Blog Entry #10

Just in case those of us in the introductory teaching course weren’t feeling sufficiently intimidated by our new role as teachers, chapters 23, 24, and 25 of Teaching Tips remind us that we must not only ensure that our students master all the content our university and department demands, we must also help students become self-regulated learners, teach them how to think, and teach them ethics.

When I was an undergraduate, I had some professors I really liked, respected, and learned from, but few—if any—did many of the things outlined in this section of Teaching Tips. Given that most of my professors were educated between 1960 and 1980, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by that, but I think my teaching would be helped if I had seen these teaching behaviors modeled when I was younger. Nonetheless, reading this section motivated me to try to model as many of these positive teacher behaviors as possible.

Before proceeding, I need to note that this week’s reading provided a relatively cursory overview of very complex pedagogical issues. As such, a lot of information was only hinted at, so much of what I wanted to know was not readily available in the text. I found myself going online and searching for some of the lists, surveys, inventories, statements, and other artifacts referenced in Teaching Tips. This means that—as usual—this blog entry will detail my responses to the week’s reading and contain a mix of what suggestions I will incorporate into my own teaching and what suggestions I probably won’t incorporate into my own teaching. It also means that instead of ending the entry with a few links to interesting internet articles or tools, I will insert several links—throughout the entry—to sites that provide some background information about some things I encountered in the book.


Chapter 23: Teaching Students How to Become More Strategic and Self-Regulated Learners

This chapter focuses on linking good teaching practices with a variety of effective learning strategies and skills. The essence of the chapter is that teachers should do what they can to help students learn how to learn. Part of this means making explicit as much as possible the content that will be learned in class and methods the teacher believes students can use to learn the content.

In my course next semester, I will also make explicit to my students my ideas about how communication scholars learn and think. One of my course objectives is that students will develop some basic media literacy skills. Media literacy embodies the concept of communication expertise in this context. And as we view mass media artifacts and discuss media issues throughout the semester, I can actively model the kinds of media literacy skills I want my students to practice.

There is, though, a limit to what the average teacher can achieve. Teaching Tips talks about helping students evaluate their learning styles and increasing their self-awareness. I’m not an education expert, so teaching study skills would probably not be very easy for me. Furthermore, spending too much time teaching what some might see as remedial study skills could be misconstrued or even counterproductive. Having said that, there are some tools online that may be used in class to help students identify how best they learn. For example, this survey is easy to take and score and gives students a general sense of whether they learn best visually, aurally, or kinesthetically. This questionnaire must be taken online, but is able to show students where they fit within a range of learning styles (this is more realistic because none of us learns exclusively in any one way). The styles are active versus reflective, sensing versus intuitive, visual versus verbal, and sequential versus global learners. These activities do not require much time and could be used to introduce the notion of discipline-specific approaches to thinking and learning.

Helping students recognize how best they learn is only the first step, however. Teachers must also do their best to ensure that their teaching methods target their students’ learning styles. Most good teachers incorporate many teaching strategies into their lessons anyway, but they may not know which strategies appeal to which learning styles. A brief list showing these linkages can be found here.

Next semester, I will be teaching an entry-level course. Teaching Tips says this means that most students will have very little prior knowledge of the field, which makes building bridges between old knowledge and new knowledge more difficult. Luckily for me (and my students), my course is a mass media course, so most, if not all, of my students should have some prior knowledge by virtue of having been consumers of mass media throughout their lives. They may not have prior knowledge of media criticism, but they’ve probably heard some things growing up about the dangers of watching too much TV, for example, and the criticisms of video games and rap or rock music. In short, even if they haven’t practiced media literacy skills themselves, they’ve had some exposure to these skills as practiced by others.

A simple way to illustrate this with students could be to ask them how their parents or guardians monitor and control their television and movie viewing when they were younger? Did they ever watch something that was too “mature” for them? What affect might it have had?

The entry-level course is also where students are introduced to a discipline, and I am very excited about having the chance to introduce students to the fields of communication and mass communication. I think I will also have a communication department faculty member—ideally one who mostly teaches grad students or upper-level undergraduates—come in and speak about the discipline and being a scholar within the discipline.

This semester, I’ve seen many students struggle in the class I’ll teach next semester. Part of the problem, I think, is that the students are suffering from what Teaching Tips calls gaps in their knowledge that aren’t being revealed until the exams. Based on this experience, I will gauge students’ knowledge and understanding more frequently, through short writing assignments, in-class Q&A, short quizzes, and other tools.

