EGIA Assignment PDF

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PART B 1) How does Bain define “the best” in terms of college teaching? • •

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“When we see evidence about remarkable feats of student learning and indications that the teaching helped and encouraged those results” – p.15. Best teachers know their students extremely well. “They can do intellectually, physically, or emotionally what they expect from their students. They know how to simplify and clarify complex subjects, to cut to the heart of the matter with provocative insights, and they can think about their own thinking in the discipline, analysing its nature and evaluating its quality” – p.16. “The best teachers assume that learning has little meaning unless it produces a sustained and substantial influence on the way people think, act, and feel” – p.17. “They try to create natural critical learning environment in which they embed the skills and information they wish to teach in assignments (questions and tasks) students will find fascinating, authentic tasks that will challenge them to grapple with ideas, rethink their assumptions, and examine their mental models of reality” – p.47. “They often display openness with students and may, from time to time, talk about their own intellectual journey, its ambitions, triumphs, frustrations, and failures, and encourage their students to be similarly reflective and candid” – p.18. “They didn’t blame their students for any of the difficulties they faced” – p.19. “They are learners, constantly trying to improve their own efforts to foster students’ development, and never completely satisfied with what they had already achieved” – p.20. “They set high standards and conveyed a strong trust in their students’ abilities to meet them” – p.73. “A strong desire to help students learn to read the materials in the discipline” – p.56. “When these highly effective educators try to teach the basic facts in their disciplines, they want students to see a portion of reality the way the latest research and scholarship in the discipline has come to see it” – p.27. “They help students to understand the connection between current topics and some larger and more fundamental inquiry, and in so doing find common ground in those big questions that first motivated their own efforts to learn” – p.37. Focus on both the personal and intellectual development of their students. “When they offered suggestions, they could convince their students through the sheer weight of their own sincerity, an earnestness born from the perceptions described here and from their diligence in getting to know their students that their critique didn’t intend to judge anyone’s soul or worth as a human being. It was, instead, based on the high standards of the best scientific, scholarly, or artistic thinking, and came not because the professor thought less of the student but because he or she believed the student could benefit from the advice” – p.77. “The best teachers simply know how to make good explanations” – p.123. “Teachers succeed in grabbing students’ attention by beginning a lecture with a provocative question or problem that raises issues in ways that students had never thought about before, or by using stimulating case studies or goal-based scenarios”

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– p.109. “Ask their students for a commitment to the class and the learning” – p.112. “They pulled each person in the room into a dialogue, offering gestures and body language that conveyed their desire to reach out to each student regardless of the size of the room” – p.118. “The best professors tended to use warm language, to be explicit, to be complete, and to tell the story and make the explanation. They would raise powerfully worded questions” – p.122. They would bring their students inside the material having the ability to communicate orally in ways that stimulated thought. “Their attention to the details of performance stems from a concern for the learners, and their focus is on the nature and processes of learning rather than on the performance of the instructor” – p.134. Using a learning-based approach rather than a performance-based displaying a strong dedication to the academic community rather than only focusing on their success inside the classroom.

2) According to Bain, how do the best college teachers a) plan their course for the specific educational context and learners? •

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“Our subjects use a much richer line of inquiry to design a class, lecture, discussion section, clerkship, or any other encounter with students, and they begin with questions about student learning objectives rather than about what the teacher will do” – p.17. “They conduct class and craft assignments in a way that allows students to try their own thinking, come up short, receive feedback, and try again. They give students a safe space in which to construct ideas, and they often spend a great deal of time creating a kind of scaffolding to help students engage in that construction” – p.28. “They help students re-see a familiar object in light of the analytic and historical tools with which their course had equipped them. Thus building a solid connection between the questions and their students’ lives and interests” – p.39. “Change exams, assignments, or what happens in class to respond to what the teachers learn about students’ interests and knowledge” – p.56. “They take great pains to explore their students’ learning, to analyse their work carefully, to think extensively about what and how different people could learn, and even to design particular assignments to fit the needs, interests, and current abilities of each student” – p.75. “The best teachers plan their courses backward, deciding what students should be able to do by the end of the semester, they map a series of intellectual developments through the course, with the goal of encouraging students to learn on their own, engaging them in deep thinking” – p.114. “They explored their ambitions, their approaches to and conceptions of learning, the ways they reasoned, the mental models they brought with them, their temperaments, their habits of the heart and mind, and the daily matters that occupied their attention” – p.157. “We don’t need routine experts who know all the right procedures but adaptive ones who can apply fundamental principles to all the situations and students they are

