Meet Our ProVisions Fellows!

James D. Allen

James graduated from the University of Cincinnati with degrees in Secondary Education and Mathematics, received his Masters in Eductional Foundations from the University of Cincinnati and his Ph.D. in Eductional Psychology from the University of California.  James has been a professor of Educational Psychology at The College of Saint Rose since 1988.

James’ Interest in the “Teaching Critical Thinking” Theme:

As an educational psychologist I have focused my professional endeavors primarily in the areas of learning, motivation and instruction with a particular interest in promoting reflective and critical thinking among students.  I have conducted and published research that has focused on the constructivist and generative student-centered pedagogies that I use in my classes and I am continually reviewing the learning and instructional literature for research that demonstrates effective practices for promoting these skills and then integrating them into my own teaching. I see this as the essence of the scholarship of teaching and learning. Literature suggests that instructional strategies that require students to generate their own understanding of academic content, either through interactive discussions or analytic writing, promotes not only greater depth of content learning, but also increases critical and analytical thinking skills, as well as increases motivation and positive affect to learn.

Stephanie A. Bennett

Stephanie received her BA, MA, and Ph.D. from SUNY Albany, and is now an Associate Professor in the Sociology Department here at Saint Rose.  Stephanie has been at St. Rose since 2008.  Prior to coming here, she was a tenure track faculty at SUNY Oneonta and before that SUNY Oswego, choosing to come to St. Rose because of the small class size and the emphasis on teaching.

Stephanie’s Interest in the “Teaching Critical Thinking” Theme:

My interest in critical thinking has been with me as long as I have been in the classroom.  I have always worked to make students see the world from various points of view as it is one of the tenants of the Sociological Imagination in Sociology.  My interest has been most currently peaked with my participation in FLEP American City here at St. Rose.  We as a group have tried to emphasize critical thinking and the measurement of critical thinking into the First Year Experience.  I hope to walk away from this fellowship with a greater understanding of what Critical Thinking means in a wider academic sense and have more tools to instill Critical Thinking to my students.

Amina Eladaddi

Amina received her PhD in Applied Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2006, and she has been a professor in the Mathematics Department here at The College of Saint Rose since 2009.  Eladdadi’s research and teaching are interdisciplinary in nature and are at the interface of mathematics and biological, medical and financial sciences. Of particular interest to her, is cancer research. She is also very active in the undergraduate research in Applied Mathematics where she incorporates critical thinking in her project-based teaching/learning.

Amina’s Interest in the “Teaching Critical Thinking” Theme:

Critical thinking is a not only a fundamental focus in modern education, but is a vital skill in this fast-paced and global economy we live and work in today.

The skill to “think critically” is always listed as one of the important outcomes of undergraduate education.  Most of the time, this teaching is done “indirectly” or “implicitly” that students do not pick up the signals of critical thinking skills. In my field of mathematics, critical thinking and problem solving go hand in hand. I believe that teaching critical thinking in mathematics or any other discipline is essential in the development of successful students; though not easy for the instructors (or the students) to develop critical thinking skills from the first attempt of teaching (or learning).  I would like to explore questions such as: why is it so hard to teach critical thinking? Does critical thinking vary from one discipline to another?  Are instructors trained in critical thinking to teach it to their students?

One of the main challenges that lay ahead is how to implement and integrate critical thinking “effectively” into classroom instruction?  I envision this new Provisions activity to be an open forum where the CSR faculty can share ideas on how to teach critical thinking, and possibly develop programs for promoting critical thinking skills in their classrooms.

April Provisions: Signature Pedagogies and Saint Rose

The April ProVisions session focused on the topic of Signature Pedagogies and The College of Saint Rose.  The presenters included Dr. David Sczerbacki, president, Dr. Margaret Kirwin, provost, and Steve Black, Librarian.

