Dee Fink webinar Dec 2021

Again, welcome everybody. We're getting started in just a minute.

go ahead and introduce yourself if you haven't already.

And, Dee do you want to say hi to everybody while we're getting started?

Sure, I'm Dee Fink. You all know my name I guess by now. and some of the things i've done i worked for got my graduate degree at the university chicago and while there i was working on the teaching of geography and higher education that's what kind of got me set up for what i did later after i came uh to the university of oklahoma for my first and only academic job

for my whole career but uh started the instructional development program here where i worked with faculty across the whole campus to uh uh find ways to improve their teaching those who were interested and ready to do that and uh and so it we had a lot of a lot of fun activities some of them were one-on-one consulting some we had a lot of some a good number of uh kind of bi-weekly group meetings that were

that were a lot of fun to work with and uh and uh did that until i retired from oklahoma in 2005.

I am Bridget Arend. I have the pleasure of getting to work with Dee Fink. When i used to run a center for teaching and learning at the University of Denver we had him come visit our campus like a lot of you probably have done and it was incredibly popular one of the most popular things we did people really enjoyed his version of course redesign

focusing on meaningful significant learning and so i have had the pleasure being able to work with him over the last couple years and offer online courses based on the integrated course design framework and the taxonomy of significant learning so really excited to do that work and share some

of d thanks brilliance with you all today this is pitch to be a very informal conversation we definitely have a little bit bigger group than we typically do in these conversations and i'll share more about that in a second but just some housekeeping items because this is really set up as an informal webinar really more of a meeting if you know kind of the zoom technology

norms so all of you have the capability to unmute and talk at any time but we ask you to keep your microphone muted for now i'm going to start off asking dee some questions that are just a little bit more of the common things that people are asking around significant learning in the course design process and then we'll have some questions i'm going to maybe pick out those of you that are

in our significant learning by design 2 course right now who have sent in questions to have your questions addressed and then we'll also open it up to questions from the group and some of you have sent in questions earlier which i'll be able to get at as well you are certainly welcome to put questions in the chat we will do our best to get to those but i will fully admit that

we might not get to all of those um and be as attentive to that during this session but i wanted to also like i said just just do the housekeeping pieces give you an idea of what's to come and also can't help but share with you that we are basing this discussion for folks who have been in our significant learning by design courses but a lot of you that were invited to this session

have not um either you have in the past or maybe you're familiar with defense work in other ways but what we'll be talking about are some issues related to course design and specifically integrated course design and the taxonomy of significant learning and those are the courses that we offer that are based on Dee Fink's work we have significant learning by design

one and two and the first course is really based on designing what we call the three-column table where you go through a backward design process and you really outline your learning outcomes based on the taxonomy of significant learning you also then think about your assessments how you will get evidence of those learning goals happening and then you look at the different kinds of activities

that you would use to have those things um be most likely to happen for your students what kinds of things would students need to do in order to be successful with your learning outcomes and then the significant learning by design 2 course takes it to the next step where you actually build out your course you you take that significant learning goal and you put it into weekly um

learning outcomes we talk about things like grading we talk about inclusive design principles we talk about designing the syllabus all those different kind of tangible elements and then i also just want to share before we jump into this that that our organization also has other courses that you may or may not know about and may or may not be interested in but

they are all different and unique in their own way and really kind of uniquely successful in terms of what they can do they're all based on a base a two and a half to three week online course format where you either get in and design some activities for teaching students how to learn or advancing equity based online teaching or we also have one around designing a motivational

syllabus and i know a few names out there in our group today some of you have taken a few of these courses but just wanted to share those those are all on our website if those are of interest for you as we go forth so like i said i'm still kind of admitting people as they come in but i'm going to go ahead and turn that off and we can share some thoughts with d fink as

we go forward but i'm going to try to highlight his video here for us today and that way we can get some some questions and ideas from him and i think on your end you possibly have the idea to kind of adjust your settings where you can see everybody or you can just see d or the two

of us so do whatever makes the most sense for you but like i said i'll start off with some general questions and then we'll we'll move it over to questions from our participants in our group um but first of all this is actually a question that has come in from some of the folks that are participating in today's session but relates to a lot of things that that often are talked about

um by participants in our courses so one of the the questions that comes in is the idea around the practical applications of significant learning so the taxonomy of significant learning which we're not really going to review today i certainly could drop something in the chat that will have some

some additional resources for that taxonomy if you're not um familiar with it but we're this question is around the practical application so how do we help instructors see the value of things like caring and of these other things that go beyond their content knowledge so dee

