{"id":383,"date":"2010-06-07T17:12:17","date_gmt":"2010-06-08T00:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/?p=383"},"modified":"2010-06-08T09:35:57","modified_gmt":"2010-06-08T16:35:57","slug":"pearls-of-wisdom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/2010\/06\/07\/pearls-of-wisdom\/","title":{"rendered":"pearls of wisdom"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today Sunaina<\/a> and I had the pleasure of lunching with Russ Day<\/a>, 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\u00a0idea 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\u00a0biggest 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,\u00a021st-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<\/em> getting about 2-3% of students feeling frustrated by\u00a0my 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\u00a07 Principles<\/a>, 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\u00a0perspective 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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. Continue reading pearls of wisdom<\/span>→<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4281],"tags":[4805,6175,8856,8405,8225],"class_list":["post-383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections-from-professional-development-activities","tag-cwsei","tag-gratitude","tag-high-expectations","tag-student-evaluations-of-teaching","tag-the-big-picture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":386,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions\/386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/catherinerawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}