All posts by Isabeau Iqbal

Assessing team process in student learning teams

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This blog post was inspired by a session on assessing team processes that I attended at the Festival of Learning.

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Teamwork by Easa Shamih https://flic.kr/p/91hqQ5

The session presenters were from Royal Roads University (RRU) where teamwork is the pillar of most programs.  Because teamwork is such an integral part of their course and program design, and because teamwork also presents many challenges, the  Coaching & Counselling Centre (CCC) and Centre for Teaching and Education Technology (CTET) have partnered to develop resources and workshops to help students and faculty members improve team-based learning1 at RRU.

Below are some notes and learnings from the session on assessing team processes:

  • When instructors design a project that involves teams, they often measure outcomes and not process. Yet, assessing the process matters; by gaining insight into how teams function and how individual members contribute, one can build healthier teams.
  • Resources from TeamsWork, the RRU initiative, can be found  here. They include workshop slides, activities, information from the literature and more. This site is worth exploring!
  • ITP Metrics is a Canadian site that provides free “team dynamics diagnostics, peer feedback, and behavioural assessments.” I had a chance to review a sample report and was impressed. The reports are free because the work is associated with a funded research project.
  • Some  advantages of team work can be found here.

Other resources this session inspired me to look into:

  • We often use the term ‘team’ when we mean ‘group’.  Interested in some differences? See here.
  • Carnegie Mellon’s Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation has some terrific resources on group work, including a number of inventories and assessments.
  • The Association of American Colleges & Universities has a helpful and detailed teamwork rubric available for download.
  • iPeer  is an open source web application that allows instructors to develop and deliver rubric-based peer evaluations.
  • Kahoot.com is a free online tool that can be used to engage students/workshop participants in active learning (we used this at the Festival session; the downside is that results are in a spreadsheet).

If you have resources to share, please leave them in the comments or be in touch with me via Twitter or email.

  1. ‘Team-based learning’ in the context of RRU is not the same as the Team-Based-Learning developed by Larry Michaelsen.

Social media profiles: Best practices for mastering your digital footprint

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At the Festival of Learning, I attended Dr. Greg Chan’s sessions:

This was a terrific opportunity to spend a day exploring web visibility in my professional life and planning for changes in my online portfolio. Below are a list of links and random ideas related to the workshop and my learning.

How do I show up?

To check what shows up when I Google myself, open up an incognito window in Chrome and search my name. Any surprises? I was happy to see that what appeared was: my isabeauiqbal.ca site, my CTLT affiliation (I expected this to be lower down), my LinkedIn, Twitter, and then some pictures (mostly me).

Sites: Must have/Good Idea/Maybe

  • According to Greg, the “must join” list is: Twitter, Facebook (just can’t do it), LinkedIn and Google+
    • for research specific: Academia.edu, ORCID and Research Gate (Consider Google Scholar). Greg said ORCiD was especially good for researchers wanting to collaborate and gain greater exposure. The site gives you something like a DOI and also a QR code (which you can make part of your conference presentation)
  • the “strongly consider” joining list is: Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube
  • the “think about” list is: Storify, Litsy

Twitter: Hashtags and Abbreviations to Know about

#WednesdayWisdom
#Scholar Sunday
#AcaDowntime

ICYMI – (in case you missed it)
FTW (for the win) – sometimes about yourself, but can be of someone else to celebrate their accomplishment
HT (hat tip) – give an accolade to
PRT – please retweet (If you want to make RT stronger, tag people)
TT – throwback Thursday
YOLO – you only live once (i.e. photo of you Skydiving or less dramatic)

Building your Site and Hosting

Efficiency

  • Consider Hootsuite or Buffer to manage posts on social media
  • Gravatar – changes your picture in all your social sites
  • Tweet deck  (visually helpful way to see what you want to see on Twitter)

Other

  • PicMonkey: edit your pictures  
  • Medium.com: cross post from my blog to this site (Thanks for the suggestion @trent_g)
  • Fiverr: Hire people to help with WordPress, photo editing and tons more

For additional perspectives on Greg’s sessions, you can also see:
@fol_media            #socialmediaBCTLC         #FoL16

My Next steps for Social Media Presence

As a result of attending Greg’s workshops, here is what I have committed to:

  • Change the look of my existing isabeauiqbal.ca site to something that looks more like kathleenbortolic.com
  • Build my academia.edu profile (was dormant and I only vaguely remembered I had it)
  • I will further explore and consider ORCID, Vitae and Research Gate.

Facilitating effective meetings: Creating desired meeting results

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A facilitator is one who contributes structure and process to interactions so groups are able to function effectively and make high-quality decisions.* (Bens, 2012)

team meeting
I recently attended a full day session on building facilitation skills for meetings. Despite the large amount of time I spend in meetings—as a participant and as a facilitator-participant—I have never formally learned about meeting design. The facilitator, Charles Holmes  ran a great session and I learned a lot. In this blog post, I write about one key idea from the session: Desired meeting results (the ‘learning outcomes’ equivalent of meetings).

Desired Meeting Results

Desired meeting results (DMRs) are concise written statements sent to meeting participants ahead of time, which help participants picture what they must accomplish by the end of the meeting.

