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