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TRINA MCMAHON: Welcome to An Introduction
to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching, an open online courses
for current and future STEM faculty.
I'm Trina McMahon.
I'm a professor of civil and environmental engineering
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
I'm also a co-faculty director in the Delta Program at UW-Madison,
which is an organization that's dedicated
to the development of future faculty.
I teach several courses each semester.
I teach an introductory course in engineering,
a sophomore/junior level course in environmental engineering,
which is my specialty.
I also teach part of an honors biology course
and a course in environmental microbiology.
DEREK BRUFF: And I'm Derek Bruff.
I'm the director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University
and a senior lecturer in mathematics.
I teach in the math department.
I teach a course in statistics and linear algebra from time to time
and a really fun course in cryptography.
As part of the Center for Teaching, we work with faculty and graduate students
all over the campus to help them develop foundational teaching skills
and to try out new ideas in teaching and learning.
Let's unpack this course title a little bit.
An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching.
STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
That refers to a group of disciplines that
have a similar way of making sense of the world
and definitely have a lot of commonalities in how they teach
and how they approach teaching.
And so those are the disciplines that we'll be focusing on in this course.
TRINA MCMAHON: So let's talk about undergraduate STEM teaching.
This course is mainly focused on undergraduate teaching.
And you might think this could also apply-- some of the principles
that we talk about could also apply to high school or graduate school,
but we're mainly focused on undergraduates,
and specifically, undergraduates in the United States.
DEREK BRUFF: So what do we mean by evidence-based?
Well, let's take a recent example, a journal article that
got a fair amount of attention.
It's an article that was published in the Proceedings of the National
Academies of Science, by Scott Freeman and colleagues.
And in this article, they analyzed 228 control group studies.
Each of these studies compared, more or less,
a traditional lecture-based classroom environment
with a classroom in which active learning was present.
And so on the one hand, you had courses that were primarily lecture-based.
Students were in class kind of passively taking notes.
And in the other cases, you had classrooms
in which students were interacting with each other, with the material,
often through small group activities.
And so they had 228 studies like that that they analyzed.
And they had a couple of key findings that I think are really important.
One is that the students in the lecture-based courses
actually failed at a rate 1 and 1/2 times
that of the failure rate in the active learning classrooms.
So the students in the active learning classrooms, about 22% of those students
failed across all the studies.
In the lecture classrooms, it was 34%.
Another key finding, that the final course grades in the active learning
classrooms were actually six points higher on a 100 point scale
than the final grades in the lecture-based classrooms.
This is pretty persuasive evidence that STEM educators
should adopt active learning strategies when they teach.
Trina, when did you do start using active learning
approaches in your teaching?
TRINA MCMAHON: Well, Derek, when I was a PhD student,
I didn't have access to a course like this.
And so when I first enter the classroom, it was pretty rough experience
as an assistant professor.
I set up my course just as 50-minute lectures where I just blathered on
to the students, and they got really bored and didn't learn very much.
So it wasn't until I took a short version of this course, basically,
or a course that's really similar to this one, and learned a few key tricks.
And the first thing that I applied that really
changed the dynamic of my classroom was to break my lectures up
into 15-minute blocks and intersperse those
with active activities, where students will answer a problem or work in groups
to talk about a particular concept.
And this really simple redesign of my class time
was so powerful in terms of bringing the energy level up and keeping
the students engaged that I was totally convinced that active learning was
the way to go.
One thing I learned through that process also
was that we have a lot of choices to make as teachers.
We get to decide what to assign, both inside and outside of the classroom,
in terms of the activities.
We have to decide how to structure in-class interactions.
And how to craft the content of our lectures and our labs.
But there's really no reason why this should be something
that we just copy what we experienced as undergraduates in our own learning.
Because it actually doesn't work very well for most learners.
We should actually use evidence-based research, so research
on teaching and learning, to inform our teaching choices.
And this course is going to help you learn how to do that.
DEREK BRUFF: So in this course, we'll see
what the research says about how learning works,
about the role of learning objectives and assessment of learning.
And we'll spend some time talking about active learning and what
that looks like in the classroom.
We'll delve into the importance of inclusive teaching practices as well.
And in the final activity in this course,
you'll get to design a lesson plan where you draw all these ideas
and concepts together and apply them to a course or a lesson
that you might teach one day in your own discipline.
TRINA MCMAHON: You may be wondering right now who's
putting this course together.
This course has been designed by a team of staff and faculty
from the CIRTL Network.
CIRTL for the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning.
And it's actually a distributed center because it's
in many different institutions across the United States.
In fact, more than 20 of them.
And they range from public to private, small to large.
And the faculty and staff at those institutions
who are helping us with this course have as their mission
to prepare future faculty to teach in STEM.
And so we're drawing on that expertise within the network,
as well as expertise outside of the network,
to put this course together for you.
Now the CIRTL Network has three core ideas
that are going to permeate throughout this course.
And so I want to go through them really quickly.
The first is teaching as research.
And this basic idea is that you can approach your classroom teaching
as a research project.
And you can continuously improve and iterate
in order to maximize student learning.
And this was a really transformative concept for me
when I was first learning how to teach as an assistant professor.
The second core idea is the concept of a learning community.
And learning communities actually operate at two different scales.
The first would be students within your class
supporting each other in the process of learning and discovery,
as well as the community that you belong to as
an instructor with other instructors, and even in this course,
as someone learning how to teach.
The third core idea is learning through diversity.
And this concept means that we can draw upon the experiences
and the backgrounds and the skills that students bring to our classrooms
to actually enhance learning.
DEREK BRUFF: Speaking of learning communities,
we have set up a variety of ways for you, in this course,
to interact with the content, and most particularly, with each other.
Certainly we have a lot of videos for you
to watch that will introduce some key ideas and some of the research
on teaching and learning.
A lot of these videos have embedded questions
that you can respond to that will help you reflect on what you're learning.
But just as importantly, we have discussion forums
where we encourage you to share your personal experiences,
your own perspectives on teaching and learning.
And one of the opportunities I think we have in a course
with this many participants is to explore
how some of these teaching and learning ideas
play out differently in different disciplines
or in different institutional contexts.
So we encourage you to explore some of those differences in the discussion
boards as well.
We'll have weekly quizzes that will help you reflect
on the material, some peer-graded assessments along the way
so you can get some structured feedback to each other on your work,
including that lesson plan activity that I mentioned.
We also think that local learning communities
are a key part of this experience.
And so we encourage you to seek out colleagues in your area,
on your campus, maybe other grad students, other faculty,
other postdocs, that you can meet with and interact
with as you're taking this course.
And talk to each other and help each other apply
what you're learning in this course to the teaching that you do.
If you're interested in facilitating a local learning community, please let us
know.
We have some additional resources we can provide you
that will make that a little bit easier.
We're really looking forward to getting to know you
and participating in that learning community.
So jump right in.
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