Like many of you, I enjoy reading about teaching, listening to podcasts and watching videos for inspiration. I find it very interesting the many different ways faculty engage their students in learning. Many times, I'm inspired to incorporate some of these strategies or activities I discover in my own teaching.

It is risky, though, to try something new. Just because a particular approach works well in one class, doesn't mean it will work well in others. Any time we incorporate something new, it takes time to plan and implement. This means that there are opportunity costs. If we incorporate a new activity in class, it means that we need to make time for it by eliminating another activity. It also means that the extra time it takes to plan for the activity is less time we can spend on our work outside of teaching as well. Finally, we also have to take into account student evaluations of our teaching. If we take a risk that fails, we may come to regret it at the end of the semester. With all these reasons not to take risks in our teaching, why should we consider it?

Why take risks?
I've found that when I teach one of my courses in the same way each semester, it's disadvantageous for myself and for my students.  First, I'm not growing - in my teaching and in the way I approach my course content. One example that comes to mind for me is the way in which I teach my preservice education students to integrate technology through instructional planning. I have worked with colleagues to develop a particular strategy with materials to assist students in the process, but I essentially used the same series of in-class lessons to introduce it. I realized over time that sticking with the same way to engage students with the material had some issues. Working together with them in class didn't give students the time they needed to work with the materials, grapple with their ideas and produce good work. Consequently, through several different iterations, I have developed a new self-paced, online approach that I think works much better and improves my course.

Trying new strategies and activities also helps us to better respond to students' learning needs and preferences in the classroom. One way I've taken a risk to provide my students with more choice to better meet their needs is through offering more choice in the materials and different strategies to approach their work. Giving them a range of different materials to introduce new content allows them to pick the mode and format that works best for them. I also like to provide options for both the specific focus for course projects and how they present their work as well. While these efforts do require more time for me to plan and prepare, my students consistently have positive things to say about the choice they have in my courses.

Taking risks and trying new things can also increase our enjoyment and engagement with the class. Even when things don't go exactly as planned, experimenting with different strategies for class discussion, student writing assignments, and different ways to present content can keep us engaged and interested in our own work. A few years ago, one activity I had to help students understand TPACK, a theoretical construct to describe teachers' knowledge for integrating technology, had become stale. I traded out a series of readings and a paper with a project where students developed TPACK teaching cases. Not only were these teaching cases much more effective in helping students to understand TPACK, it was also much more satisfying for me to design, facilitate and assess their final projects.

Tips for getting started with new approaches
Despite the potential payoff for trying new approaches in teaching, it can still be daunting. I've learned over time that a few tips can be helpful in taking the leap and being successful with new strategies.

1. Try small "hacks" rather than huge changes. If you can identify small, manageable changes to explore you can build confidence to take bigger risks. So, for example, rather than building your course entirely around case studies, try planning and implementing a single, brief case in one class session. This experience will help you to determine if you want to try additional cases in future class sessions.
2. Consider your rationale for change. I think that when we make a significant change in our teaching, we ought to have a reason to do so. If we identify a challenge or opportunity in our teaching, we'll be much more likely to invest our time and energy into trying a new approach.
3. Determine if the innovation is a fit. Even if we have identified a challenge or opportunity in our course content, a particular strategy or approach we come across may not be a good fit for the content or students in our class. To avoid a mismatch, be sure to clearly identify your learning goals and consider any new ideas against them.
4. Be transparent with your students. When you recognize you're taking a risk in trying something new, tell your students up front what you're planning. Tell them why you've decided to try a new approach. Ask them for their feedback afterwards. In my experience, being open and honest with students and then asking them for the input goes a long way towards getting their buy-in for a new approach.
5. Be reflective. When you try something new, take some time after class or at the end of the project to think about what you've learned. This reflection can help you to zero in on effective elements of an activity, how you might be able to improve, and what lessons you learned. Armed with these reflections, the next time you try a similar approach, you will have the benefit of your reflective experience.
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What risks have you taken this semester in your teaching?
Please post your comments below.   

