MAKING OUR OWN LEARNING EXPLICIT

And What That Means About Our Teaching

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About This Talk

• Lanny as Proselytizer

• A Home Grown and from Left Field Approach

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Quiz Game

• • Diamonds and Rust

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Joan Baez

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Quiz Game 2

• • Richard Cory

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Simon and Garfunkel

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Quiz Game 3

• • In Memory of Elizabeth Reed

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The Allman Brothers

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Tough Question

• What’s the common link between these albums from Lanny’s view?

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Ion USB Turntable

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How would current students score?

• How would we score if students designed the quiz game based on what they listen to on their iPods and we had to give the answers?

• Lanny would score 0.

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Common Shared Experience

• Is great to form a bond of understanding.

• How can an instructor be sympathetic to student learning needs in the absence of common shared experience?

• If your take away from the talk is to spend hours watching MTV, you are missing the point.

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Reason 1

• Cultural psychology is comparatively slow to change.

• Reflecting on how you learn gives insight and connection into how your students learn.

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Warning!!!

• You must reflect on how you learn now.

• Nostalgia about how you learned the content of the course you are teaching is not the same thing.

• Your memory will play tricks on you.

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Immersion Model of Learning

• Graduate school as an immersive experience

  • And a trial by ordeal.

• The Immersion Model is not sufficient

  • Dabbling ()

  • Learning through recreation

    • Books, Movies, Conversation with Friends

  • Sidebars to the main conversation

    • Teaching with technology may be such a sidebar

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Zeno’s Paradox of Learning

• For adults regarding non-immersive learning

• “I know what I know and it seems as if I’ve always known it. I don’t learn new things without immersion.”

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Reason 2

• Reflecting on how you learn makes you aware of learning en passant.

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What’s The Most Basic Pedagogy?

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What’s Another Name for It?

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What Do We Call It In Higher Ed?

• Modeling Behavior

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Reason 3

• What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

• If you want your students to reflect on their own learning…

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Station Break

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The Wall

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The Benefits for Teaching

• I’ve learned more about teaching and learning from teachers of English and Writing than I have from other economists

  • Gail Hawisher – If students receive a critique from the instructor about their work or their performance they need the ability to respond.

  • Peggy Lant – Read

  • Barbara Ganley – We’re arguing now on about whether it should all be guide on the side (Barbara) or some instructor center stage (Lanny).

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A Critique of Econ Textbooks

• They’ve got the sequencing wrong.

  • From theory to illustrative example.

• The motivation for the students comes from the examples.

  • They’d like to understand them from an economics perspective.

• None of my colleagues in the Econ department here think this way or care about student motivation.

  • But my friend Byron Brown does.

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Picking on Walt

• Undergraduate Students Engaged in Inquiry

• Among the primary benefits reported from students doing real lab research on open ended problems

  • They learn that even their professors get stuck at research.

  • They learn that failure is a normal part of the process.

• Why don’t we teach these lessons in the classroom?

  • How would we go about doing it?

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Conclusion

• Instructors who have a great poker face can plan for failures at different junctures of the class session without tipping their hand ahead of time.

• The rest of us need surprise. One very good reason to experiment with teaching is to produce that sense of surprise.

  • Sometimes it won’t work.

  • Other times you’ll get stuck. Modeling how to get unstuck is a key lesson.

    • Reframing, First Principles, Learning to Learn Skills

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Thank You

• Lanny Arvan (larvan@uiuc.edu)