounds, requiring a more flexible approach to teaching style and language. I have found the traditional large-class lecture to be a poor method of teaching, yet with 150 students (my typical large lecture size) and no TAs, teaching and grading at the individual level becomes much more difficult. To compensate, I have focused on the careful application of new technologies to engage students and encourage learning.
My approach to solving the large-class conundrum is to employ new technologies that enable peer teaching, based on the hypothesis that students at the introductory level at least, can better communicate scientific concepts to their social and cultural peers than an instructor who does not share the students' original use of language. The simple and elegant metaphor for describing the axial tilt of the Earth using a spinning basketball (with the lines on the basketball representing lines of longitude) had never occurred to me until it was used by a student, largely because I had never played a game with which they were intimately familiar. The internet and online collaboration software in particular have made the recording and sharing of student perspectives on the science practical.
The rest of this document describes how I have applied my two overarching principles and new technologies to large and small classes at the introductory undergraduate, senior undergraduate and graduate levels.
Large lectures
As I have taught large introductory lecture classes over the last 5 years and been exposed to new methods and philosophies through Cutting Edge workshops and the science education literature, I have been continuously revamping and changing my large lectures courses to better align with the two educational principles described above. To this end, I have introduced much more interaction, such as think-pair-share assignments, to the large classes I teach almost every semester. However, my primary interest is in applying new technology to learning because this takes advantage of my own proficiency with computer applications and I believe recently developed technologies have the potential to revolutionize education.
The MovieClassroom, described below, is one such new technology. It and others that I have developed are quite effective means of engaging students, while simultaneously providing useful measures of student learning, which is an extremely important consideration in large classes.
- The weatherlog (Weather_log, 2007), an online journaling tool, has proven effective at improving students' observational and higher-order thinking skills when used with a final integrative assignment.
- Three-dimensional, interactive, physically based models created in the VPython programming language have proven capable of capturing student interest and communicating complex concepts (Urbano and Houghton, 2006).
- Online assignments such as the Climatic Regions Lab (2007) have proven useful in training students to access online data sources and fit that information into conceptual frameworks.
I have found that the key to the creation and application of new techniques has been in the development of explicit goals with a well defined rubric for each assignment. Using these principles and approaches, learned at a recent Cutting Edge Workshop on Course Design, I am in the process of guiding the development of the Departments' new introductory course that integrates the content of Physical Geology and Physical Geography ("Landforms").
The MovieClassroom project
The MovieClassroom project (http://lurbano-5.memphis.edu/MovieClassroom/) best encapsulates my approach to teaching at the introductory undergraduate level. The primary aspect of the MovieClassroom is that it provides the mechanisms for students to create Earth Science themed movies. In creating a movie students must acquire expertise on the subject, but the mode of acquisition is entirely up to the student. The moviemaking provides the strong incentive that inspires the learning. When applying this in classes, I instruct that the ultimate movie must be something that could help students taking the same class in a subsequent semester. This instruction strongly encourages meta-cognition: students need to think about how they learn in order convey the scientific information to their peers. Meta-cognition has been shown to improve students' higher level cognitive skills.
The second aspect of the MovieClassroom project, the online databasing of student-produced digital video, plays an important role in my second teaching principle: that different people learn in different ways. I subscribe to the social cognitive theory that language constrains ideas, and teaching science involves introducing students to the use of language as it is defined by scientists. The meanings of words are defined by their context. Students in science classes are learning the context that applies to words like "hypothesis", "theory" or "facies". Some of these words students will know from different contexts, and it is essential to understand the original context in order to introduce the new scientific context. Here I believe students can serve as the best translators for their peers, which makes the use of student-produced audio merged with instructor-produced digital videos extremely powerful. A student viewing a movie produced by a social and cultural peer can be introduced to a new idea with media that uses the accent, idioms and examples with which that student is already familiar.
Taken together, viewing and producing movies provide a powerful method in engaging students and promoting learning.
Undergraduate/Graduate classes
At the University of Memphis I have taught senior undergraduate/graduate level classes in Physical Hydrogeology and Physical Climatology. I have also developed in collaboration with Dr. David Dye a course combining archeology and paleoclimatology called "Climate and the Fate of Civilizations". My objective in these classes is to teach the subject matter in a way that trains students to use quantitative and qualitative skills and methods of scientists.
A major challenge in the Hydrogeology and Climatology classes is that the students taking them come from a variety of backgrounds inside and outside the department. To facilitate these differences and maximize individual learning, a large fraction of student grade in these classes is based on the development of epistemological skills using individual and group projects. I require that students find and analyze data from experiments, online sources and the literature, as part of exercises designed to enable them to develop and test hypotheses. By restricting project topics to a central theme for each semester, students can more effectively share their projects while maximizing the use of their own prior expertise.
In the class on Climate and the Fate of Civilizations the focus was on how paleoclimatic change influenced the rise and fall of pre-historic civilizations. Created in the fall of 2006, this was the first non-quantitative upper level class I had taught. In keeping with my philosophy of active learning, my focus was on eliciting classroom discussion based on assigned readings. Students bore the burden of contrasting hypotheses while the instructors used their expertise to help answer the broad range of factual questions that arose. This theme of encouraging argument and discussion was ultimately assessed using a peer-review process for the final paper.
Graduate Level: Introduction to Modeling in the Earth Sciences
With the growing use of numerical models in the Earth Sciences in general and my own research in particular, it was important for me to create a class that could provide a basic understanding of modeling methods and techniques. Even more than in my quantitative upper-level undergraduate/graduate classes, this class is oriented around projects. The ultimate goals are to enable students to create basic examples of the broadly different types of physical and behavioral models, and finally to create and calibrate a computer model applicable to a topic in their field. Given the broad range of student backgrounds, students work on a wide variety of modeling types and subjects. As a result, this class has proven as exciting for me as for the students. The course outline and student projects from the last iteration of the class can be found on the class website (http://lurbano-5.memphis.edu/GeoMod/index.php/Introduction_to_Modeling).
Conclusions
The University of Memphis has allowed me the opportunity to develop and expand on a large variety of teaching techniques in a variety of university settings. I now employ a broad and growing range of techniques that tend to emphasize the development and application of new technology to achieving learning goals. I also tend to be extremely flexible with their application since my ultimate objective is to help every student learn. I believe these teaching techniques, the addition of the new class on numerical modeling, the incorporation of interdisciplinary themes into my classes and my flexibility in teaching classes under the different disciplines have substantially improved the Department of Earth Sciences' graduate and undergraduate programs.
References
Bransford, J., Brown, A., and Cocking, R. (eds), 2000. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (CBASSE), National Academies Press, Washington.
Climatic Regions Lab (2007). Relating climatographs to synoptic climatology, http://lurbano-5.memphis.edu/Classes/index.php/Climatic_Regions_Lab (accessed July 2007).
Gee, J.P., 2003, What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy, Palgrave MacMillan, New York.
Urbano, L., and Houghton, J., 2006. An Interactive Computer Model for Coriolis Demonstrations, Journal of Geoscience Education, 54, no. 1 pg. 54-60.
Weather_log, 2007. Weather log. http://lurbano-5.memphis.edu/Classes/index.php/Weather_log (accessed July 14th 2007).