This semester, we have the pleasure of hosting Dr. Jane Hunter from Western Sydney University at William & Mary. Jane does amazing work in researching teachers' efforts to integrate technology in K-12 schools to create High Possibility Classrooms. As part of her visit, we've been touring a number of K-12 schools so that she can get a sense for how teachers in the U.S. enhance teaching and learning with technology.
It's so interesting to pop into different teachers' classrooms to see how they've filled and designed their physical learning spaces. Over the last two days we've visited:

• a high school computer lab with bright, natural light, space to spread out and work on the walls
• a first grade classroom with multiple areas for different kinds of work, including areas for kids to work on the floor, on beanbags, are at a table
• a middle school makerspace complete with woodworking machinery, a computer etching machine, computers, and a range of building materials
• a high school government classroom with inspiring images, pictures of students and school events, and college pennants

In seeing all these different kinds of learning spaces, it became clear to me how much the furniture, arrangement, tools/resources, and decorations communicate what is valued and emphasized in the classroom. For example, in the first grade classroom above, it was clearly important to the teacher that the students be comfortable and have freedom within their space. In the high school classroom, the photos on the walls communicated the teacher's amazing rapport with and support for the students in his class.

What do our learning spaces communicate?
It made me wonder what our learning spaces communicate to students in higher education. What does a lecture hall with the chairs bolted to the floor in long, tiered rows say about interaction and collaboration? What does a space with flexible, easily arranged furniture communicate? What does a seminar room with mismatched chairs and writing and scratches on the table communicate? This also works the other way too. It’s key for the space configuration to match or fit the instructional approach. A lecture actually works better where all students can easily see the front of the room – like in a lecture hall. 

A few years ago, I was at a university in Sweden for a workshop. It was a high profile event, and the organizers had arranged a beautiful, modern, high-tech space for the session. Each seat offered multiple power outlets, a network connection, and even a handy place to perch one's drink. The room was accented with beautiful Scandinavian wood paneling. There was only one problem. While the workshop was designed to be highly collaborative and interactive, the learning space was one of those steeply tiered lecture halls.

As the attendees filed in, we scrambled around the building looking for a more suitable room to support the interactivity we had designed for the workshop. We held the opening session in the original room. The participants seemed engaged, if a little distant.

Following the coffee break (Swedes know how to serve a proper coffee break!), we moved the workshop to a non-descript, but large and flexible room. We had arranged the tables in the room to seat five participants and positioned them in a way so that they would easily be able to see not only the front of the room, but also each other. The whole tenor of the experience changed from the beautiful but rigid initial space.

How can we tailor the learning space to our teaching?
Unlike our K-12 teaching brethren, college faculty typically don't have their "own" classroom. This means that we can't really decorate the room or even permanently arrange the space. In fact, we often have little choice or control in where we teach. What, then, can we do to tailor the space to the kind of learning experience we want to create?

1. Create great visuals. While we can't put up posters or other decorations in our classrooms, we can employ great visuals. We can do this by creating engaging presentations or even printed transparencies. We can also use colors and graphics even on the whiteboards or chalkboards. I fondly remember a history professor of mine at Notre Dame that drew elaborate multicolored maps painstakingly on the chalkboard prior to class. These visuals communicated a kind of excitement and richness that wasn't lost on the students.
2. Bring in your personality. We also communicate to our students by bringing our quirks, interests, and passions into the learning space. I have a colleague who distributes "agendas" for each class with relevant cartoons and graphics as a way to pique students' interest before class even begins. I had another colleague with a great sense of humor. He regularly showed brief videos, cartoons, or even humorous newspaper clippings to illustrate points from his lecture.
3. If it's possible, arrange the furniture. I'm fortunate enough to teach in a building with modular furniture on wheels that can easily be rearranged in a number of different ways. For a more formal approach, I can arrange the room in neat rows. If I have designed a gallery walk experience, I push all the chairs off to the side and arrange the tables around the perimeter of the room. For small group work, I push together pairs of tables. It's easy in my current space, but I managed to do some arrangements even with less flexible furniture.
   