i'm just going to go ahead and throw that up to you okay uh well first of all i just want to say thank you to bridget for inviting me to visit with all of you but also thank you to all of you for joining in here it's it's always wonderful to see a group of faculty who are willing to spend time

to learn about teaching and learn how to improve their teaching and that's exactly what you all are so thank you on behalf of somebody who cares about higher education thank you for that because that's what it's going to take to make higher education although it can be and it needs to be a little bit of background on this on how these things developed i was working here as a

faculty developer at the university of oklahoma and and realized that a lot of the people when i said let's let's uh plan your course not around topics uh which is a very common way of doing that topic one maybe from the textbook topic one topic two topic three and you work your way through the the table of contents of the textbook there there's there try to convince them there's a

better way of putting a course together that will result in what i think most professors really want if they stop and think about it and that is they want students to learn something in their course that the students will see has long term and personal value to them either in their personal life or their business operations or or whatever and so how to do that

how to how to build a course that has that kind of impact beyond just short-term memory and that's where i think these two concepts of the the taxonomy of significant learning can can give us what some of those possible learning outcomes might be that would impact a wide variety of students in a variety of variety of ways

but also in the model of integrated course design which gives us some ideas on how to take those those learning goals and build them in the course and identify the right learning activities and assessment activities so that by the time the course is over the students really get it and understand it and understand how to use it so that would that was the uh the feeling

that prompted me to to enter uh push for some of these things and uh that's what that's what got it out there so i'll hold it there and maybe move from that sort of general comment to your questions about either the taxonomy or the model of integrated course design thanks dee and somewhat of a perhaps related question too and you might want to just share

for just a second or two the idea of the big dream but that is definitely oh yeah yeah that was something existing i didn't start out with that but i was just going around the country doing some of these workshops on different campuses and uh in the middle of one of those i just i was i was trying to help one professor drill

down to see what her major learning goals were and as i was pushing her and pushing about that i came up with this well what's your big dream for your students and she was a person who was in the theater department and it really stopped her for a minute i mean she really had to it took a while we were all sitting there in silence waiting for her to figure this out and finally she said

i want to teach students how to act and that was that kind of big all-encompassing that was her the set on top of things and then but to get that to happen then that's where you bring in the taxonomy and whatever start will for them to learn how to act effectively what are the various specific things they need to learn that would allow them to do that and so that's that was where that that

idea the big dream it seemed like it was so useful to uh if you can identify that for your course uh to that then help you let that guide you in identifying more specific learning goals that you can build into the course in a fairly annoying way so yeah that was that was kind of an interesting moment but as soon as that came out i realized that was not just something

that was useful for her that was something that was used for all of us we're trying to put our courses together in a powerful way for students figure out what our big dream is and then maybe encourage students to think about what their big dream is for the queen that is what is it they think they might learn from our course that would have major value for them

and i can speak from experience and say that i think the big dream is one of those really incredibly um sometimes even transformational steps that people will go through where they they will often see you know i just want them the contents going to change the skills they use are going to change over time but i want them to be a lifelong learner i want them to always be

using evidence-based practices or i always want them to to see the the complexity of this field but be able to move forward and when you have that as your guidepost if you will yeah you're really able to adjust and change and and design things that help get to that more so than if we're just

focused on the content yeah yeah so one of the questions that often comes in around the big dream is this sense that when people are really dreaming big they will very often say well these these dreams i have for students are more about the program or graduating college you know when you say i want somebody to be a lifelong learner that's a wonderful big dream but sometimes

it's hard to then think about am i dreaming for the course or for the entire program or how do i how do i get this focused on what i can do in my particular course yeah uh well it's good to keep the program in mind but i i think with a little practice and work you will get the hang of

how to do it for your particular course let me give you an example of how i did that for mine i was teaching i had taught a course for many years in the geography department here at the university of oklahoma uh on regional geography and that that was a course that i i really had my main job as a

faculty developer but i wanted to stay active in the classroom and that that was a course that fit me well because i had been in the peace corps and had been overseas in two years in one country and then had the incredible opportunity to join some other people and travel through africa the middle east and asia for a whole year so we we got to we got to see regions and so i knew from personal

experience what that meant and the potential value it it had so part of my my challenge was to figure out how to take that concept of regional geography and say help students find a way to find make that find out what the meaning of that was for their own personal experiences and and i think what what i found myself working towards it says either in their personal life or their business life

what are the places that you will be important to you in doing things and what is it you need to know about those places that will feed into your uh your personal agenda for that or your business agenda and then how do you gather that information and so that's that's what the the geography course became was uh what is it what are

