Category Archives: from the classroom

Triathlon!

Posted on March 14, 2013 | 1 comment

This past weekend I completed the UBC Sprint Distance Triathlon! It was my first triathlon ever, and it’s something a year ago I said I’d never do (I’ve since stopped saying such foolish things!). It was also my first sustained attempt to swim and bike since I was a kid playing around at the pool and on my street. So when I came in last place in my age group at a total time of 2h4mins, I felt nothing but pride at having finished so strongly. My purely positive reaction to coming in last place surprised me a little. I’ve entered running and walking events before, and I’ve usually finished toward the middle/end of the pack. But coming in dead last is something else entirely. If I had any inkling of judging my success in terms of how I did relative to others, coming in dead last means failure. There is no way to hide behind “at least I didn’t finish last!” defense.

In my Psyc 208 class on Tuesday, I was teaching about motivation. As I explained the difference between motivation derived from a self-defined mastery approach versus a social-comparison-driven ego approach, I was quite aware of my recent performance in the triathlon. I was also quite aware that I took a mastery approach to understanding that performance. I felt like I had successfully completed the triathlon. I finished, and I had felt strong and happy the whole way through — it was fun just being out there on the course! Yet, I know deep down that as much as I take a purely mastery approach to my athleticism, it’s much harder for me to take that approach in my career. You see, my athleticism is new. It’s a new aspect of my identity that I’m playing around with. I’ve been building confidence by taking baby steps over the past three or four years (starting with “I think I could run for a minute” on a treadmill, and surprising myself that I could. Really.). No one had any expectations of me in this domain, least of all myself. Taking a mastery approach to athletics is easy.

Yet who I am as a teacher hits deeper to the core of who I am. This is my chosen field, my area of specialization I have chosen to cultivate because I enjoy doing it and derive great meaning from it. I have been hired into this fantastic and extremely demanding job because other people think I am and will continue to be successful in this domain. And I’d be lying if I said I took a completely mastery approach to judging my success. Social comparisons are so easy to do: How do my student evaluations compare with someone else’s? Are my tests and assignments as fair and challenging as they possibly can be? Am I doing enough to foster community and learning in my classes? Should I be focusing more on initiatives within the department rather than at the university level or beyond? That person is publishing more than I am… does that mean I’m not doing enough? Even letting these questions come into my consciousness at this moment is triggering insecurity… and I think a lot of that insecurity comes from comparing myself to other people. The reality is there will always be someone who seems better than me in some way. But that doesn’t mean I’m not good enough. 

Completing my triathlon is an opportunity for me to (re)think about how I define success in my career. If my triathlon experiences can be extrapolated (and I don’t see why not),  I think I will experience more moments of joy and fewer moments of anxiety from my career when I commit to setting my own standards and define success as mastering those. (I’m lucky enough to have a career in which I have a fair amount of autonomy in this way.) I have tried to do this somewhat, but this is a chance for me to take this attitude change more seriously. Like the triathlon, those standards will be demanding, but they’ll be mine. And when I reach them, I’ll be able to experience joy and pride for myself, but also for others who are on their own paths, achieving their goals.

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Posted in from life experiences, from professional development activities, from the classroom

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Ethics in Teaching

Posted on January 24, 2013 | Comments Off on Ethics in Teaching

This morning I gave a guest lesson in an “Ethics and Professional Issues” seminar for clinical graduate students. Although I encounter ethical issues in teaching routinely, preparing for this guest lesson gave me a chance to deliberately examine all the activities involved in teaching using the lens of ethics. My thinking was greatly informed by the edited volume called Teaching Ethically that came out last year, which also prompted me to examine the APA code of ethics.

I came up with a list of domains in teaching where ethical issues pop up. You might be surprised by some of these, but not by others. Do you have anything to add?

  • Competency
    • Content knowledge (what to teach)
    • Pedagogical knowledge (how best to teach it; evidence-based assessment)
    • Adequate preparation (class, course)
    • Classroom management (e.g., strategies for dealing with sensitive issues like mental illness, gender differences, ugly history of IQ scores)
    • Self-assess “boundaries of competence” and don’t work beyond them (if must, obtain training)
    • Professional development
    • Seeking advice from and collaborating with colleagues to improve learning
    • Continual improvement (self, course, program, degree)
    • Scholarly teaching/SoTL: using new method without adequate research or preparation
  • Fairness
    • Diversity and inclusivity (access to materials including cost of the textbook, self-disclosure in class activities)
    • Assigning a textbook you don’t use (much)
    • Discourage and pursue cases of plagiarism, cheating
    • Textbook cost
    • Grading and evaluation is clear, competently done, consistent
    • Doing the SoTL work including withholding treatment to one group
    • Accommodations for special circumstances: extra grade chances, re-grades, make up a missed exam
    • Accurately describe your course, set up appropriate expectations (e.g., grades)
  • Faculty-student relationships
    • Trust and power
    • Authorship with graduate and undergraduate student collaborators
    • Writing reference letters for students you know have slim chances of getting in somewhere or who you don’t know that well (and not writing letters when you can)
    • Avoiding multiple (conflicting) roles: research supervisor, employer, teacher, mentor, evaluator, researcher (SoTL), TA/teaching supervisor
    • Consider the impact of challenging students’ core beliefs (e.g., God, evolution, trust in authority, gay rights…)
    • Social media: Facebook friends, Twitter following à blurring edge of professional relationship
    • Assigning a textbook when you’re and author and will receive royalties
    • Accepting gifts from students (and textbook publishers, for that matter)
  • Confidentiality
    • Grades files shared over email (security)
    • Sending grades over email to students using non-UBC email addresses
    • Storage and confidential shredding of paper material
    • Non-disclosure to parents
  • Law
    • Understanding copyright laws (including digital copyright)
    • Complying with copyright laws
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Posted in from the classroom, Reflections