4. Find interesting space on campus. Most campuses have some innovative classroom spaces. At William & Mary, we have an amazing digital media center and classroom. I haven't taught there yet, but I'm planning for it. We also have access to the Jim and Bobbie Ukrop Innovation and Design Studio. Sometimes, it can be difficult to secure the exact classroom space you want. I suggest offering nice chocolates to whoever schedules the space.

What does your ideal learning space look like?
Please post your comments below.   

Increasingly, many faculty members feel pressured to integrate technology in teaching in either a face-to-face or hybrid approach. While there are many potential benefits for integrating digital tools and resources in our teaching, they often also introduce new complexity and increase the likelihood that something might go wrong. Why then and when should we consider using digital tools in our teaching practice?

Like the selection of learning activities for class sessions, we need to be strategic about the integration of technology. One of the first things to keep in mind is to never start your planning with a tool as your primary focus. Rather, technology integration decisions should be considered after you’ve considered the big picture of your course, designed your learning goals, factored in students' needs and preferences, and selected the learning activity sequence. In this way, the technology is where it belongs – in a supporting role.

Beyond this, however, it can be a little daunting to think about how to select from the universe of possible tools and resources. One way to pare down the options is to consider the particular technologies that are best positioned to support the specific learning activities you’ve selected to guide your class session. To assist you in this process, the Higher Education Learning Activity Taxonomy (HELAT) includes suggested technologies for each of the 20 different learning activities that comprise this taxonomy. While these suggested technologies aren’t an exhaustive list, they will help you to consider options you might not otherwise consider. In this way, you have only to consider a smaller, more targeted number of digital tools and resources that are well grounded in the learning design you’ve created.

Just because a particular technology tool or resource connects with a learning activity doesn’t mean you should necessarily use it. For example, while you could choose to have students create a 5-minute, simple cause and effect chart with a digital concept mapping tool like SpiderScribe, it’s probably more expedient and less distracting to do so on paper. If, on the other hand, the students would build out a detailed concept map incorporating different images and media, the digital version of the experience would clearly be superior. How, though, can you determine when and why to opt for a digital tool?

Technologies can provide a relative advantage
In some cases, the use of technology can simply provide a relative advantage over more analog approaches. This can be one of the simplest ways, but potentially quite powerful reasons to integrate technology in your teaching. For example, students can interview a subject for an oral history project taking notes with pen and paper. When they record the interview with a digital audio or video recorder, however, they have a more complete record of the experience. They can also then either review the specific wording and intonation of the subject after the fact or even incorporate the actual content in a class presentation or multimedia paper. When students take notes using a digital tool like OneNote or Evernote, they can easily search for specific terms and can more easily incorporate the content into their papers.

Technologies can enhance or extend skill development
When students are developing their skills – either more general 21st century skills or more discipline specific skills like procedures in a laboratory course, technologies can often help to enhance or extend the learning experience for students. For example, students may have limited time to use microscopes in a lab setting, in which case, they may be able to continue their practice via a virtual microscope. Similarly, while students can collaborate on a writing project with classmates around a table, with videoconferencing and collaborative word processing tools, they can collaborate with peers literally around the world.

Technologies can help meet diverse learners’ needs and preferences
I’ve written often on this blog about the ways in which faculty can help to meet diverse learners’ needs through Universal Design for Learning principles. UDL suggests that students should have multiple ways to encounter the content, express their understanding and engage with the material. Digital resources like video clips, animations, and digital texts can all provide more interactive ways for students to encounter the content. Similarly, digital simulations, multimedia design tools, and 3-D visualization software can open up powerful opportunities to share their understanding of course concepts. For many students, these digital enhancements can lead to increased engagement in learning.