the things you can know about places and then how to pick out various of those and then find information about those that you might want to use in your future personal and professional life uh so that's that's the way i made that transition for a particular course uh to have it feed into the dream with the well the work of those students but my big dream was they will they will know how

to find information that's significant for their personal and or professional lives so that brought it right down to that particular course great thank you and i think you know i often give people feedback too that if the dream is so big that it's hard to do it on a course that's good and that that means you're dreaming really big because sometimes yeah it's sometimes it is difficult for us to think about those

bigger goals that go beyond the impact that we want to have on students lives so i always say this is a good problem and you know what is that small piece perhaps that we could impact that would affect that long term but that we could actually control for in this one course uh we probably don't want to spend the whole time on this but it might be worth doing if

somebody here was really struggling to figure out what their big dream was for their course i want you let's raise it up here and let's uh we'll talk it through to see if we do it and the value that for everybody else might be you'll see the kind of questions you need to ask when you're trying to figure out what your big dream might be so if anybody wants to volunteer

a course where they're struggling to find that we could play with that for a little bit well i did see i think kirsten helmer just put a question in the chat and if you want to go ahead and unmute yourself and share this question i think that relates to us kirsten do you want to join in and share real quick well i don't have a particular course

in mind so i also work as a faculty developer with the center for teaching and learning at umass amherst and i mean we we know that some courses it seems easier you know to to think in terms of uh how is this relevant for our students personally professionally but then there are certain courses

some have termed them and i mean i i don't uh like those terms like more remedial courses for example so students are kind of forced to take them right so how do you really uh yeah bring this notion of the the dream and the relevance into those courses beyond you need to take it

to be brought up to speed or even we see it sometimes with the uh general education courses right that students feel like okay i'm just taking this course because i i have to fulfill certain requirements yeah there's a list here and i got to take five of them or whatever exactly yeah uh well i think yeah those especially required courses sometimes uh students come into

those courses with a little bit of a negative attitude not always but sometimes that uh i'm here to only be only because i gotta take it they're making me and so i don't i'm not here because i already have any sense of the value of it and when you have a course like that i think what it requires is you spend the teacher spend a little time during the first week or two maybe longer but

especially then to build some links between what you're going to do in that course and students future personal and professional lives you have to think about what that might be and then how what get beyond just teacher talk i mean you can talk about it but the more you can get students doing

things uh field experiences field trips visiting people bringing visitors in some way or another helping them see what the connections might be between what you're going to be studying in this course and again their their future personal and professional lives uh to help them see those these potential connections and then help them build them as they go through the course

i don't know how much that helps but uh is that has anybody else struggled with that but had some success that they might want to share uh their course and what they did with that in terms of helping students uh see value in courses that they're required to take and maybe don't see the value of it themselves just volunteer out

or if you didn't have one where you solved the problem you if you're still facing it uh go ahead and put it out here and we'll play with it yeah either way hi um my name is sarah master lagyan and i am and a faculty developer at university of iowa so what we have done and we have talked to our faculty about and it has seemed to be very useful

is that we think about the ways that we want to communicate the course streams with the students there are many different ways to do that and in order to also make it a more inclusive experience for the students basically we always talk about that to be less transactional to

just tell the students what our dreams as the instructors are for this for the course but also have a dialogue with the students to say or just encourage them to reflect on what they think they will get out of that the other thing that is a kind of complementary to this communication

of the course dreams or goals for the course is that we try to also encourage faculty to incorporate transparent design in their courses that all the time talks about the purpose the transformation transparent assignment design from the transparency learning and teaching project

that it really starts all the time with purpose and we encourage the faculty to link whatever the students are doing throughout the semester in terms of assignments tasks activities to the goals that they have they have talked about at the very beginning of the course so they all the time are revisiting that goal to see that what it really looks like in terms of their

professional development good advice good advice yeah in other words highlight at the beginning and and keep reiterating it with particular assignments not only here's what the assignment is but here's why we're doing this and then and in answering that why are we doing this uh link it as much as you possibly can to possible personal goals they might have or let them start sharing

some with each other because a lot of times if we can get students dialoguing as a whole class one student will say something well i i see this link and another student will oh i hadn't thought of that but that could have that value for me too and so having that dialogue could be beneficial for the whole class

yeah and i love that idea too of having the students put it in their own words or you know sharing this dream you have with your students and having them yeah i often do that in courses here's the course outcomes but rewrite these in terms of what would make sense for you and your career and where you are and take ownership and then share that with the rest of the class yeah

