Lessons Learned in the Classroom

 I can never resist articles that promise a finite number of answers: the three most important qualities of a good teacher, the five new technology tools everyone needs to know, the seven characteristics of a good manager, that sort of thing.  So when I saw Dr. Paula Cohen’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the 10 lessons she’s learned from her teaching career, I had to check it out. 

Cohen’s 10 lessons, learned over three decades of teaching English at Drexel University, were these:

1. Don't take things personally.
2. Be accountable to your students.
3. Make students accountable for their performance.
4. Simplify.
5. Don't rush—i.e., slow down.
6. Listen.
7. Use. (I was relieved to see that this didn’t refer to illegal substances but rather to using everything said or done in the classroom as part of the teaching process).
8. Connect learning to life.
9. Make form follow function. (Don’t adopt a new tool until you weigh both what will be gained and what will be lost.)
10. Trust your voice and amplify it. (Admit, for instance, when you don’t know something and then model “how not to know.”)

Her exploration of each of these 10 lessons is thought-provoking, and for me it raised the question of what else I would add. One “lesson” that came to mind was “Appreciate the joy.”  When I’m in the classroom, I’m doing something I love, and I think it’s important to my students and to myself that I remember to be grateful for that, even when faced with stacks of homework awaiting my attention or hours of meetings awaiting my presence.   

What would you add?  What lessons have you learned from your classroom during your teaching career?  Can we make it a baker’s dozen? Or two?

Authentic Learning

According to Authentic Learning for the 21st Century: An Overview, an interesting white paper published by EDUCAUSE, we need to immerse our students in authentic learning activities because it is through this sort of learning that they will develop

• The judgment to distinguish reliable from unreliable information
• The patience to follow longer arguments
• The synthetic ability to recognize relevant patterns in unfamiliar contexts
• The flexibility to work across disciplinary and cultural boundaries to generate innovative solutions (p.2) 

If I am a writing teacher, then, my focus should not be what I want to teach my students about writing but how I can teach them to be writers.
 

While the article focuses on technology-based examples, it includes an interesting 10-point checklist that teachers can use to judge the authenticity of any learning component.

1. Real-world relevance: Authentic activities match the real-world tasks of professionals in practice as nearly as possible. Learning rises to the level of authenticity when it asks students to work actively with abstract concepts, facts, and formulae inside a realistic—and highly social—context mimicking “the ordinary practices of the [disciplinary] culture.”
2. Ill-defined problem: Challenges cannot be solved easily by the application of an existing algorithm; instead, authentic activities are relatively undefined and open to multiple interpretations, requiring students to identify for themselves the tasks and subtasks needed to complete the major task.
3. Sustained investigation: Problems cannot be solved in a matter of minutes or even hours. Instead, authentic activities comprise complex tasks to be investigated by students over a sustained period of time, requiring significant investment of time and intellectual resources.
4. Multiple sources and perspectives: Learners are not given a list of resources. Authentic activities provide the opportunity for students to examine the task from a variety of theoretical and practical perspectives, using a variety of resources, and requires students to distinguish relevant from irrelevant information in the process.
5. Collaboration: Success is not achievable by an individual learner working alone. Authentic activities make collaboration integral to the task, both within the course and in the real world.
6. Reflection (metacognition): Authentic activities enable learners to make choices and reflect on their learning, both individually and as a team or community.
7. Interdisciplinary perspective: Relevance is not confined to a single domain or subject matter specialization. Instead, authentic activities have consequences that extend beyond a particular discipline, encouraging students to adopt diverse roles and think in interdisciplinary terms.
8. Integrated assessment: Assessment is not merely summative in authentic activities but is woven seamlessly into the major task in a manner that reflects real-world evaluation processes.
9. Polished products: Conclusions are not merely exercises or substeps in preparation for something else. Authentic activities culminate in the creation of a whole product, valuable in its own right.
10. Multiple interpretations and outcomes: Rather than yielding a single correct answer obtained by the application of rules and procedures, authentic activities allow for diverse interpretations and competing solutions.  (pp. 3 – 4)

Do any of those 10 checkpoints stand out to you with respect to an assignment that has worked well in your class? Please share a brief description of that activity—what you do and how it works?  Let’s start an authentic Lincoln learning list!

Art Across the Disciplines

Guest Blogger: Saadia Lawton

During a recent conversation with a colleague outside of the Visual Arts field, she lamented that an attempt to incorporate art into her class discussion about literature did not ago as well as she intended. For her, the discourse with her students was not as lively and did not transcend the common art criticism often heard when people outside the field are introduced to art: “That’s art! It’s ugly. I don’t like it.” What this professor wanted was an opportunity to introduce art to students outside the field and ensure that they would use it as a means to contextualize her literary lesson. As we talked further, I realized how often images are used to provide context outside the field, but rarely discussed in a way that leads to a deeper understanding and appreciation for what the specific artwork conveys about the artist, the subject matter, the event represented or people depicted, and the audience that made/used it at the time of its creation. Rarely do conversations about the artwork, outside the field, move beyond what the art represents to address why it is important and what additional information can its visual cues offer to our greater understanding about a specific period or people being studied.

In order to facilitate a conversation about any form of Visual Culture, it helps to become familiar with the terms used to discuss and describe what the artwork shows. In one of the University required core courses, ART 200: Introduction to Art, we prepare students to observe, discuss and write about different kinds of artwork. One of the first lessons taught focuses on the 15 design elements and principles that comprise the bases of our discourse. Color, line, light (value), mass, shape, space, texture, time and motion comprise the design elements. The design principles include balance, contrast, directional force, emphasis and subordination, repetition and rhythm, scale and proportion, unity and variety. Some of these are self-explanatory, while others require a little more discussion and practice to enable accurate identification of the element of principle in question. Ultimately, the goal in learning these basic terms is to get students adept at seeing an artwork from different perspectives. As they learn to look they systematically use the design elements and principles to collect data, and process the visual cues in order to construct a thesis statement that ties information about how the artwork was created to its content or meaning (why it was created and what it informs us about the event, the people, the period…etc.).

Educators and students who master this approach are capable of using almost any artwork to contextualize the lesson. This is the reason why we see art used for almost everything we experience in our day to day lives. We not only live in a visual world but we form part of the information acquired, processed and meanings ascribed daily. One of the Best Practices that the late Dr. Lori Lynn Kata used in her classes involved the compare and contrast approach. It is relatively simple way to train novices to learn how to look at art and collect the necessary data about the representation that can lead to enlivened debates that move beyond criticism into deeper conversations about what the art is about (content), how the artist used the subject matter to convey certain sentiments, and why the approach was or was not effective at the time. This teaching method can be accomplished with two artworks by the same artists, by two different artists, artworks completed at different time periods about the same subject and so forth. I recommend the use of a graphic organizer, such as a Venn diagram because it aids students in the processes of collection, recording and sharing information later. In my own classes, I have broken students up into small groups that rotate between 3-4 different artworks either collecting data or making notations on large post-it notes. All of these approaches encourage better communication about art within the context of any lesson plan and activates a cross-curricular conversation about art and its important role in any other field.

As we continue to be a society inundated with images, we will realize just how much art is a part of our daily lives. For this reason, the Visual Arts is one of the most diverse and interdisciplinary fields often referenced by outside scholarship. When information garnered from an artwork is observed, collected, and discussed, it opens up opportunities to explore a different field from a new perspective. I encourage you to find innovative ways to introduce art into your class lessons and witness how the visual provides an exceptional tool for learning.