Catherine Rawn

Term 2 is now right around the corner! If you’re interested in checking out syllabi for my sections early, by all means take a look! My Psyc 218 (Analysis of Behavioural Data) syllabus is available here, and my Psyc 208 (Special Topics: How Social Psychology Can Help You Succeed) syllabus is available here. I suspect that both of these courses will challenge learners–and me–to grow in new directions. They won’t be a walk in the park, but they can be valuable learning experiences if we all put in the thought and effort… and isn’t that what university is for?

I hope your 2011 wraps up safely and your 2012 brings you joy and adventures!

Last Friday evening (November 26), 550 Psyc 217 (Research Methods) students showcased their hard work designing and conducting research throughout this term in a poster session. It was a fabulous event with many students reporting a rich learning experience… and that it was fun to see what everyone else had come up with!

Many thanks to Eric Eich, who committed financial support from the department to make this happen, to the Life Sciences Institute for allowing us to book their space, to my fellow 217 instructor and poster session co-coordinator Colleen Brenner, additional 217 instructors Victoria Savalei and Rajiv Jhangiani, and all dozen Teaching Fellows for their support and dedication to making this a success. And, of course, to our hard-working, impressive students! It was a pleasure to see your work!

Today Sunaina and I had the pleasure of lunching with Russ Day, Senior Lecturer and head of the Intro Psych program at SFU. Of the many insightful ideas he shared with us, a few stand out for me in particular. Most potently, he built on the idea of of 20-60-20: 20% of students will learn in spite of you, 20% may not be sufficiently motivated to learn from you at all, but that middle 60% is where our biggest impact can be as instructors. So if I pitch my course at the 80th percentile of students, the top 20% won’t be too bored, the bottom 20% will be disengaged, but I have the potential to truly engage and challenge 60% of my students. This is interesting on its own, but he pushed it further into what this would mean for student evaluations. The students in the, say, 21st-25th percentiles will be pushed too far if I’m pitching for the 80th percentile. A psychologically healthy response to failure is an external attribution: i.e., to blame me. So if I’m not getting about 2-3% of students feeling frustrated by my course, I may be pitching my course at too easy of a level. Wow!!! That is powerful! (I’m reminded here about something else we discussed: Chickering & Gamson’s 7 Principles, one of which is “communicate high expectations.”) So often I (and others) ruminate about those few extremely critical comments in the student evaluations, and have to find ways to cope with them… but Russ offered such a thoughtful and realistic perspective on those comments! Instead, I should be ruminating on the positive comments, trying to figure out exactly what I did to connect with that student so I can do more of it.

The second idea that really stands out for me was our discussion about being a scholar. As a scholar, there is no choice but to keep up with the literature. For me, that means content, but also as a teaching-focused scholar, the education literature. This is a challenge to me, one that’s been in the back of my mind for a while now. One thing I do to help with this is that I attend the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative (CWSEI) reading group weekly during the summer months. This is one step in the right direction. Where can I build more literature into my life?