Dr. Sczerbacki began the presentations by discussing what he terms is Saint Rose’s “pedagogical pluralism,” where there is a deep commitment to academic freedom that recognizes that there is no one best way, rather that there are multiple contingencies at work, always remembering that different people learn differently.  Dr. Sczerbacki was sure to point out that for any pedagogy to be a signature pedagogy, it must pass the test.  In other words, we must have “proof points” where we can demonstrate where and how our pedagogies make a difference.  Here is the useful handout that Dr. Sczerbacki provided, which looks at both the components of successful high-impact practices and essential learning outcomes:

Steve Black followed Dr. Sczerbacki, defining signature pedagogy as a distinctive model of teaching and learning that focuses on what students are able to do.  He focused on Lendol Calder’s “Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey,” from the Journal of American History, and presented the following insights that he gained from the article:

• Desired result is for students to do, think, and value what practitioners in the discipline do, think, and value. The resulting values, knowledge, and manner of thinking form a disciplinary world view.
• Emphasis on covering material in introductory courses is grounded on a false “attic theory” of cognition, which assumes that we need to furnish the mind with a collection of facts in order to think critically. But “facts are not like furniture at all; they are more like dry ice, disappearing at room temperature” (p.1361).  Facts disembodied from a problem will fade away.
• Better to become perplexed by a problem, then use facts to achieve a solution.
• Uncoverage–instead of emphasizing facts, uncover what the discipline is. Why bother studying it, what problems do practitioners grapple with, what is the discipline all about?

Steve sees Saint Rose’s unusually broad range of liberal education requirements as a possible signature pedagogy of Saint Rose, where these courses have the strength of introducing students to a wide array of disciplinary ways of seeing the world.  He also provided some examples of what he sees as Saint Rose’s strengths and weaknesses in relation to signature pedagogies, noting possible opportunities for success:

 

Strengths:Highly qualified and dedicated professionals within the disciplinesSmall class sizes Strong support systems (service learning, learning center, library) Successful problem-based learning	Weaknesses:Reliance on adjuncts(?)Inherent limitations of one semester courses taught primarily to freshmen Difficult to maintain constructive dialogue across disciplines
Opportunities:Engender conversation about the degree to which our lib ed offerings should focus on “uncoverage,” how to achieve that, what supports are needed, and how to maximize students’ ability to make connections among disciplinary approaches to problems.	Threats:How much can students learn about the workings of a discipline in one course?In the courses our students take, how often does coverage take precedence over uncoverage? Why should faculty be concerned about coverage vs. uncoverage beyond their disciplinary boundaries?

 

Last but not least, Dr. Kirwin focused on service learning as a signature pedagogy and argued that if the signature pedagogy does not involve active learning, we must rethink it as a signature.  Dr. Kirwin sees Saint Rose’s mission statement as a hint towards a mission-centric signature, a goal for Saint Rose Service Learning:

“The College delivers distinctive and comprehensive liberal arts and professional programs that inspire our graduates to be productive adults, critical thinkers, and motivated caring citizens.  Our engagement with the urban environment expands the setting for educational opportunities and encourages the Saint Rose community’s energetic involvement and effective leadership in society.”

In her presentation, Dr. Kirwin explained emphasized that the connection to learning standards is what distinguishes service learning from community service, where the activity also requires that students make decisions, act under conditions of unavoidable uncertainty, and socializes them to the conditions of practice.

Take a look at Kirwin’s PowerPoint presentation: Kriwin – April ProVisions.

To listen to Tuesday’s session about Signature Pedagogies and Saint Rose, click here!!

The Polarized Debate on Internet Distraction: An Alternative

In “You’re Distracted. This Professor Can Help.,” Marc Parry discusses Professor David Levy’s unique teaching practices when it comes to his class “Information and Contemplation,” where students scrutinize their use of technology (i.e. how much time they spend with it, how it affects their emotions, how it fragments their attention), write guidelines for improving their habits, and practice in-class meditation to sharpen their attention.

The conversation that Levy is intervening in is composed of two camps, defined by Parry as those camps that “duke it out over whether the Internet will unleash vast reservoirs of human potential (Clay Shirky) or destroy our capacity for concentration and contemplation (Nicholas Carr).”   Parry notes, however, ”Mr. Levy hopes to open a fresh window on the polarized cultural debate about Internet distraction and information abundance.”

Mr. Levy, a professor in the Information School at University of Washington, “sees a problem with many discussions about what technology is doing to our minds.”  “So many of those debates fail to even acknowledge or realize that we can educate ourselves, even in the digital era, to be more attentive,” he says. “What’s crucial is education.”

Mr. Levy believes that part of this education is teaching the benefits of meditation, and he begins each of his classes with a short meditation session in an effort to sharpen their focus.  Parry describes Mr. Levy’s meditation practice as repeatedly bringing your attention back to your breathing as the mind wanders away, training the mind to focus on the present.