likely to encounter, recognizing when invention is both possible and necessary and that there is no single best way to teach” – p.175.

b) set the goals of the course? • •

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“They avoid objectives that are arbitrarily tied to the course and favor those that embody the kind of thinking and acting expected for life” – p.17. “They ask themselves if they want students to recall, comprehend, apply, analyse, synthesize, or evaluate. Write down the largest question that the course would address. Then list the questions that one would need to explore to address the larger issue” – p.50. “Rather than laying out a set of requirements for students, they usually talk about the promises of the course, about the kinds of questions the discipline will help students answer, or about the intellectual, emotional, or physical abilities that it will help them develop. In general, avoid the language of demands and use the vocabulary of promises instead while explaining what they need to do” – p.36,37. They want the students to develop their questions about that discipline so they lay the foundation such that the students can be successfully stimulated to ask their questions. “Teachers use survey forms or what might be called in the broadest sense a pretest on the first day of class” – p.157. With proper evaluation, the teacher can adjust the learning objectives accordingly and find the best way to achieve them.

c) assess their students’ learning relative to the goals? • • •

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“They ask questions that students struggle with, to develop and defend their analyses, syntheses, and evaluations” – p.30. “They avoid grading on the curve, and instead gave everyone the opportunity to achieve the highest standard and grades” – p.35. “They grade students on the knowledge and abilities they have developed by the end of the class rather than on an average of accomplishments displayed throughout the term” – p.36. Instead of rotely memorizing the correct answers, they want to know how to help the students reason toward those answers. “They carefully planned ways to challenge assumptions and put students in compelling situations in which their existing models would not work” – p.51. “The outstanding teachers used assessment to help students learn, not just to rate and rank their efforts” – p.151. “Comprehensive examinations with each test replacing the previous one. The first test covers material from the beginning of the course, but so do all subsequent examinations. By making each examination cumulative, professors convey to the students that learning is supposed to be permanent and not just something done to get through a single examination” – p.161

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Ask students to assess themselves like requesting them to provide evidence and conclusion about the nature of their learning.

d) develop the overall course structure and individual lessons to help students meet the goals? •

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“Exceptional teachers treat their lectures, discussion sections, problem-based sessions, and other elements of teaching as serious intellectual endeavours as intellectually demanding and important as their research and scholarship” – p.17. “They realize where people are likely to face difficulties developing their own comprehension, and they can use that understanding to simplify and clarify complex topics for others, tell the right story, or raise a powerfully provocative question” – p.25. “The focus remains on helping people learn to reason or create, to use new information, not on the need to tell students everything they must know and understand” – p.51. “Some of the best teachers might plan explanations. Others might devise questions that will help students focus their attention on significant issues, clarify concepts, or emphasize assumptions that they might otherwise ignore” – p.52. “Structure the course in ways that encouraged students to learn how to learn and to benefit from their own mistakes” – p.57. “Promote deep rather than surface or strategic learning, to help students become better thinkers, and to encourage them to grapple with important issues and understand concepts” – p.59.

e) evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching and determine its impact on students? •

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“Gather student ratings. Rather than asking if professors were expressive or used a particular technique, the questions should ask if they helped students learn or stimulated their interest in the subject” – p.13. “Some external factors beyond the control of the instructor can influence the way students respond to certain questions. An evaluator should take these factors into consideration when using the information to make evaluations” – p.171. “They make a systematic and reflective appraisal of their own teaching approaches and strategies, asking themselves why they do certain kinds of things and not others” – p.21. “Examinations and assignments become a way to help students understand their progress in learning, and they also help evaluate teaching” – p.152. “Evidence about learning might come from an examination, a paper, a project, or a conversation, but it is that learning, rather than a score, that professors try to characterize and communicate” – p.153. “They hope that their students will learn to do the work in a timely manner, but they do not assume that their power over grades can facilitate that learning, or even that a late submission indicates that the student has procrastinated” – p.154.