Sometimes the best option is no technology
One benefit to using specific criteria like those offered above is that it forces you to have a specific vision and purpose for including technology in your learning experiences. In some cases, using no technology might be the best option. In other cases, however, when the use of a digital tool or resource provides a relative advantage, enhances the learning experience, or more effectively meets the needs of diverse learners, it would be to your advantage to at least consider the options.

How do you determine when to integrate technology in your courses?
Please post your comments below.   

We're fortunate enough to live near Busch Gardens, a beautiful theme park in Virginia. Needless to say, we've visited many times. As veterans, we recognize the importance of planning to maximize our fun. Even for a full day, there's too much to see and do to fit it all in. Consequently, we have to choose what and when we do things to get the most out of the day. For example, it's never a good idea to have a funnel cake immediately before hopping on a roller coaster. We also have different interests, so we try to mix up rides with carnival days and food during the day. With these options and the strategic planning, we all go home happy.

What we can learn from a day at the amusement park for our instructional planning
We can learn a lot from our experience at an amusement park in planning instruction for a class session or course. Just as we consider the possibilities available at the park, we have a number of options for teaching and learning activities. We need to be strategic in selecting and sequencing them for class sessions to create powerful learning experiences for our students.

One challenge we have as instructors considering teaching and learning options is to recognize the full range of the options we have. After all, it's easy (and only natural) to fall into ruts where we default to a small subset of the possibilities in our teaching. This is a big part of the reason that I developed the Higher Education Learning Activity Taxonomy (HELAT). The current version of the taxonomy includes 20 different learning activities you can consider in your planning.

You may be thinking that it's nice to have all these options, but wonder how to select, sequence and combine them into learning experiences for your students. While it's critical to begin by considering the big ideas in your course, build from your learning goals, and factor in students' needs and preferences, you may still be looking for some guidance in the process. Below I share three different strategies that you can use to build your teaching from the HELAT.

Build around cognitive levels
One effective and time-tested approach to selecting learning activities is to select appropriate activities based in part on the cognitive level of the targeted learning goal(s) using Bloom's Taxonomy. Developed originally in the 1950's, the revised version of the taxonomy offers a framework to consider the cognitive level of different learning tasks in the following categories:

• remember
  
• understand
  
• apply
  
• analyze
  
• evaluate 
  
• create
  

So, for example, if the learning goal is focused upon students developing a basic understanding of a topic or concept, a class discussion or focused exploration might be more appropriate than conducting research or engaging a problem-based learning experience. Both of these latter activities would probably be more effective with learning goals that require a greater level of analytical thinking. To assist you in selected learning activities based on the cognitive level of the learning goal, the HELAT activities are organized according to the six levels of Bloom's taxonomy.

Leverage content learning to build 21st century skills
Another strategy for selecting learning activities is to consider what skills you would like students to develop as they learn. A great framework to consider these kinds of skills is the 21st Century Learning Design framework. The framework includes the following six skills:

• collaboration
• knowledge construction
• self-regulation
• real-world problem-solving and innovation
• use of ICT for learning
• skilled communication

While some bristle at the notion of 21st century skills, I think most of us would agree that these are the kinds of skills that not only will be important for students in their future careers, but also help to enrich content-based learning experiences in our courses. To make it easier to zero in on the learning activities that are particularly suited to help students to develop these skills, in the HELAT taxonomy you'll see icons representing each skill "tagged" to specific learning activities.

 Assessment for learning
For many faculty, assessments may equate to quizzes, tests, and term papers. We may have a tendency to think of learning activities and assessments as two different things. In reality, many learning activities can be used as formative or summative assessments of student learning. The key advantage to considering assessments more broadly is that you can vary the options for students to express their understanding – an important component of Universal Design for Learning.

The HELAT includes a number of learning activities that can serve as formative (e.g., write/respond, compare/constrast) and summative assessments (e.g., develop a model, perform an experiment/procedure). When you view them in this light, you can combine these assessment activities with activities that are more focused on helping students build their knowledge. If you can combine a range of these assessments over the course of a semester-long class, you'll have great insight into student learning beyond the more typical approaches to summative assessment.