“As digital tools gained momentum in the 90s, he [Levy] started to wonder whether technologies sold as tools of connection were also disconnecting people from themselves and one another. Cellphones, e-mail, Internet—all of it accelerated life. That contrasted with the stillness and focus Mr. Levy cultivated in meditation.”

The question of how people could live balanced lives in the middle of these technologies is what Levy took to the classroom.

Parry explains a sample assignment of Levy’s, where the students are required to spend 15 minutes to half an hour each day observing and logging their e-mail behavior.  Parry writes that the idea, an outgrowth of meditation, is to note what happens in the mind and body, and Levy is curious to see: Can they notice the initial impulse to check e-mail? What are they thinking and feeling at that point? What emotional reactions do they have the moment they set eyes on the inbox? How does their posture and breathing change as they e-mail?  After observing their own behavior for a week, students write a two- to three-page reflection on what they saw.

In the process, Levy finds that students tend to discover what works for them, learning how strong their attention is at different times and seeing how e-mail provokes pleasure, anxiety, even hatred.  Parry also explains the follow-up assignment: “e-mail meditation,” meaning concentrating only on e-mail for 15 minutes or so at a stretch (i.e. no answering the phone, no texting).

Mr. Levy even has his students use Camtasia, a program that records what happens on the computer screen as students use the computer as well as uses a Web cam to film the students’ postures, expressions;, and physical environments.  Levy’s students use the software to record 15-minute multitasking sessions, “an exercise designed to teach them to multitask more mindfully, by noticing the desire to switch activities and deciding whether to follow it.”

Parry wraps his article up by highlighting Ulrich Mayr, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, whose research is concerned with the cognitive costs of not paying attention.  Mayr defines multitasking as “rapid task switching, since the human brain does just one thing at a time.”  Parry provides an example of Mayr’s definition using the circumstances of watching television while doing homework from a textbook. He quotes Mayr’s conclusion that, “While you’re trying to follow a story on television, you won’t be doing your homework, he says, and while doing your homework, you won’t get the TV story. Simple as that.”  Mayr says that as a result of multitasking, one is left with moments of mental “dead time” that are unproductive for either task, carrying the implication for teaching that the cost of classroom multitasking can be a failure to learn.  Mr. Mayr, however, does caution against drawing the conclusion that multitasking weakens attention, with the big question of whether or not multitasking changes how our brains work remaining unanswered.

Mr. Levy, meanwhile, is encouraging other colleges to bring age-old contemplative practices to their wired campuses.  You can check out Parry’s article for quotes from Levy’s students, more on Mayr, and a sample reading list for Levy’s course!

March ProVisions: Teaching Service-Learning Courses

The March ProVisions session focused on the topic of Teaching Service-Learning (S-L) Courses, with the two presenters providing insight on how to incorporate S-L into a variety of classes as well as a specific example of how S-L has already been incorporated into a Philosophy classroom.  The presenters included Fred Boehrer, Coordinator of Academic Service-Learning here at Saint Rose, and Jeanne Wiley, Associate Professor of Philosophy.

Boehrer began his presentation expressing how S-L benefits not only students but faculty, the college, and community organizations.  Boehrer said that S-L is a pedagogy, a teaching methodology that is classroom-based, involving not only preparation and service/volunteering, but reflection as a key component.

Boehrer explained that all courses can include S-L, and provided a variety of models:

-   A class can visit a community partner together.
-   “Buffet Style” – Students choose where to volunteer based on options offered by faculty.
-   A class can be divided into 2 or 3 sections to visit 2 or 3 community partners.
-   A community partner can be invited to campus and then a decision can be made on how to connect.
-   Problem-Based Service-Learning – A community partner identifies a problem, rather than faculty.

Boehrer said that there are three important things to consider when considering incorporating S-L into a course: time (to create/adjust syllabi, to connect with community partner, to assist with reflection), transportation (i.e. walking, St. Rose shuttle, St. Rose vans, public busses), and turnover (maintaining those community partnerships as teachers/students leave/graduate).

Boehrer also mentioned that Saint Rose’s S-L blackboard site will be launching in April.  The site will have numerous resources for S-L including sample syllabi, forms, lists of community partners, course related info, and transport info.