My favorite phrase of the chapter came at the end: “executive control processes,” which the book used to describe students’ power to organize, manage, maintain, and monitor their own learning. This means that students have the power to set and achieve their own learning goals, but teachers can help students evaluate their learning skills. The book referenced a four-phase sequence (developed by Zimmerman and Paulson) for doing this, but then gave no details. I searched for publicly available editions of New Directions For Teaching And Learning, the journal in which this article was published, in vain. However, I was able to learn a bit about the four phases. Students met with an instructor who modeled four reading-comprehension strategies: predicting what is likely to happen next in the text; clarifying difficulties occurring during reading; summarizing, and setting reading goals.


Chapter 24: Teaching Thinking

Here Teaching Tips revisits learner-centered instruction, saying that in response to research findings that support pedagogical reforms, most universities have added “critical thinking or problem-solving skills” to the list of standard curriculum objectives (p. 319). To this end, and in keeping with teaching methods discussed earlier in the semester, I hope my media literacy skill development ideas and case study/discussion formats will stimulate critical thinking in my students.

We are also reintroduced to Bloom’s Taxonomy, but this time we also learn of a revised version. I always liked Bloom’s Taxonomy because the verbs linked to each of the learning orders helped me grasp the intent of the corresponding objectives. The revised version has even more verbs, as the names of the orders were changed from nouns to verbs. This makes the taxonomy even better, as far as I’m concerned. And I agree that “create” is higher than “evaluate.”

The other element from this short chapter that got my attention was the reminder that skilled test writers can use multiple-choice tests to tap higher-order objectives. I found a helpful example of multiple-choice items applied across the taxonomy here on the Penn State website, though please note these examples were written based on the original taxonomy.


Chapter 25: The Ethics of Teaching and the Teaching of Ethics

I almost wish we had read this chapter earlier in the semester when we were talking about proper teacher-student relationships, as it helped me to frame the issue in terms of teachers’ responsibilities to different groups—namely students, colleagues, the university, and maybe others. Perhaps teachers’ answers to ethical questions depend on which responsibilities teachers prioritize.

I was very interested to see that the bad teaching behavior most commonly engaged in was simply being unprepared for class. This is probably unavoidable for any teacher on some days, perhaps more unavoidable for graduate teaching assistants. Reading this did remind me that I want to prepare as much of this class as possible over the semester break!

The chapter mentioned that researchers identified 126 different behaviors that teachers were then asked to rate. The bad behaviors viewed as most serious were segmented into seven clusters. The labels for the clusters were noted in the text, but I wanted examples. So I dug up the document online. The text then alluded to a statement of professional ethics devised by the American Association of University Professors, which I also found online.

Making the classroom a place where safe but open debate can occur is not easy. Discussing sensitive issues can make many students uncomfortable. The book suggests drawing up rules for how debates or talks on these subjects would be conducted in the classroom. I think this is an excellent idea. I found a good example online. It includes alerting students to potentially controversial topic discussions in the syllabus and making sure that the teacher protects all students equally in the face of heated exchanges or potential conflict.

I am planning to have students write online media literacy blogs in my class next semester. To respect confidentiality, I’m going to encourage students to set up their blogs under pseudonyms, in the hopes that they will be more willing to write truthfully about their opinions and experiences.

Finally, Teaching Tips argued that we should teach some values and that all teachers end up teaching values through behavior, if not instruction. I agree that teachers do instill values in their students through modeling behaviors, in and out of the classroom. And I don’t disagree that all schooling is generally geared toward socializing students to be honest and have respect for others as human beings. How these values are taught, though, is another matter.

Research has shown that students learn most deeply when obtain knowledge through their own trial and error. This is at least as true for values as for fact retention. Values, after all, are emotional associations with issues and events, and if not internalized are not truly values at all. Students must be exposed to issues relating to honesty and human rights in a way that they come to appreciate those values in a genuine way. Simply being lectured about university policy or a particular instructor’s view on gender-sensitive language, for instance, may even be somewhat counterproductive, though it is important for students to know the university’s policies on such matters.

I’ll be giving this more though over the coming weeks and look forward to a healthy classroom discussion (in COMM 702) about this, since I expect values to be a recurring theme in my mass media class next semester. TV shows, music, movies, the internet—all these things tend to be judged based on values, in one way or another. How I approach discussing values will matter.

As a final note in this entry, I found an excellent teacher behavior inventory for students.
Originally printed in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 1983, it lists many good teaching behaviors. Students are asked to indicate the extent to which the teacher models these behaviors and whether the students would like to see more or less of this behavior. Filling this out may require a bit more time than the typical teacher evaluation, but I think it could be very helpful in providing the teacher with specific feedback about what he or she is doing (or not doing) in the classroom.