What do you consider when selecting and combining learning activities in your planning?
Please post your comments below.

In the last couple of posts, we've been exploring the planning process for teaching in higher education. I began with discussing the need to understand the big picture for the course to identify the key concepts and foci. From there, we can develop clear and effective learning goals. If we were to go right from this point to selecting and sequencing learning activities, however, we'd be forgetting one key piece of the instructional puzzle - our students. Unless we consider the unique experiences, characteristics, and goals of our students, we may just be spinning our wheels.

While research faculty may be able to operate independently of students as creators of new knowledge, for the vast majority of us in higher education, our purpose is to play a part in developing the next generation of biologists, anthropologists, mathematicians, exercise physiologists, etc. The development of our students is absolutely central to our mission as academics. Why then don't they figure more deliberately in the planning process?

I believe that we should consider our students from multiple angles in our planning process. In this post, I offer ideas on how we might consider where students are in their programs, the common misconceptions and challenges they typically encounter in our courses/disciplines, and the defining characteristics they bring to the classroom.

Who are you and why are you here?
I vividly remember my experience as an undergraduate student at the University of Notre Dame in a class called Basics of Film. As a history major, I was interested in the course primarily as an elective that sounded interesting to me.  It was my first time taking a course as an elective that was a program requirement for another major. It was a rude awakening. While interesting to me, in identifying thematic and technical elements of silent films from the 20's, I quickly realized I was out of my depth. I was much more familiar with Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese than I was Akira Kurosawa or Federico Fellini.

If you teach 100 or 200 level courses, you're likely to encounter students like me in your courses. We may be interested, but we won't likely bring the same level of commitment to the course than a major in your program. That's not to say that these students can't contribute in powerful ways to the classroom community. When we recognize this continuum of commitment, though, we can ensure that elements of the course will appeal to the range of students in our courses. We can differentiate the content in a variety of ways to ensure that the majors are properly challenged without overwhelming the "dabblers" or "searchers" that often comprise a significant proportion of our classes.

Based on my experience...
Once you've taught a particular class a few times, it can be fairly easy to identify the course topics, concepts or skills that most students tend to struggle with. We can also begin to predict the common misconceptions that students bring with them to class. While all students are different, it's been my experience that the general "pain points" in a class are pretty predictable from one group of students to the next.

So, knowing this, what do you do about it? If you can identify at least some of these issues in advance, you have the opportunity to confront them proactively and with gusto. For example, if you know that students have difficulty grasping a particular concept as presented in the course textbook, it can be helpful to have ready a brief video clip, animation or simulation to illustrate the point in a different way. Similarly, if you know that a particular skill you plan to teach requires considerable repetition on the part of the students, you can build this practice into the syllabus. While you probably can't anticipate all the areas where your students will struggle, for each one that you can prepare in advance for, the better off you and your students will be.

Students here are typically...
I've been teaching at the College of William & Mary for the last ten years. It didn't take me that long to begin to understand a general profile of the students here. While all the students are clearly individuals, with their own unique experiences, traditions, and challenges, I have certainly come to understand a bit about our undergraduate population. From my perspective at least, William & Mary students are high achievers, both in the classroom and through a number of intensive extra-curricular activities. They care. A lot. The Tribe produces an inordinate number of students who pursue opportunities in the Peace Corps, Teach for America, service trips over Spring break, etc. They are engaged globally with more than half the students studying abroad at least once. They seek out opportunities for both faculty- and self-directed research opportunities. Based on the knowledge of my students, I draw on these characteristics to engage them in the learning. I try to bring in social justice and ethical dimensions of the concepts we explore. I also attempt to bring in more global research into courses and examples from teachers in other countries.

At different institutions, this profile may look different. When you get to know your students and understand their passions, responsibilities, and challenges, the more you can leverage the positive elements and mitigate some of the challenges in their learning.

How do you leverage your knowledge of your students in planning a course?
Please post your comments below.