Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
But it's very humbling, by the end of the semester,
when they self-reflect, and we open it up.
This means that this is a friendly atmosphere, and we have
discussion, you know, what we talk about stays in the room.
We're all friends here.
About their point of view, and it's dynamic
what happens in there.
And at the end of the semester, everyone said I didn't realize
about myself, these are the things I need to work on before
I go into the classroom, and work with the many types
of students I will.
It's very humbling that they admit to something.
That they were mistaken about where they thought they were.
And you talk through the dialogue, and in this critical
thinking, listening to someone else's perspective that they
didn't have before.
So I see tremendous growth, and I wish there was a way
to take those activites, and channel them right into some
Comp I papers, or something.
Because they forget, when they get very passionate about
whatever those issues are, and they just write, and they
think it through.
And then they begin to come in with articles to back up,
you know, some expert that said this, and here it is.
I think it's a tremendous growth in four months for some of those
particularly second semester freshmen, who are scared
to death, it seems like, when they come in there.
But I think that they are moving toward this, and they don't even
realize they are.
(Dr. Lee). Oh, and they don't.
You know, again, Perry makes the observation that the most
critical move that students make between, basically, from,
whether it be multiplicity to relativism, this idea that it's
not authority that is the ultimate prevaricator
of a decision, but my own judgment about what evidence is,
that that is the biggest leap that they make.
It's a huge leap, and they don't realize that they're making it,
very often.
So, real interesting, very interesting stuff.
Alright, let us move on here, and we're going to get
a little bit more concrete.
And those of you who were here this morning, this will be
a little bit of a review.
But I'm going to take a look, now, at a very systematic course
design model, not my creation, it's just a very common
instructional design model.
And it begins with intended learning outcomes.
And we've been spending a ton of time, up until this point,
talking about the intended learning outcomes that we hope
to get from inquiry guided learning.
Developing habits of independent inquiry, thinking critically,
intellectual growth and maturity, and taking
responsibility for one's own learning.
So those are the intended learning outcomes.
And then, particularly, okay, however you would define,
particularly those first two for your particular discipline.
Okay?
Now, assessments of student performance, that's kind of
what, that's what we talked a lot about, or more about
this morning.
So we're actually not going to spend a lot of time,
this afternoon, talking about them.
What we are going to talk more about is the third part,
which is the learning experiences because
the critical thing about inquiry guided learning is that you
are driving learning through these learning experiences.
Learning experiences that specifically get students
to grapple with problems, questions, and issues for which
there is no single answer.
And they grapple with them, often, up front, not we learn
this general stuff, and then we encounter a problem.
You give them the problem first.
Joe and I were talking about this at the end
of the morning session.
You know, beginning journalism students who are learning
how to interview.
Do you first give them general principles of interviewing,
and then send them out to interview somebody?
Or, do you first give them a kind of low impact interviewing
problem, like interviewing a classmate about his or her
childhood, or whatever it happens to be, and then talk
about that experience?
And out of that experience, students will begin to learn,
there are some good ways of interviewing people,
and some not so good ways of interviewing people.
So it's kind of turning the process around.
So, with inquiry guided learning, a big part of it is
the learning experience.
Right?
So we're going to really focus on the learning experience
in inquiry guided learning.
And, the other piece is so-called situational factors.
And you've already brought up some of these.
Who are the students?
Are students at EIU different now than they
were 12 years ago?
What do students in 2008 need that students in 1996 didn't
really need?
You know?
Where does your course stand in the curriculum?
Does it, are students supposed to fulfill some
requirement for this?
You know, is the course online, or is it face to face?
You know, all of these situational factors that you
have to think about when you're thinking about the course.
Okay.
Going back to the learning experiences.
So we talked about, a lot about the intended learning outcomes.
Now, again, I'm focusing on the learning experience.
There are a variety of experiences that you can give
students that are inquiry experiences, and some of them
are more supported than others.
And these are presented as kind of a continuum, beginning with
one that is really, kind of, removed from students actually
doing the inquiry, to the very bottom one where students
are actually posing their own questions, and going off,
or problems and then going off in a very, very, unguided way.
And learning, pretty much as you would, either as a researcher
or, you know, as yourself as a learner in other areas.
So, reading very generally about the nature of inquiry.
Or reading or analyzing short journal articles.
Or analyzing case studies about reseach projects.
I'm in the process of, really, re-reading a book about
inquiry guided learning that was published in the 1990s
by faculty at Hampshire College.
A small, kind of, elite college, experimental college
in Massachusetts, whose entire curriculum is built
around inquiry.
And one of the instructors of a science course describes how she
teaches a first year course on, it's actually kinesiology,
so I wish we had our kinesiology person.
Do we have any kinesiologists here in the room?
Thank you.
She teaches about muscle response, or muscle reactivity,
or whatever.
And students first learn how to read a journal article,
you know, a highly technical journal article, which they
first confront and think there's no way I can read this.
But she has developed a way of getting them to read the article
so that over time they're not only learning how to read
the article, but they also get a window
into the scientific process.
Which then frees them, later on in the semester to begin to ask
their own questions about muscle reactivity.
Something that they, themselves, are very curious about because
many of them are involved in athletics or some other form
of physical activity.
Observing and interviewing researchers
about their projects.
Analyzing and synthesizing data compiled by other researchers.
Doing preparatory exercises to actual research.
And then conducting inquiry about questions generated
by others or self.
So this is a kind of continuum of inquiry, if you will,
that progresses from the rather, fairly passive, actually being
a bit distant from the inquiry process yourself, to one where
you're very directly involved in inquiry.
Okay, what I would like to do now is to, let me just go back
here, kind of refresh my, reorient myself...is to give you
a couple of examples before we break, of how do we actually do
this in the classroom.
And these are both going to be examples from courses
I've taught.
And they're both, they're two first year courses.
And I would call the first one kind of inquiry.
It's moving from a more traditional course to one that
is more inquiry guided.
But it's probably not quite there yet.
And then the second course is one that I would call quite
inquiry guided, although, as I've thought about it, I would
do it differently if I taught the course again.
If you were here this morning, this course is going to be
familiar to you, you've already seen it before.
But it's the intro to psych course, and the intended
learning outcomes are right there.