Greetings! Barb and I are happy to welcome all of you here for our Faculty Inquiry Group (FIG) on "Teaching Contemporary Students to be Actively Engaged Learners." This is a (too rare) opportunity for us to take time out of our Thursday afternoons for the next four weeks to engage with each other on an important topic.
We want this FDI short course and this Scholar site to be an interactive, continuous dialogue. With that in mind, we have embedded this blogger tool, and once you accept your gmail invitation, you will be able to both "author" and "comment" in our eConversation. Please feel free to post resources and links, suggest strategies, pose questions/dilemmas/possible answers, etc., with your colleagues.
Posting links is pretty easy: just state what it is you're posting, the fabulous fun and seriously important early TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson and voila! you are good to go. (btw, if you don't have 18 minutes to spare, check out the RSA Animate version of Robinson's Changing Educational Paradigms
We look forward to your comments and collective contributions!
--Shelli & Barb
I've been thinking about the way in which people learn and how teachers teach. Don't you think it would help teachers if they could be put into the position of their students?
ReplyDeleteI'd like to suggest a new FDI course in which several types of courses (i.e. science, engineering, humanities, english) are offered for the teachers to attend as students. Each course would have four sections, of which the teacher would participate in during the course of the day. The same content could be taught by three or four different instructors, all using a different method (i.e. lecture, integrated technology, team project, etc.). It might help if instructors were to "feel" the differences in learning experiences from the perspective of their students.
All too often, we blame the instructors for not helping their students to understand the content. However, most faculty are thrown into teaching with absolutely no training. This fact leaves them to teach as they were taught. Rather than telling them they're not doing it right, they may be more receptive to new styles in content presentation if they could experience intimately the effects of different delivery methods.
Anyway, just a thought!
Diane