yeah and then kind of moving on to other aspects of the design process i know the taxonomy of significant learning has these various components to it and gina i think you are here and i don't mean to call you out but you sent in a question earlier i know you're going through sld 2 and asked about is the aim to have equal proportion of all types of learning in each course so would

you want to give a little more context on that and share that question sure so um i'm in the occupational therapy department uh at dominican university in california and we're in the process of redesigning our curriculum and so as we've been and we decided that we wanted to use the think taxonomy um as a guiding principle and so as we've been going through the different courses

uh you know we're looking at how can we pull in these different aspects of significant learning and then we started creating what we called the think pie for each class and what percentage is it of this and what percentage of it so we were really like deconstructing it and and i wasn't sure i was like well i don't know if if it makes sense to have a class that's you know

mostly foundational i think the the purpose is that in every learning experience we're trying to to hit all six of those but that began to feel unrealistic you know when they're learning more foundational knowledge and you know kinesiology versus towards the end of the curriculum when

they're learning um you know seems to be more application based so i just wasn't sure how to how to weed that or the expectation of balancing all six of those throughout you know an activity a class and a curriculum my own sense is that it uh that most people when they start this process

will feel like what you described that that you you need the the lower levels and the foundational courses and the higher levels not until you get until the upper division courses or whatever and and my my view would be to be cautious about that i think you if with a little

creative thinking you can find application type activities and goals even in your intro courses and the you they may be lighter than some of your later courses but the degree to which you can make those an explicit part of those courses the easier it's going to be for students to see the value of those courses and engage the energy in them so i i my goal my sense is to agree that you

can try to get the the full set of the taxonomy in all courses introductory as well as the advanced courses and uh and even in the advanced courses you are working on applying all the time but usually there's some new material being introduced there to the students so again you've got the you've got the introductory material as well as the application of it and so so i think if

to the great you can it it theoretically does apply the whole the whole taxonomy all the way through from beginning to end emphasis may vary but you want some of that just so they know what it begins to look like they begin to know what it looks like the application part and the value part what connections they might want to make with thank you

so just kind of moving we seem to be chronologically moving through your integrated course design process but there were other questions that came in and this is something that often emerges in the courses i've done the the focus in the three column table goes from learning outcomes to assessments and then to activities and a lot of times

there's some blurred lines between assessments and activities and there's usually some questions that come up around what's the difference is it okay to duplicate do i need to have separate things how do you differentiate those two and why do we have assessment come first even yeah well uh let me take two of those questions then remind me if i have forgotten some of the others but

uh one one thing is assessment activities and learning activities uh are they the same or different and and uh what i eventually realized after working with this i didn't have this realization when i first started was sometimes not always but sometimes assessment activities

and learning activities will be identical that is the same activity that allows students to learn it also gives you and them information to determine how well they have learned i mean just inherit in the nature of the activity not always the case but sometimes so if you if you find that looking as you try to write a learning activity and assessment activity if they look pretty similar

don't worry about it that's okay sometimes they either are identical or at least similar and so that's that's par for the course other times they'll be fairly different but uh but if it's the same or similar uh sometimes that's okay yes and i'd say i think you know especially as we move more and more towards active learning

types of activities what we really are doing are we're getting evidence of learning as we're having them practice the learning and do the things so that i think that's okay to have that that blurred line a lot as well um one other question i wanted to get to before we start getting more questions from the group um because sometimes people ask about the idea of the integrated nature of course

design like what makes it integrated and in the courses we talk about functional integration which is more of the do the alignment between the goals and the activities and the assignments but then there's also this kind of chronological integration in terms of how things build over time so could you speak to that a little bit the idea of why it's called integrated course design

what i saw a lot of when i started working the field of faculty development here that is when people were just on their own without input from some specialists like that is they put together courses where oftentimes there there weren't even there weren't any learning goals they just worked through the content and sometimes that content was of their own makings or often times it was uh kind of

followed the table of contents in a major textbook for the course uh and so they would introduce some content and then they would uh long well let's say i better i better assess this somehow i got to give a grade so they put two midterms and a final in there maybe some weekly quizzes along the way so they'd have some basis for giving a grade but to me what that usually resulted in was just was

that was was an uncoordinated unintegrated just a a set of learning activities and a disconnected set of assessment activities in a non-existent set of learning goals uh and and so for the students it resulted in a learning experience that was disconnected not integrated uh certainly with each other let alone with any purposes they might have