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Is “active learning” in the classroom helping you learn or wasting time?

Posted on October 18, 2012 | Comments Off on Is “active learning” in the classroom helping you learn or wasting time?

Check out my latest article for the Ubyssey (UBC’s student-run newspaper). And in case you don’t feel like clicking the link, here’s a copy…

 

The other day I said to my class, “Please turn to the person next to you, and together come up with an example of a time when you or someone you know experienced classical conditioning,” a concept which I had just described.

Many students enthusiastically took advantage of this learning opportunity. But as I looked around the room, some students were checking email, some students were talking about other things, and others were simply staring blankly into space. I thought to myself: why aren’t more people taking advantage of this chance to study? The midterm is next week! This experience prompted me to think (again) about why I ask students to engage in particular activities on their own during class – and I thought you might be interested in knowing, too.

Why do I ask my students to do things like this? Because it works. The broad framework of what’s called “active learning” has taken higher education by storm over the last decade or two. Every time I ask students to discuss ideas and problems with people around them, participate in demonstrations, privately write a summary of what they just learned or engage in a team test, I am using some of the techniques of active learning.

There are dozens of examples of studies that have compared courses or topics that use active learning approaches to those that don’t. The specifics differ by course and discipline, but the message is clear: active learning results in improved student learning, relative to traditional lecture format. Granted, not just any activity will do; those that are tied to specific, measurable learning objectives are best. My teaching practice is far from perfect in this regard, but I strive for such synergy daily among my in-class activities and learning objectives (and assessments too, but that’s another story).

So why is it that some students choose to take advantage of active learning techniques in the classroom, and others sit idly? Maybe the idle students are idle when I’m lecturing too, but I just don’t notice as much. Perhaps some students are unmotivated by the task or are failing to take care of their physical health and therefore zone out. Okay. But I think another part is not realizing just how valuable those active learning opportunities can be.

Based on research from cognitive psychology, I suspect that active learning works because working with the material promotes recalling it, which strengthens memories. It can also help people attach new ideas to existing memories, so the new ideas stand a better chance of being recalled and perhaps even applied in new situations. By taking five minutes to think up an example from your own life of a concept — like classical conditioning, if you’re in my intro to psych class — you will remember it better than if you didn’t. Even if you’re tired or uninterested or thinking about your weekend plans or otherwise don’t feel like participating in active learning, remember that. Learning is challenging. It takes work on the part of the person trying to learn.

On the first day of each of my courses, I warn my students: I’m here to create conditions in which you might learn, but I’m not going to guarantee anything. You must make the choice to learn. And that’s what it comes down to. It’s your choice to waste your time or to help yourself learn.

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What do profs do all day?

Posted on October 3, 2012 | 1 comment

Wow, I’ve been writing a lot lately… just not here! Check out my latest article for the Ubyssey (UBC’s student-run newspaper). And in case you don’t feel like clicking the link, here’s a copy…

 

Most people probably think they could tell you what a university professor or instructor does. There’s probably little bit of reading, some research and some teaching. But how much do people actually know about how professors spend their days?

I’m a tenure-track faculty member here at UBC in the teaching stream. This means that next year, after four years of full-time teaching, my performance will be evaluated by colleagues, and if I am deemed “excellent” enough, I will be hired permanently by UBC. My title will change to senior instructor, but (I think!) that’s the only major change.

Indeed, the more common tenure-track stream for faculty involves being evaluated primarily on research. That means teaching vies for attention with research, the activity that ultimately determines whether a faculty member advances. I enjoyed doing research, but it was immediately clear to me that I love teaching students. I am passionate about the creative and deeply human process of helping someone think differently, so this teaching track is a perfect fit for me. That’s a glimpse into the big-picture career level of professorship. What does the daily life of a prof actually involve?

