An Overview of How to Design Instruction Using Critical Thinking Concepts
The Logic of Instructional Design Instructional design involves two deeply interrelated parts: structures and tactics. In this article we focus on structures. Structures involve the "what" of the course: What am I going to teach? Tactics involve the "how": How am I going to teach so as to make the structures work? Five Important Structural Determinations That Set the Stage for Everything Else We suggest that for every course you teach, there are five defining dimensions you should carefully think through. your concept of the course, the general plan for implementing that concept, the requirements the students must meet, the grading policies in the course (when applicable), and performance profiles (that correlate with the grade levels). The students, in other words, should know from the beginning what in general is going to be happening in the course, how they are going to be assessed, and what they should be striving to achieve. Back to top
Brainstorm
A guest post by Donald Lazere. “Baby Logic”: The Disdained Discipline in American Colleges Several recent studies identifying the weak spots in both American K-12 and college education, like Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift, the Common Core State Standards Initiative of the National Governors’ Association, and Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit, lament the lack of learning in critical thinking and argumentation. Yet none of these studies that I have seen discuss at any length the disciplinary and curricular context in which these subjects are, or should be, taught; nor are they very specific about delineating their content. A movement to implement critical thinking courses peaked around l980, when Chancellor Glenn Dumke announced the requirement of formal instruction in critical thinking throughout the nineteen California State University campuses, serving some 300,000 students. Return to Top
Finding Talent Is No. 1 Global Issue, CEOs Say - DiversityInc.com
The critical question of where to find and how to effectively manage talent tops the priorities of 1,201 business leaders from more than 69 countries, who were surveyed as part of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ annual global CEO survey. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is No. 1 on The 2012 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list. The survey report finds that strategies for managing talent are the No. 1 concern for the CEOs over the next year, followed by approach to managing risk, investment decisions and organizational structure following mergers and acquisitions. In recent years, with the global recession, profit and investment were top priorities, but that is changing. “This really is the biggest business concern around the world … growth is going to be very uneven and there is concern about the diversity of different pools,” says Ed Boswell, who leads PwC’s U.S. The PwC report notes that in almost all markets, women represent substantially less of the workforce than men.
Why the Facebook Group My Students Created for Themselves is Better than the Discussion Forum I Created for Them. « Douchy’s Weblog
Since 2004 I’ve created a website of some kind for each class, with a discussion board – a place where students can ask questions or make comments on our class any time of day or night and get a response. I think it’s an essential component of any modern class. This semester something new happened, though. My students created a Facebook group for my class (and then invited me to join it!). Slowly I’ve watched and noticed more and more, that students are posting on that Facebook group instead of the discussion forum I’d created for them! While at first, the control-freak in me wanted to send them all back to the “official class discussion forum”, The advantages of the Facebook group have become increasingly compelling and I’m wondering whether it’s time to let the forum I created go the way of cassette tapes and typewriters. Some other advantages of the Facebook group over the discussion board I created are:
The 100 Best Web 2.0 Classroom Tools Chosen By You
The Wordle of this list! (Click image to enlarge) One of the most popular posts on Edudemic in 2010 was The 35 Best Web 2.0 Classroom Tools Chosen By You and I felt it might be time for an update to that list for 2011. In order to put together a list of the best Web 2.0 classroom tools, I polled my Twitter followers, Facebook fans (are they still called fans? There were more than 900 submissions but many were duplicates.
Unique Online Teaching Method at UWM Earns National Attention
Newswise — UWM psychology professors Diane Reddy and Ray Fleming believe they have found a more effective way to teach undergraduate courses. Two major funding organizations agree and have invested to scale up its use at other U.S. universities, and also to scientifically identify what factors make it so successful. The online U-Pace instructional approach has been shown to improve student performance compared to traditional, in-person lecture classes at UWM. Funding organizations like the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) would like to see the approach used at other large, public institutions serving low-income and underrepresented students with the goal of improving retention, learning and college completion. NGLC is a new initiative designed and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The Society for the Teaching of Psychology, a division of the American Psychological Association, is UWM’s partner on the grant.
Faculty Focus Email
By Mary Bart All too often students shuffle into class, take notes while the professor lectures for 50 minutes or so, and then pack up and leave. Rinse and repeat throughout the semester. Some might never raise their hand, offer their opinion, or even learn the name of the person sitting in front of them. Yet active learning, while not exactly new, might be reaching its tipping point. In Ten Ways to Actively Engage Your Students, Alice Cassidy, PhD, principal of In View Education and Professional Development, shared many of the techniques she has used in her 15 years of teaching at the University of British Columbia. You want students to participate in class discussions, but how do you respond to answers that are off the mark without discouraging future participation? Here are just five of the ten activities Cassidy discussed during the seminar: Get to know your students. Invite students to start some of the classes. Find out "What's news?" Ask for a ticket to class. ShareThis
Nine Tips for Creating a Hybrid Course
October 29, 2008 By: Rob Kelly in Curriculum Development, Distance Learning Administration, Instructional Design, Learning Styles, Online Education Most instructors supplement their face-to-face courses with some online learning materials such as online syllabi, handouts, PowerPoint slides, and course-related Web links. All of these can add to the learning experience, but they are merely a start to making full use of the learning potential of the online learning environment in either a hybrid or totally online course. Although there is no standard definition of a hybrid course, one characteristic that makes a course a hybrid is the use of the Web for interaction rather than merely as a means of posting materials, says LaTonya Motley, instructional technology specialist at El Camino Community College in California. Motley offers the following advice for creating a hybrid course: From Online Classroom, March 2007. Tags: hybrid courses, learning environment, learning experience