or why do i need to learn this what's the value of it for me there's no attention given to that maybe might become a little bit apparent for some of the students but i think for a lot of them it never did it just of course i had to take here was what the teacher required i

mean here's what i had to do to get a grade or a good grade and to me that's that's wasting a major learning opportunity that that we want students to have and so if we want to avoid that kind of learn it and forget it kind of response by the students uh then we have to start thinking about well what what kind of goals can we put in and how can we build the right kind of

learning activities and assessment activities for it and once we do that and make that visible to students and make the the the connections between those your purposes and their purposes and how that might connect with their life in the near or distant future the more value they're going to see in it and the more energy they're going to be able to put into it we wanted to put into it so i think

learning how to get those connected all of but you have to start with the learning goals because that should drive the selection of the learning activities and assessment activities and again sometimes those assessment and learning activities will be either similar or identical and that's okay uh i don't know how is there additional parts of that question that

i can address or is that that address it fully enough i no i think that is good i still you know vividly remember again when you visited our campus and you talked about how also just kind of the the nature of building on material throughout the course that you can't just take week three and week 12 and swap those that they should be doing something very fundamentally different

if you're doing if you can swap them your course isn't set up in a way that builds it becomes more exciting as you go through it so that's that's maybe the asset test can you swap whop weeks without any effect and if so you want to rethink your course and i think that was a little bit of a mind-blowing message for a lot of folks

in terms of oh that is you know it's not just the content it's these in some random sequence well and we did and i want to again kind of open it up more to questions that you have and i have a list here but we'll get to what is most useful for the group here um but curtis you just sent in a question about convincing colleagues to switch from things to

blooms and again if you want to add any more context to that please go ahead and jump in um i i it was just sort of an off the cuff question but uh so uh dee i uh i think i uh i went to a workshop of yours i think it was at the university of minnesota

but we might have flown out to once so um so i was excited to see this webinar and just kind of get inspired again by your taxonomy so the the i work um at a place that does all online learning and we use bloom's taxonomy a lot so i was just kind of thinking as i was listening to this how

do i get this group to adopt you know what are the big selling points um for a change for a big change in practice but i was thinking gosh i wish we we had like the metacognitive stuff built into our lessons and the stuff about caring and human values so i'll hang up and listen yeah uh

yeah i think bloom is you know i i i think you probably know this i may have mentioned some of my workshops here but you know my graduate work was at the university of chicago and i had of course i had a course from bloom not about the taxonomy but one about courses i think it was uh but i was very

very familiar with him and it really is a good i thought start having that cognitive framework and of course it's had worldwide adoption and use so it's clearly has a lot of people see the value in it but having looked at it and then looking at well what is it i really want students to learn

clearly a lot of what i want to learn was cognitive it fitted the bloom taxonomy easily but there were other things as well that i thought were important that just didn't fit into that and so i started playing with that and say well what are those other things let's try to list them out and then eventually realized i could begin to sort those into you know a handful of categories

and then and then eventually came out with my own taxonomy which which incorporates bloom but then goes beyond it i think in some important ways at least ways that i found important uh in the human dimension and caring and things like that interacting with other people and learning to care that that just doesn't go into the bloom taxonomy and to me they're really important uh and i think they are for most people when they stop and

ask themselves seriously whether they might be important for them so that's that's what prompted me to sort of move into this other you know what i saw as a broader taxonomy and uh and hopefully other people would see some value in it too is there does that address your comments or do you want to you want to follow up with some comments about how

what that did for you no thanks uh that and the the link from bridgette are very helpful so thanks god glad that worked out yes i was trying to pop some resources in the chat as we go through but i think a related question that came in um through the registrations for this

session was also about administrators and helping see administration to see the value not only of spending time on course design but of this also kind of more holistic view of learning so i know you've worked with administrators too if you have any tips or advice on that realm yeah that that's

an important one because the uh if we can help the administrators become allies in our effort to uh work with faculty and convince faculty that they want their courses to be more than just content centered content focused uh that will make a major difference in our ability to to

get faculty on board with this uh so how to help administrators i i think the key probably is to look at uh linking courses to program because uh the the administrators see programs i mean they're aware of courses that that support those programs but they're if we can help them see to

to get these program goals and your departmental goals and the goals for your majors in your course if you really want those to if you should have goals i mean explicitly give some thought to by the end of this program what we want our majors to know and be able to do uh and as you start to answer that you will be developing learning desired learning outcomes in my current language