Characteristics of DMRs

  • Are specific and measurable
  • Are nouns (not verbs) [the verbs appear in the agenda]
  • Answer the stem “By the end of the meeting, we will have…” (a decision, a list, an agreement, an awareness, a plan, etcetera)

Why use DMRs?

DMRs help participants gain clarity on the following:

  • What do we want to accomplish in this meeting?
  • How will we know this meeting has been a success?
  • What do we want to leave this meeting with?

How DRMs differ from meeting purpose and agenda

DMRs are different from the purpose, which describes the overall “why?” of having the meeting. And, they are different from the agenda, which describes the how of getting to the DMRs (the agenda is where you find the verbs).

Below is the framework that was suggested at the workshop. As mentioned above, this information would be sent to participants ahead of time:

  1. Why we are having this meeting (this is the purpose)
  2. DMRs
  3. How we will achieve the DMRs (this is the agenda; it links every item to a DMR)

Here is my stab at applying the framework to a meeting I am having on Tuesday.

Revisiting the DMRs at the close of the meeting

At the end of the meeting, it is important to revisit the DMRs. And, though this isn’t uniquely related to the DMRs, it is also useful to spend some time debriefing “What worked?” and “What would you do differently next time?”

For additional resources on meeting design, see:

MIT Human Resources

Into the Heart of Meetings: Basic Principles of Meeting Design (Book, 2013)

Let’s Stop Meeting Like This: Tools to Save Time and Get More Done (Book, 2014)

And, of course, work by Ingrid Bens (quoted at top of page)

 

*Bens, I. (2012). Facilitating with ease: Core skills for facilitators, team leaders and members, managers, consultants, and trainers. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.

Desired meeting results (sample)

facilitation, Uncategorized

 

Desired Meeting Results Framework

Why are we having this meeting (the purpose)
DMR (specific, measurable, nouns instead of verbs)
How (agenda – links every item to a DMR)

Here is my stab at applying the above framework to a meeting I am having on Tuesday.

Why: To advance the work of the BMLSc program review and renewal initiative

DMR:

By the end of this meeting, we will have
1. Program-level learning outcomes that we are ready to send out to graduates, course leads, and section leads for their feedback

2.
a) Feedback to CH on the draft surveys so that she can prepare a revised version
b) A date selected by when the revised surveys will be ready

3.
a) Decision about who will craft a draft of the text that will accompany the surveys
b) A date selected by when the draft text will be ready

4. A meeting date to discuss a plan for the next 6-12 months (we may or may not get to this)

Agenda:
1. As a group, review the PLOs on the Google doc and make further edits.
2. Amanda and Isabeau to provide feedback to CH on the 2 draft surveys. If helpful, we can all spend time revising the surveys using the survey tool. Decide by when CH can have next version to share.
3. Discuss who should craft the email that will accompany the surveys and make a decision. Agree on when that survey will be sent out.
4. Determine a meeting time during which we (who?) will create a long-term (6-12 months) plan that can be presented to Andrea H before the end of July.

Predicting: 5 key messages from “Small Teaching”

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I recently read “Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning,” an excellent book1 by Dr. James Lang. To help me remember what I read and as a way of sharing some key messages from the book with a broader audience, I have decided to write some blog posts on select concepts. The first post was about retrieval practice and this second one is about predicting.

“Making predictions about material that you wish to learn increases your ability to understand that material and retrieve it later” (Lang, p.43)

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1) When students take time (even just a few seconds) to make predictions about material they are about to learn, it increases their retention (or the memorization of facts) and comprehension (or the use of those facts in other contexts).

2) Even when the prediction the student makes is incorrect, it can increase subsequent retention. However, as Lang cautions, learners “have to receive fairly immediate feedback on the accuracy of their predictions or pretest answers if we don’t want those wrong answers to leave a deeper impression than the correct ones” (p.52). Providing fast feedback to students is essential in all prediction activities.

3) Prediction has a positive effect on retention and application of knowledge for the following reasons:

a) prediction helps implant new facts more strongly into the brain’s network of connections (and this promotes the activation of new facts in diverse contexts). “Prediction helps lay a foundation for richer, more connected knowing.” (Lang, 2016, p.49)

b) prediction activities can help students identify gaps in their knowledge.

c) prediction activities (and pretests) give students a better understanding of what the final assessment may consist of and this might help improve their study preparation.

4) As the instructor, you should speak with your students about why you are asking them to make predictions and/or take pretests on material they haven’t learned yet. By doing so, they will understand the ‘power of prediction’ and won’t feel you are being unfair.

5) Prediction questions should be at the conceptual level. In other words do not ask questions that are ultra-specific and that require students to draw on precise prior knowledge. Lang reminds us: “Predictions work because they require students to draw up whatever knowledge they might have that will assist them in making their prediction.” (p.59)

To learn more, see the Faculty Focus post titled: Learning on the Edge: Classroom Activities to Promote Deep Learning by James Lang.

Reference: Lang, J. (2016). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

Photo credit: Motion blur by Frank Monnerjahn  flic.kr/p/4Ny6Md