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“To assess their learning objectives, they follow important intellectual developments emerging within and outside their disciplines” - p.164. “Peers can provide essential comments on the qualities of the learning objectives. They can look at the syllabus, the way students are assessed, the nature of assignments, reports from the teacher, and even examples of student work to understand the nature of those objectives. They can then use that understanding to make their report” – p.169.

3) Pay particular attention to “How the study was conducted” (throughout and from the appendix). a) Note the pros and cons of the approach. Pros: •

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All candidates entered the study temporarily until they had sufficient proof that their approaches sustained exceptional learning based on “careful consideration of his or her learning objectives, success in helping students achieve those objectives, and ability to stimulate students to have highly positive attitudes toward their studies” – p.183. Small group analysis with the students was done in the absence of the professor to see if all students had a consistent view or had a difference in opinion.

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It was only limited to professors teaching in the United States and Australia.

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The number of professors selected was only sixty-three and the qualitative analysis was done in only a subset of them. (“We utilized five or six types of sources with the thirty-five subjects we studied most closely, and at least two kinds of sources with each of the remaining twenty-eight people. We observed an entire course for six of the subjects, and portions of courses from thirty-five others.” – p.184)

b) What suggestions do you have for improving research designed to address similar issues at multiple levels of education? It can be done in multiple countries to identify a group of best teachers from each of them and then a systematic comparison can be done to see how the teaching varies depending on the culture, location, and other factors. Online forms can be sent to all the professors around the world for nominating teachers they think are best in their field. Also, specific guidelines can be designed based on which all professors will be judged on the same criteria as due to the availability of latest online tools and resources it can be done efficiently in a short period.

PART C 1) In what ways were your initial reflections different from Bain’s conclusions? Why? I initially thought if the students can understand everything in a class and perform well on all kind of assignments then the learning has taken place but Bain also showed that the best teachers will make the students be able to read the latest articles in the discipline and also focus on their personal development. I used to think that designing quizzes on a single topic with all possible type of questions is better but I learned that comprehensive examinations with each test replacing the previous one emphasizes that learning is permanent. Also, I thought grading in a curve encourages competition and is better but after reading I realized giving all the students an opportunity to achieve the highest grade encourage healthy cooperation and collaboration.

2) What have you learned that might help you be a better teacher of college students? I thought teachers should focus mostly on the intellectual development of the students but after reading the book I understood that personal development is equally important. I also thought that being strict with the students will make them more responsible but now I know that most extrinsic motivators damage intrinsic motivation and can even lead the students to lose interest in that field. Lastly I thought that the teacher should focus on the course syllabus and try to cover all the parts so that the students can get what they wanted out of that course but now I think it’s important to first realize for each topic if the learning has taken place then only move to the next one otherwise completing the course would become meaningless.

3) What implications can you draw for the design of educational interventions for students of any age and for research to test their efficacy? Right kind of intervention needs to be designed for the right students. “For example, students who have been victims of negative social images that their group can’t do well in school but who still care about their academic performance require much different treatment than those targets of negative stereotypes who have decided to give up” – p.96. No single strategy is right for all of the students and it needs to be designed for each particular student. Constant feedback can be taken and with proper evaluation, adjustment can be done in the interventions to find the best way to achieve it.

4) What questions remain? What is exceptional learning? How to identify and render the right intervention for each student in a course when they need it in the middle of learning efficiently?...