and and then if and then what language can you use to formulate those in a good way that's both convincing to students convincing the faculty but then also maybe sheds a little light on what you need to do in individual courses or with a set of courses to get those to happen to each student by the end of the program uh what you're basically doing is kind of a curriculum

planning via courses via desired learning outcomes and so to me those kind of all fit together and but but those are things that administrators can see the value of pretty quickly i think and i think sarah you had a question

yes sure thank you bridgette um i um actually have two questions but the first one is that um so we in our course design institutes and everything that is related to course design discourse we definitely rely on and introduce backward course design and one of the questions because

we really see that as a very learner-centered and learning-centered process and framework for the students but one of the questions or one of the conversations that we've had and we've also got is that to what extent because we know that it's very learner-centered but because it starts with the instructor i mean the instructor thinks about the goals

and then designs the objectives or outcomes and then things about the other parts of the course how what is the what is the boundary between its being learner-centered and behavioral perspective that was one of the questions that i needed more time to think about and respect how it is not something that is very very much inspired by a behavioristic perspective that we

are we are thinking about how students should do or what they need to do and then how is students learners situated in this framework i don't know if i asked that in a clear work the way but for me that was something that i'm very much appreciating this time to also mention and

also see what you think about it well let me let me start with a little bit and then you tell me if if we need to talk about this more i sort of have to understand it but let me see if i if i do properly or not what i'm hearing is is if you buy if a teacher buys into the idea

that a course ought to be learning centered fair enough but then he also has to deal with student reaction student behavior student activities and and link those to those desired learning outcomes and then work about how do i get the right behavior and students to engage in learning about this kind of learning as opposed to something else or nothing at all is that sort of where

your question is going or clarify yes when one of the questions and then um you know we had this in our own uh learning community that is is backward course design more is it also something like that is you know from the different approaches to learning we have cognitive we have constructive

and also behavioristic we were thinking about i've advocated that as a co-constructive perspective but then i was thinking like also it is a question that is it also behaviorals because we are trying to guide the students behavior towards some preferred learning outcomes i wanted to see

what your insight is in in this regard uh well uh i mean is your question about is is uh backward design does it work or is it coordinating these your cognitive versus constructive versus behavioral is it is coordinating those is your question

yes yes thank you okay well i i think that uh what that reveals your question well the the short answer is yes you you can and should to degree that you can incorporate more than just cognitive learning outcomes behavioral learning outcomes are constructive or whatever now you may need different frameworks for doing that

but having multiple kinds of learning desired learning outcomes is okay what what you if when you do that you probably though need to uh keep in mind that that you don't want too many major desired learning outcomes yet that is to me 10 15 20 is too many uh i think you know

five to seven is probably a max of an optimum number of desired learning outcome which may have sort of sub points under them but a sort of macro things that you want to keep your eye on and make progress towards a handful you know a good handful five six seven whatever but not

10 12 15. that becomes too many to to really to really effectively uh support and build in the activities necessary to make significant progress on and to monitor them for students so that'd be my general advice on that you can have multiple kinds but but keep a lid on the number of them

and i was going to jump into if i could just as i teach a course about adult learning theory and so i just my head was just in this space where we have students do a project where they kind of separate out behavioral versus cognitive versus constructivist type learning theories and how they apply and i mean to me that at the end of the day we're almost using bits and pieces of each of

them when we're really getting students involved in this more well-rounded education and so i don't know that that's an answer just to say that i think at some level when you use a framework like this that isn't just a behavioral perspective or a constructivist or a cognitive perspective it actually allows you it gets messier but it kind of allows you to use some of the benefits

of all these different philosophies of teaching and approaches to teaching in a way that that to me i think is more freeing for people and we can kind of use the best of everything as opposed to just focusing on learning is a behavioral change or learning is only something that you know we're not concerned with their thoughts or their emotions and so it does feel

messier but yet something that we can approach from lots of perspectives and i think at the end of the day we get a better educational outcome because we're looking at the much bigger picture which kind of leads to other questions i think that dee that come in a lot around things like like when we have values and caring and learning to learn as our goals

how do we measurably assess those things how do we create these learning outcomes and you know look for evidence so do you want to speak to that a little bit well yeah and that that that is a question that came up very early when i put this taxonomy out there says the first three yeah we're familiar with cognitive stuff blue's been having us work on that for several decades but this uh

this interaction and caring and learning how to learn um how do we assess those things and and i have some general thoughts i mean i've thought about that but i think uh people are right as soon as you introduce those one of the questions that has to come up is uh what both how do we get it to happen but then equally important is how do we know whether it's

