First Blog – The Learning Puzzle

This is my first “real” blog. I decided to get onboard the blogging bandwagon, in part to start documenting some of my ideas about teaching and technology (and whatever else pops into my mind). It also an attempt to network with others that have similar interests and to put myself out there so that people can see what I am about and my interests.

For my first blog I wanted to talk about where I am at in terms of my teaching. I have to admit that at Fresno State, they do provide a lot of opportunities for professional development with regards to teaching. And I have for the better part of 4 years or so taken advantage of these opportunities to develop my teaching skills. If anything else it has increased my awareness about what effective teaching is all about.  And like the old expression goes, the more you learn the less you know, I find myself with a similar axiom, the more aware I am, the less effective I think I am. It has lead to what I have titled this first blog, the learning puzzle – the real question: how do I create significant change in my students.  Certainly with every teacher, there’s going to be the one or two students that get something out of the class, it impacted them in some important way. But I don’t think one or two students is good enough in a class of 30-40 students. And the majority of my students will say, that my classes were “fun”. So I know I’m not boring them, but I don’t think I am really creating that significant change that I should as a teacher. It is perhaps most evident in the papers that I’m grading at the end of the semester (or those scantron sheets with the multiple choice answers) where I don’t see as much significant change as I would have hoped.

This has led to my quest to figure out just how to create this change. I certainly know all about active learning techniques, it’s been drilled in my head since grad school. But what they don’t teach you in grad school and certain not at your first job teaching at a college is how to design an integrative course. That perhaps is one important element that is missing, I have a lot of pieces but they don’t quite fit together as a coherent whole as a course. Quite serendipitously Amazon suggested that I read this book: Creating Significant Learning Experiences by L. Dee Fink (see it here on Amazon: http://bit.ly/8Cs2iW ). How Amazon knows to tell me what I should read or buy is another story! However, I bought it and I have only now begun reading it.  Fink’s book is suggesting that my thinking is right, an integrated approach is, in part, a solution to the problem. In fact the subtitle to his book is: An Integrated Approach to Designing Collge Courses. The thing I really like about the book right now is his taxonomy of significant learning: Foundational Knowledge, Application, Integration, Human Dimension, Caring, Learning How to Learn. This taxonomy to me seems much more pragmatic that Bloom’s taxonomy (as much as we all love Bloom’s taxonomy).

I want to implement Fink’s ideas into my courses. My thought perhaps is to try one course this semester and see how it works. I really want to create the time to implement this. Fink gives some very sad statistics about college teaching and my own “discomfort” with teaching right now requires that I do something about it. Over time then I will continue to blog about my success and failures in my quest to solve the learning puzzle.