Jeanne Wiley followed Boehrer’s presentation, discussing her personal experiences with S-L in her own Philosophy classroom.  One of the first points that Wiley was sure to make was that her students do not simply earn credit for going out and “playing board games,” but that their service counts for field research that supplements traditional book work that then informs their reflection essay.  (You can find Wiley’s course materials in the previous post here)

Wiley explained how her course is a general education requirement, where the 60+ freshmen often feel “forced” to be in their class, something unrelated to their major that they were placed in.  Presented with this challenge, Wiley has found community service as a way to get students to see ethics as important to their lives.

Wiley then proceeded to talk about her process of incorporating S-L into her classroom.  For Wiley, the first step was conceptual, determining how S-L would help students achieve her course objectives.  The next step was logistical, thinking about her hour and fifteen minutes of class time, and realizing that in order for S-L to work within her course, students were going to have to be responsible for taking initiative with their service outside of class, a type of homework.  Lastly, Wiley explained that it was then about actually designing the curriculum.  She said that for her, it is important that students don’t have a collective experience.  She also mentioned that she often has to work to prevent “drive by service” from those minimalist students, stating that she in fact does subtract credit from those students who do not go outside their comfort zone.

To listen to a podcast of the March session, click here!

Service-Learning Overview

The topic of the next ProVisions session, which will be held next Tuesday, 3/26, at 12pm in Standish A/B, is Teaching Service-Learning Courses.  The presenters will be Fred Boehrer, Ph.D., Coordinator of Academic Service-Learning, Community Involvement Faculty, and Jeanne Wiley, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies.

In preparation for these presentations, Dr. Boehrer has put together a Service-Learning Overview.  The following is the information that he has provided:

Service-Learning is a pedagogy for deepening students’ understanding of course learning objectives by connecting with off-campus community partners.

Service-Learning courses are not the same as Community Service.

While both involve volunteering, Service-Learning is classroom-based, with “volunteering” or “community service” integrated into the course syllabus.  Through Service-Learning courses, students have an opportunity to reflect on their volunteer experience through the lens of their course concepts and theories.  Studies have shown that students in Service-Learning courses grasp course learning objectives better than students in non-Service-Learning courses.

Teaching Service-Learning classes require a little extra planning and flexibility, but the rewards are very significant.

Do you want to explore syllabi offered by other faculty in your academic field?

Visit: http://www.compact.org/category/syllabi/

Do you want an introduction on how to teach a Service-Learning course?

Visit: http://prezi.com/op2f66sb0swe/template-welcome-to-service-learning/

Do you want to learn about how to connect with a Community Partner for a Service-Learning course?

Visit: http://prezi.com/seefuy1sfvgr/template-creating-successful-community-partnerships-faculty/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=prezi_landing_related_solr&utm_campaign=prezi_landing_related_author

Are you interested in more resources for teaching a Service-Learning course?

Visit: www.compact.org 

Campus Compact is a national coalition of colleges dedicated to service-learning.

Saint Rose is a member of Campus Compact. This site contains a plethora of resources for faculty (syllabi, faculty toolkits, service-learning models, assessments, research opportunities, etc.)

Do you want to teach a Service-Learning course at St. Rose for the 2013-14 year?

Please join us:

Service-Learning Training Workshop for Saint Rose faculty

Friday, April 12

10am to 1pm (lunch included)

CCIM Conference Room 118

1006 Madison Avenue

Please contact Fred Boehrer (boehrerf@strose.edu) to sign-up.

As Coordinator of Academic Service-Learning, Fred Boehrer

– supports faculty who are currently teaching service-learning courses

– invites and provides training for faculty interested in teaching service-learning courses

– networks Saint Rose faculty, administrators, staff, and students with local community organizations (“community partners”)

– networks with service-learning advocates at local colleges

Jeanne Wiley will also present next Tuesday and is allowing us to share her Ethics & Values syllabus and her Service-Learning guidelines with other faculty.  Browse at your leisure!

Ethics Service Learning Project Guidelines Spring 2013

Ethics Syllabus Spring 13 – Wiley

We look forward to seeing you March 26th!

Competency-Based Education & the Credit Hour

In his post “Rise of Customized Learning,” Paul Fain discusses competency-based education and its focus on “performance and results” rather than seat time.  The post runs through how several institutions have continued to expand their competency-based offerings and the problems that revolve around these offerings relative to the credit hour, “higher education’s gold standard,” when the online degree programs are typically self-paced and emphasize the testing of competency rather than faculty-student contact time.  Some of the institutions that Fain discusses include Western Governors University, Southern New Hampshire University, and Bellevue University.  Mary Hawkins, Bellevue’s president, says that now is the time to experiment with customized learning, predicting that competency-based offerings “will be a big innovation in higher education and where online learning has its biggest strength.”  For more information on competency-based approaches click here.