happened that's you that's the assessment piece i think there are answers to that i think there we have to be creative and and just give some thought and explore it let me just uh just brainstorm a few of the kinds of things that i've come up with in my own thinking about that having students interact with others have how would we know if students have

made progress in that in interacting in a better way and i and i think i think one way to do that would be to have a questionnaire for the whole class to say how do they feel about some of their class especially how that how do they feel about the interaction capabilities of their fellow students have they gotten better over the time or how good are they at the end by the end of

it however you want to put it but when you start introducing other students in the class especially if you get classes beyond you know 10 12 15 you probably can't have students react to all the other students that is one reason for for me to break the class up into small groups and have

the course operate via small groups throughout the course i mean to me that's that has a lot of good good reasons to do that but one of them and it allows you to do this student assessment they don't evaluate everybody they evaluate the people in their small group so you've got got them evaluating you know five six seven people whatever and that's that's a feasible amount of

feedback to give on people then so everybody in the group evaluates themselves they turn that into you and then you summarize it somehow and somehow get it back to the students if you can but both about what they learn and how well they contribute to the work of the group and those sorts of things so to me that that's that's the that's the direction which i'd

move for evaluating getting course evaluated and the students evaluated and the small groups great and as we move into kind of the last 10 minutes or so of our time together there were some more specific questions that came in and um hillary i think you were out there greenberger you had a question sd you were just talking about groups um that yours was more around kind of independent mastery of material but also when students are

working on groups do you want to share anything with dee and some context for your question as well sure thanks bridget hillary greenberger from ithaca college physical therapy department i teach in fairly large uh large cohorts um from 75 to 100 students and i struggle with so for

grading purposes i have them in groups when they do projects but my concern is whether or not they are reaching independent map independent mastery of the material if they're working in groups yeah that is always a worry i mean um and it's it's a worry whether you're out of the

whole class or using small groups or not how do you know when number 78 and 98 are learning well as numbers one and two that you might have a little more contact with and i mean if they're for the moment the question is are they learning the content i think the the only answer that is you've got to give some content assessment uh individually i mean that everybody

takes individually uh you can have them do it individually keep the paper and then have them do it collectively in which there's a lot of learning that goes on as i hear what you thought you learned oh i did that too but i didn't think about it but you've got a record of what they did learn independently at least for the questions you give them or what they thought they did

either way and so i think you just have to give individual questionnaires that you make up or they add to or however you want to set it up but if you want to know how well they each individual master the material some you've got to simplify that down because but but you can do that you just have to give them out this kind of a

conventional questionnaires about our chess about it as well as some group things and again others feel free to share thoughts so hillary were you gonna join you have some follow-up questions of that hillary no um unfortunately um i you were frozen for most of your response oh i'm sorry uh do you know bridget whether you're recording that do you know whether the that will record the freeze or the actual

i was actually able to hear you so i don't know also that maybe that's something on hillary's screen or yeah maybe it's at my end maybe you can get a copy of the recording from bridgette later yep i will do that thank you and that's what i was going to suggest too that if others want to share

ideas this is one of those issues that i think is is really a big thing that we all kind of grapple with and there's lots of different approaches and philosophies and there's some you know kind of peer grading and group grading and grading on mastery and specs grading and there's like so many different kinds of things that can be done it's hard to you know i know for d to answer that in

30 seconds but so just to acknowledge kind of the complexity of that question i guess um but i think if i could paraphrase what you said in that clip version it was sort of needing some some level of independent evidence as well as that you do um and it kind of goes into another i'm

sort of grouping together some questions that came in earlier that we're looking at especially the the taxonomy and the integrated course design process and do these do those things change when we teach asynchronously or when we teach online or when we teach in different formats or if we teach a condensed course like an eight-week course so um i mean i certainly have thoughts on

that but d if you want to just address like how it works in different formats yeah no i i think both of those the taxonomy and the course design design uh are universal in their general principles that as i think uh you know figuring out what you want students to learn and how they're going to learn it and how are you going to know whether they learned it

how well they learned it those are true whether you're dealing with a six person seminar or a 200 student class of some sort how you get at that you can you can do some things with a six-person seminar that you probably can't do with a 200 student class but the the challenge is the same that is you want to know to what degree they learned x y or z and why or why not

and so how you get at that with how much of a questionnaire how much of it sort of a whole group discussion i think something like that where you can probe into their answers a little more uh in a way you're just not feasible with a 100 200 students uh but the the the needs and the general direction i just have to ask them some questions uh and to get the answers as focused as you can

