Lincoln Excellence Returns

A while back I posed the question “What is Lincoln Excellence?” and encouraged you, dear readers, to chime in by taking a survey that asked “How do you practice excellence in your classroom? Give an example of a practice or teaching technique that you feel promotes excellence in teaching and learning.”  I promised to share the answers, so here I go:

Seven people answered the question and there were a few common themes:

•  Emphasize problem solving and teach students how to think, not what to think
•  Combine some lecture or theory with group work that allows student to solve problems and discuss issues in groups
• Know the students and respect their opinions – teach students how to respect each other’s opinions
• Draw on same reading material and sources that are used at other reputable universities.
• Focus on learning and application rather than route memorization
• Push students to develop and grow by continually questioning everything
• Begin on time, use lessons plans to follow a well-developed syllabus, return assignments promptly 

According to the above list, we are absolutely amazing! I would send my child to a school that advertised the above as their goals for teaching and learning.

In the above list, there is one point that jumps out at me the most: Focus on learning and application rather than route memorization. This intrigues me, not only because I think it is extremely important – and probably the underlying reason why I use a lot of problem solving and discussion in all my classes, but because I think it is the most difficult to do well. It is so easy to ask students to memorize facts and then quiz them on those facts. It is much more difficult to come up with good assignments that includes the memorization, but then goes a step further and helps students find meaning in the memorized facts through real world application that helps them expand their learning and hopefully encourages them to become life-long learners. I would love to hear if anybody out there has figured out how to do this well! 

What is your greatest challenge in achieving teaching and learning excellence?

If you intended to reply to the survey three weeks ago, but let it slip too far down into the abyss of your inbox or to-do list, here is another opportunity: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PJRY9HW

If you prefer to share directly in this blog, please go ahead and add your thoughts on Lincoln Excellence below.

What is Lincoln Excellence in Teaching and Learning?

I find myself throwing around terms like “advancing the legacy” and “Lincoln Excellence” every now and then, especially when I’m trying to convince funding agencies that we are deserving of their attention. The word excellence is even part of the title of the office that I serve; The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.

I feel like I have a good grasp on what legacy means; it is the mark that Lincoln has made on the country and world through all its graduates. If we aim to advance the legacy, we simply (or not so simply) keep graduating students that succeed in their disciplines and intentionally work for positive change in their communities and in the world. This can be quantified and measured by the success of our alumni.

Lincoln excellence on the other hand – what is it? Excellence is “the quality of being outstanding or very good” according to Merriam Webster. Are we outstanding in our teaching practices? How do we know? What do we do to be outstanding? Part of me is convinced that we practice excellence in many things that we do in the classroom and beyond. The indirect measure of our excellence is the success of our students past Lincoln. But how can we measure excellence directly? What does excellence in the classroom look like? Is it our ability to engage students and help them learn? How do we know that what we individually consider excellence translates into learning that makes a difference for our students? Does your excellence look similar to my excellence? Are we aiming to educate students that show performance excellence or mastery excellence - the former being the ability to perform well on exams, while the latter includes the ability to use learned material to succeed in life.  Is excellence in a Visual Arts class the same as excellence in a Health Science or Math class? I am intrigued by Lincoln Excellence because I know that we produce outstanding graduates who go on to successfully pursue careers in government, the arts, music, accounting, law, science, medicine etcetera, but if somebody asked me for the recipe for how exactly we do this – and do it well – I would not be able to tell them. Can you?

I would love to read your thoughts on Lincoln Excellence in the classroom and beyond.

How do you practice excellence in your classroom?

Share your thoughts here or in this quick survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PJRY9HW

I will share any survey results in a future blog.

Motivation

Each semester there are students who don’t do well in our classes, no matter how hard we try to reach everyone.  Are these underperforming students, in your view, unable to learn the content or unmotivated to learn it (or some combination of both)? The following three articles address the motivation issue from different perspectives.

The first uses Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory, which says that three basic psychological needs affect motivation: 

• autonomy, 
• competence, and 
• relatedness. 

In it, Kelly gives suggestions for how to encourage autonomy, such as giving students choices over topics, content, or weight of grades for various projects.

In the second, Orlando focuses on the potential hazards of praising a student, arguing that praise can undermine rather than enhance performance and self-esteem because it leads the student recipients to believe that their intelligence is fixed, and thus not something that they can influence through action or effort (Carol Dweck’s concept of fixed vs. growth mindsets with respect to intelligence.) He argues that we need to praise students for their effort (“you have clearly put a lot of time and thought into this project and it shows”) and for their process (“I was impressed with your choice of research articles”)  and that we should focus on giving positive feedback (“here’s what you did well”) not praise (“this is a great paper.”)

The third discusses intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, offering nine strategies to move students from working to earn a passing grade to working because of love of subject, reminding us that students don’t move to higher-level thinking until lower-level needs are met.  In addition to creating a safe and supportive environment in our classrooms so as to meet students’ basic needs, Battista and Ruble remind us of the importance of  building activities into our courses that require students to draw on past experiences, share their learning expectations and goals, and reflect frequently on their performance to date and what they need to do to improve it.  They argue, “It is through the student's sense of accomplishment and vision for the future that intrinsic motivation is born. An approachable instructor can be the inspiration for this change in the student's mindset.”

How important do you see your role as motivator?  What has worked, or not worked, for you in this area?