Designing for Significant Learning
in Groups and Teams
Jay Roberts, Ph.D.
Earlham College

Introductions and Overview

Introductions

Paired Share Progression

Favorite place

Fabulous failure?

Fabulous success?

Workshop Overview

Framing and tone setting

Context of significant learning

Designing for significant learning

Lunch!

Team exercise

Tools and strategies for group and team-based learning

Surviving and thriving with significant learning

Openings

Playlists

Useful not universal

Comfortable being uncomfortable

teaching is private AND public

Interrupt me at any time

Learning happens everywhere

Prepare for the firehose!

The Context for Significant Learning

Christchurch Earthquake, 2011

Team Magic Bus

Inquiry

Knowledge inventory

In teams

Posters

What do you want to know/learn?

What questions do you have?

Gallery walk

Goals

Continue building team cohesion

See, experience, and learn a variety of useful strategies and tools

Understand context of teaching and learning today in HE

Learn new approaches and get inspired through collaboration

Appreciate the power of open-ended, messy, collaborative inquiry

TOOLS: Making the invisible, visible

Pre-Exposure and open loops

Tone setting

Theirs-Ours-Theirs

Make it overt

Teaching and Learning Today

1. Instruction vs Learning

Barr and Tagg

2. High Impact Learning Practices (AAC&U, 2008)

Learning communities

Collaborative assignments and projects

Service learning, community based learning

Undergraduate research

Internships and project-based learning

Diversity/global learning

Immersion experiences

3. Gallup Poll "Big 6"

1. A professor who excited me about learning

2. Professors who cared about me as a person

3. A mentor who helped me pursue my goals and dreams

4. Work on a project that took a semester or more to complete

5. Internship or job that allowed me to apply my learning

6. Extremely active in extracurricular activities and organizations

3% agreed to all 6.

4. Three "Let it Go's"

1. Lecturing

Is It Ever OK to Lecture?

"On the one hand, research on the matter is quite convincing: A 2014 meta-analysis of 228 studies of lectures and active-learning strategies showed that the results were decidedly one-sided in favor of active learning. So much so that the authors found it questionable ethically to make students attend lecture-based courses, given all that we know about how ineffective they are."

On the other hand, the vague way in which active-learning strategies are discussed means ... that "it can create the illusion that the answers to teaching challenges are both monolithic and easily developed." Active learning ... has become "an easy thing to prescribe as a cure but difficult to put into practice because it covers such a vast array of possibilities." - D. Gooblar, 2019

Lecturing->Direct Instruction

D. Meiers: "Teaching is listening and learning is talking."

2. Content

The "Plurivium"

American Academy for the Advancement of Science:

“As biology faculty, we need to put the “depth versus breadth” debate behind us. It is true today, and will be even more so in the future, that faculty cannot pack everything known in the life sciences into one or two survey courses. The advances and breakthroughs in the understanding of living systems cannot be covered in a classroom or a textbook. They cannot even be covered in the curriculum of life sciences majors.

The time has come for all biology faculty, but particularly those of us who teach undergraduates, to change the way we think about teaching..." (2009)

Coverage-> Uncoverage

Less Is More

Enduring understandings

paired share: what do you want your students to say 1 year after course?

3. Self-Sufficiency

Wicked Problems

Contested and Complex

Dispersed responsibility and power

High potential for unforeseen consequences

Uncertain, unclear data

Time stress

Climate Change

Gender Inequality

Global Health Pandemics

Violent Extremism

Hunger and Food Insecurity

Water Rights

Solvable by any one discipline?

"Easily" solvable?

The world is full of complex, unscripted problems where the answers are not immediately known and the consequences matter. AAC&U

Do our current educational structures prepare students to work and thrive in these kinds of contexts?

Ages 5-18

"Likes"

Hands-on learning

Real world experience

Professional opportunity

Small class sizes

Personal connections

"In survey after survey, employers seem to agree that the skill they most want in future workers is adaptability. Those who hire complain that they often find today’s college graduates lacking in interpersonal skills, problem solving, effective written and oral communication skills, teamwork, and the ability to think critically and analytically."

From: http://chronicle.com/blogs/next/2012/09/12/skills-gap-employers-and-colleges-point-fingers-at-each-other/

Lunch!

JFK LBJ ON TV FBI

Designing for Significant Learning

Key Principles

Significant Learning (Fink)

No "one best way"

Scales

Go Big!

Example: Shakespeare Festival

Meso

Example: Barrios of Richmond

Micro

Example: Daily Query

Chunking and stages

IBFVTNOJBLKFJ

"Clean beginnings and clean endings"

Creativity Curve

3 Conceptual Design Frames

1. UbD

Backmapping

What are the enduring understandings?

Know, feel, do

Authentic Assessment (Wiggins and McTighe)

Realistically contextualized

Requires judgement and innovation

Asks students to "do" the subject

Replicates challenging "real life" situations

Asks students to integrate across KSA's (not isolate)

Discrete lessons are made meaningful toward mastery

Allows opportunities to rehearse, practice, get feedback, and refine

2. EELDRC

Experiential Learning Cycle

Experience before Label

Importance of student-centered exploration FIRST

STANFORD STUDY

“We are showing that exploration, inquiry and problem solving are not just ‘nice to have’ things in classrooms,” said Blikstein. “They are powerful learning mechanisms that increase performance by every measure we have.” Pea explained that these results indicate the value for learning of first engaging one’s prior knowledge and intuitions in investigating problems in a learning domain – before being presented with abstracted knowledge. Having first explored how one believes a system works creates a knowledge-building relevance to the text or video that is then presented, he said."

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/07/before-reading-or-watching-videos-students-should-first-experiment/

ENROLL: The importance of framing

EXPERIENCE: Experience Before Label!

LABEL: Punctuated direct instruction

DEMONSTRATE: Practice through content

REVIEW: Multiple opportunities for feedback and reflection

CONNECT: On-ramping with other content, experiences

Pairs: E b4 L (ideas? examples?)

3. Integrated Course Design

"Assessment is a process by which information is obtained relative to some known objective or goal. Assessment is a broad term that includes testing. A test is a special form of assessment. Tests are assessments made under contrived circumstances especially so that they may be administered. In other words, all tests are assessments, but not all assessments are tests."

http://www.adprima.com/measurement.htm

How do we know what we are doing is working?

Common Design Traps

Doing More, Not Doing Different

Failure to align learning goals, activities, and assessments

Insufficient scaffolding

Edutainment

Activity for activities sake

Poor pacing/project management

Failure to adapt- designing room to breathe

Lack of support/oversight of teams

Teams

Mini- Curriculum Workshop

Design challenge?

Dream course?

Tweaking an existing course?

The Real Work

Final Reflections and Takeaways

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

~ Wendell Berry

Team Magic Bus