yeah and i think i would echo that too just that i know we all got so sick of the word pivot over the last couple of years but i think that was the idea of having this really strong sense of your goals for the course that go beyond the content that if we have that that is sort of our anchoring point and then we can shift to a smaller course a different format

online to synchronous um because when we i know again i taught at a university that has 10 week courses so already that seems condensed to what a lot of you teach but then sometimes we had courses that were four weeks or five weeks so that really changes the nature of the content in terms of how much you can cover but it really doesn't change the type of learning you want students to be doing

so you know for an english class maybe you're not going to read 17 novels maybe you only have time to read five but you're still if the goals are really to explore these perspectives and to develop you know understandings of genres like you still can do that with five texts as opposed to seventeen so in fact on that very point one of the things i think uh i would often often wish

more of my literature churches teachers had done was not only teach me about certain novels but really teach me this is how you approach and study a novel no matter what it is if i could do that with three of them in the course i could do it with any of them that i read thereafter in my life

and and that would solve one and and how to pick out which novels i want to read one of my laments in life is i go into a bookstore and they got 100 million books in there where do i start i don't have a personal plan i have developed one since then but i had to do it on my own

but it would be helpful to have students learn how to develop a plan for their own reading how much of it is about personal life how much professional life how much of it is kind of serendipitous some of it is pre-planned or whatever but learn how to develop a plan for what you want to read in the in what order and what's high priority and what's down the line a little bit

uh i think that would be a lot of help to students i know it would be to me it would have been to me and i developed it on my own eventually but if you can help students learn how to do that and they can dialogue with each other about their plans and they can learn from each other i think sending

students out with both a plan but also knowing how to periodically update their plan for reading what they want to read and what they want to get out of it how much of it they want to read very carefully and how much they want to read sort of uh for the big picture uh would be a lot of value

yes and i can't help but mention that's a big focus of our teach students how to learn course which is really about you know we take these things for granted that they know how to read an academic article versus a textbook versus a novel those are different strategies and they don't always walk in our doors knowing how to do that in the way that you expect

and i know we just have a couple more minutes i want to be sensitive of time so if anybody has any last minute questions please throw those our way but i also just wanted to perhaps end with another kind of grouping of questions which were more around you know how this framework fits with the way things are heading nowadays rightly so where we're really focused on equity-based practices inclusive design

we i know sorry you kind of touched on that a little bit in your question as well and i've i've personally always found that this approach really has always been much more embracing of that and getting students even involved in the design process and focusing it around students more holistically but d if you want to talk a little bit about how any of that well you did

a pretty good job of summarizing i'm not sure i have a whole lot to add to that but i think the two goals you mentioned there one is making sure we have some clear learning goals desired learning outcomes for the course whether they're mine or jointly developed with the students having a set of goals is really important but then learning helping students

learning then how do we address those is equally important how do we set up an agenda we'll do it for this course but you want to be able to set up your own learning agenda for additional reading after the course and making sure that that's part of the course helping them learn how to do that i think is important as well just what's the content of these ideas

and i guess the other thing i actually meant to add this into what you were talking about before but just in terms of being able to apply this to such different situations whether it's online or condensed course or different you know students with different backgrounds um you know the idea of situational factors is another big component of your process that

we don't often that's one thing i often hear from faculty as well i've never taken that you know i kind of assume that i know my class is different and i have these factors but really listing them out helps in being very intentional in the design and being able to say this is a course that could be hybrid or this is a course where students are coming in without

you know they they don't think they can do math or they have very little background in this fundamental prerequisite which i you know the course was based on that they already knew how to do so those are these situational factors that once we really put those in in a form where we can see them we can actually begin to address them more

intentionally well yeah i think you you put your finger right on it most ebola stuffs are generally pretty well aware whether we got a two-week course or a 10-week course or 20 students or 120 but then taking time to stop and think uh how am i going to respond to each of those so i can so the course can be infected even effective even though it's 120 students or or whatever they know nothing

about this subject matter to begin with whatever the challenge major challenges are uh listing those things out and say how am i going to respond to that am i going to do something in the course may not have to do address all of them but you should be able to address a handful of them that's going to go a long ways towards making the course have the kind of impact you want for the students

well thank you dee thank you everyone i know we were right at the top of the hour and we are busily finishing up our our semester and our quarter so thanks everyone best of luck to you with your course design and your ongoing hopefully you have a bit of a break over the next few weeks um but again feel free to reach out with questions and let us know

and thanks for joining us for this fairly informal chat with d fink it was a pleasure on my and thank bridget for setting it up and thank the rest of you for joining in