In his post “Hour by Hour,” Fain discusses the origins of the college credit hour, explaining that it was never intended to be used to measure student learning, yet it has become a measure and a proxy for what students are supposedly learning.  Fain writes, “An over-reliance on the credit hour, which links the awarding of academic credit to hours of contact between professors and students, has led to many of higher education’s problems.”  Some of the concerns with the credit-hour model include the issue of the rejection of transfer credits (wasting students’ money and time, in part because schools don’t trust what constitutes a credit hour at another institution) and the obstruction of innovation (as it is difficult to apply the “seat-time” standard to online classes).  As Fain points out, competency-based education, in which students learn at their own pace, is a particularly bad fit with the credit hour.

According to a new report from the New America Foundation and Education Sector, the credit hour standard falls short because it does not measure learning, identifying problems with grade inflation and the inflexibility for students to learn at different speeds. As a result, the credit hour stands “at the intersection of three of higher education’s thorniest issues: cost, time and academic quality.”

Fain proceeds to points out that “blowing up” the credit hour won’t be easy because in addition to it being so convenient, “opening the floodgates to federal aid without some standard for measuring learning could encourage diploma mills and a wave of unearned credits for cash.”  According to the New America Foundation and Education Sector’s report, “Abusive interpretation of the credit hour could lead to fraud on a huge scale. But the credit hour is also archaic, a nonsensical basis for regulating online programs in which the whole notion of time in the classroom has no meaning…Define the credit hour too tightly, and innovation would be stifled. Define it too loosely, and taxpayers would get taken for a ride.”  Despite the difficulty in redefining the credit hour, Fain concludes that there seems to be a real desire to move away from seat time.

Career-Oriented Majors versus Liberal Education

In “Are Career-Oriented Majors a Waste of a 4-Year Higher Education?,” Jeff Selingo looks at the real-world impact of the push for American higher education to graduate more students in an effort to put the United States at the top in the world’s education competition.  Selingo refers to a recent post in The New York Times titled “It Takes a B.A. to Find a Job as a File Clerk,” by Catherine Rampell, which opens with the statement: “The college degree is becoming the new high school diploma: the new minimum requirement, albeit an expensive one, for getting even the lowest-level job.”

In her article, Rampell explains that economists have referred to this phenomenon as “degree inflation,” and that it has been steadily infiltrating America’s job market. Rampell writes that “across industries and geographic areas, many other jobs that didn’t used to require a diploma… are increasingly requiring one,” with this “up-credentialing” pushing the less educated even further down the food chain (citing the unemployment rate for workers with no more than a high school diploma as more than twice that for workers with a bachelor’s degree: 8.1 percent versus 3.7 percent).

In a similar article by Rampell, “Degree Inflation? Jobs That Newly Require B.A.’s,” she comments that “despite the sob stories you hear about unemployed college graduates, bachelor’s degrees have actually gotten more valuable over time”  as not only is the wage gap continually widening, but it seems as well that “more employers are using bachelor’s degrees as a signal of drive or talent, regardless of the relevance of the skills actually learned in college.”  While college degrees may be getting graduates the only lowest level jobs, with degree inflation, people without degrees are being weeded out of opportunity instantly.

While Selingo might agree with Rampell in that the overabundance of degrees does not render them useless, citing he is not in the in the camp of the “Don’t Go to College” crowd, he does, however, hold the idea that without high-quality training and apprenticeship programs as real alternatives to those ill-suited for college, many higher-education institutions have become solely high-priced job-training centers.  Selingo mentions that though colleges have marketed their practical academic programs in a way to raise demand for more of them, it seems that some graduates of those programs are finding it difficult to land a job despite having majored in the latest career fields.

Selingo notes that according to surveys and interviews, top business executives say they like workers who are “creative, are adaptable, and have the ability to communicate and think critically—all telltale signs of a classic liberal education.”  So while we know that the future economy needs more Americans with a high-quality education after high school, Selingo poses that “there is certainly a place for purely practical training programs within our broader goal to be first in the world in an educated work force, but the question increasingly should be whether all of those programs need to be housed at expensive four-year colleges.”