It's less about content, more about process

I'm back today from the Society for Teaching & Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) annual meeting. Last year the event was in Cape Breton, but this year the conference was in the neighborhood in Kingston, Ontario. FYI - Kingston is beautiful! I want to go back for a visit with my husband to actually see more of the attractions. My impression, though, is that Kingston is small (as my friend put it, "Rush hour is from 4-4:15"... perfect), walkable, and has the most gorgeous architecture. In addition, there were so many great restaurants to choose from! As a person who lives to eat, great restaurants within walking distance are actually an important travel variable for me ;)

But obviously it was the conference that brought me to Kingston this year. I started going last year on the advice of my friend at UBC, Dr. Catherine Rawn. Catherine is a recently-tenured teaching stream lecturer at UBC, and has been a great mentor and friend to me since my days as a teaching post-doctoral fellow in Vancouver. She passed on some wise words from one of her mentors, "If you only go to one teaching conference, go to STLHE."

Fireworks at Fort Henry during the STLHE 2014 banquet

There are a lot of teaching & learning conferences to choose from, & many of them are discipline-specific. There are three psychology-specific teaching conferences that I know of. However, I have deliberately chosen to go to STLHE because it's not discipline-specific. There are so many great innovations in teaching at the university/college level across the disciplines, & my experience is that we're all trying to do the same thing: teach critical thinking skills in a way that engages students in the learning process. 

One of the themes that I see emerging from these kinds of conferences is that it's less about the content, it's more about the process. I don't expect that my students will remember the specific details for the experiments I talk about in lecture 2 months after the course has ended. If they can recall some general effects (can you remember what transfer appropriate processing is?), that would be awesome. But besides that, I want students to walk out of my courses with the confidence to ask the question, "How do you know that?" when they hear a claim on the news. Writing notes by long-hand is better for learning compared to writing notes by computer. How do we know that? Did the researchers rule out the possibility that it's because students on computers are often doing anything but taking notes? How did they explain this advantage for hand-written notes? Does that explanation need some work? Does it warrant another experiment to test the validity of the explanation? Then I want them to be motivated to go find the answers to their questions.

In one of the keynote addresses, Dr. Eric Mazur made the point that as an independent academic, no one in my discipline expects me to be able to provide an exact definition of transfer appropriate processing. I probably can, but if I forget, I can look up the answer.  I'm not being judged by my colleagues about whether I know the information, but rather about how I use it to build arguments about cognition & perception. Mazur also made the point that assessment in higher education is often at odds with this truth. It has really motivated me to work harder at introducing critical thinking exercises in class & on my methods of assessments (exams & assignments, alike). This is something I try to do anyway, but I think it will also be really helpful to make this motivation clear to students in September.

I always find conferences so inspiring. It's really wonderful to connect with other people who are so interested & dedicated to giving students a wonderful education experience. I'm incorporating a few of the ideas I gathered from the conference into my courses for the fall, & I'm looking forward to next year already :D

Introspections on introspection (whoa. meta.)

I decided to call my blog on teaching & learning in higher education "Introspection" as an homage to Wundt, Titcher, & all the other introspectionists from the early days of psychology. Introspection is the examination of one's own thoughts & mental processes, & has been around since well before Plato & Aristotle's discussions of the act.

While introspection served as one of the methods on which modern psychology was grounded, the idea of introspection as a method of studying human behavior has been poo-pooed for almost a century. This was largely due to the influence of John B. Watson, who argued that the discipline of psychology should concern itself with the prediction & control of behavior, stating that "Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness." Ouch.

But introspection isn't in & of itself a useless endeavor. In several of my courses I include introspection-like assignments in which I ask students to engage in reflective writing around what they're learning. I ask students to examine their own learning process, & try to make a personal connection between academic concepts & methods, & their own lives. If introspection is so terrible for studying human behavior, what's the point of these assignments? It turns out that introspection – self-reflection,  bringing the self into the learning process, whatever you want to call it – is phenomenal for making information stick! Seriously guys, if you want to learn something, write about it in your own words, & try to drawn in new connections. The benefit of introspection is due to the fact that the knowledge that is being acquired is also being transformed, and in many cases, new information is being generated by the writer.

I do a lot of introspection about my own process as a teacher. I really consider every event that happens in my teaching practice, and I use those events & introspections to inform my future practice. I've also found that students tend to ask me about a lot of the decisions I've made in organizing my courses, often with the assumption that I haven't really thought about it. The reality is, I've definitely thought about it. A lot. In fact, sometimes I agonize about what seems like an small decision, like how will students submit an assignment? How many levels should I use in my marking rubrics? Cardigan or no cardigan? (ok, that last one was an easy decision - always yes to a cardy! I get cold easily. )

So, I'm going to share! I'm not going to lie to you - putting it in writing is also going to be a big help for me. Pausing to reflect on why I'm doing something has in the past made me realize this is not the way to achieve your goal, Kristie. I read a paper recently extolling the virtues of reflective writing assignments in which a student reported, "...if I don't understand it when reading, when I write it, it just so happens I do understand it for some reason." True dat :D

Just testing things out.

Imagine I had something to say here.