I teach about 500 students across three courses this term. That means I am physically in the classroom for nine hours each week. And I’m in the teaching stream: I teach double the amount of time as my closest research colleagues.

It’s easy to assume we do very little throughout a typical day, or that we just wait around for students to email us. When I was in undergrad, I used to think that was true. As it turns out, I work for about 60 hours each week (and some years that number has been as high as 75 or 80). Most of my time is spent preparing lessons, although the percentage of time I spend on course preparation has decreased over the past couple of years.

The first time I teach a course, I spend about 20 to 30 hours a week on that course alone. This preparation includes choosing and reading the textbook, deciding what concepts are most important or challenging or interesting, designing lessons that help students learn those concepts, and designing learning assessments like exams and assignments. All of this preparation requires an understanding of the discipline and how people learn, both of which inform my choices while creating learning experiences and assessments for my students. Each time I revisit a course, I strive to improve my expertise in how to teach it effectively. Sometimes this means overhauling entire lessons or assignments, but much of the time this means deepening my knowledge by reading journal articles and making more subtle changes to lessons based on last year’s notes and new developments in the field. After about four or five rounds of a course, I’m down to spending about eight hours a week on it, outside of class.

I also coordinate learning events, like speaker series. I sit on a number of committees to help make the university function well. And I also write. Writing is a major part of most academic posts. Last year I co-wrote a textbook on Research Methods. More recently, I have been writing an application to the federal agency that funds humanities research (called the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) to convince them to fund my upcoming conference on training graduate students to teach.

After that is a new syllabus for next term, and a research article for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. One of the challenges involved in academic work is constantly switching from major broad projects to day-to-day details of teaching courses. But it’s a fun challenge, and one that the general public needs to understand.

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Welcome back!

Posted on September 7, 2012 | Comments Off on Welcome back!

September 2012 is here, and the first week is already over! I forgot how tired I feel by Friday afternoons — wow! It’s like I can feel my body powering down. But my fatigue is warranted. This has been such a fun week! My husband and I kicked off the school year with a whirlwind trip to Ontario to witness my friend’s wedding last weekend. She and I lived together all through undergrad, and were basically inseparable during that time. A few of our other lovely friends from undergrad were there too, so it was wonderful to catch up and reminisce about good old Waterloo. The experience also served to remind me of what a profound impact my undergraduate experience had on my life, both intellectually and socially… which got me pumped to be a part of other people’s undergraduate experience!

On Tuesday I arrived in class at 5pm… and sat down in the student chairs. Yes, I’m taking a course! Why, you ask? Well, I want to. I value the classroom as a rich opportunity to learn, and I felt it was time to sit down and feel what it’s like to learn in that way again. I chose the course Psyc 312A: History of Psychology for many reasons. First, Dr. Andrea Perrino is amazing. I was a TA for her a long time ago and was inspired then by her enthusiasm. I wanted the chance to learn from her, as one teacher to another, to consider her pedagogical choices and prompt me to reflect on my own. Faculty rarely ever watch each other teach; I was grateful she agreed I could take her class for this rich opportunity. Second, I am (finally!) interested in the content! I’ve been teaching intro psych (3 years and counting), research methods (5 years and counting), and statistics (recently renewed after a few years’ hiatus). These are broad, generalist courses: my training in my home area of social psychology is useful but not always directly. Over these years these courses have prompted me to cultivate an interest in the discipline as a whole, and I felt it was time for me to really consider the origins and development of my discipline to enrich how and what I teach in these generalist courses. Psychology is only about 150 years old, so it shouldn’t be too hard, right? Ha!

One of the things Andrea (I mean… Dr. Perrino) did on her first day was started foremost with an introduction the the history of psychology. The topic. Not the syllabus. Sure, that came later, but she kicked off with a passionate rationale for why this course is important. It was inspiring, and influenced the way I began my courses on Wednesday. Instead of starting with the syllabus, I started with the topic, the reasons why it’s important to take this course. Based on feedback after that first class, I seem to have succeeded in inspiring at least some students to be excited about our course (even research methods!). In fact, I barely covered the syllabus at all in Intro, but did so using an i>clicker quiz today. I did that last year too, but this year I was more deliberate in my choice of what to reveal on the first day versus the second. The subject is most important… how we get there is important too, but secondary.

My students have been fantastic this week! Research methods felt like a class reunion from last year’s intro — fantastic to see so many of my fabulous students returning for more psychology, and I can’t wait to meet everyone else! And intro… well… I’ve never had two completely-filled hours of student meetings on the first day of class! I have had such fun meeting so many students this week. Their energy is palpable: it’s a new year, a new beginning, and we’re going to have a great time!

Here’s (sort of) what I see when I look out from the front of my intro psych classroom: 270ish energized students! Click on the image to enlarge it. See you next week!

 

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Posted in from life experiences, from the classroom

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