june meeting summary & july meeting schedule

This morning we met to continue our discussion of "McKeachie's Teaching Tips". We touched on topics of cultural sensitivity in relation to classroom discussion; teaching thinking/strategic learning; and teaching ethics/values.

Our most in-depth discussion was about teaching values, particularly in the way instructors are or aren't aware that they're conveying a certain viewpoint on their area of speciality when teaching their courses. What should students take away -- the truths of the instructor, or that this might be one version of the truth? How does or doesn't this mesh with course goals? This is especially relevant to those of us as researchers and instructors, since in some fields we teach students about classic theories that may have fallen out of favor today.

Robyn brought up Perry's work on developmental pathways of learning, which McKeachie mentions briefly in the chapter on "Dealing With Student Problems and Problem Students" (see the section "Students Who Want the Truth and Students Who Believe that Everything Is Relative"). We discussed this in relation to teaching students at the advanced high school or early college stage and how to help them along this pathway of learning. Some suggestions that were brought up: talk about an historical example of an idea change (although the relevance of this to the course topics should be made clear to the students, rather than having it be nothing more than a timeline of events); and discussing the various paths of thinking that past researchers have gone through in the field -- how/why some paths of thinking fell apart, and how/why others persisted -- to enhance the idea of thinking like a researcher/expert in the field.

Next month, we'll be meeting on Monday, July 9 at 12:00pm (location TBD). We'll be reading Beard & Wilson's "Experiential Learning: A Best Practice Handbook for Educators and Trainers", a book that we found a couple of months ago (see April 12 post for more info). It's available through Stanford Library's ebrary. We haven't decided which parts we're reading -- it has 12 chapters -- so we can either do like we did with McKeachie's book (read and discuss over 2 meetings) or just have each of us just read the chapters that look interesting to us and then discuss them in the next meeting. Any thoughts?