On the challenges of delivering content or processes better:
Here are some suggestions and questions for both personal reflection and as conversation starters with peers and others.
- Discuss thinking about a concept or content you have had difficulty teaching, or perhaps a concept or content you want to look at in a different way to get a new perspective. What is that concept or content? What is not working or needs strengthening or a new perspective? Try to be specific.
- Think outside of your disciplinary box and discuss ways you could incorporate more diverse learning styles, newer versions of learning taxonomies, or newer research on cognition and learning into your teaching strategies. For instance:
- Can you expand the array of techniques that you use to deliver or present your content?
- Can you use aspects from the “backwards design” concept and run with it – even a small portion.
- Can you use infuse a new teaching model into your teaching?
- Can you use any of the taxonomies included in this website to monitor your classroom activities? Or might help you keep track of what you are doing and at what levels?
- Could you use one of the existing educational taxonomies to help generate different activities? ( 6 Facets of Understanding, the Anderson/Krathwohl’s revisions of Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy, or L. Dee Fink’s)
- Could you organize information or materials differently again using some of the suggestions from this website?
- Can you add metacognitive or reflective exercises so your students can understand how they think and how they think might be different from their peers?
- Could you use different types of assessments or grading rubrics?
- Begin to educate yourself about the new knowledge about cognitive processing, and neuroscience and learning, and then let your teaching strategies evolve and change, as James Zull did in The Art of Changing the Brain.
On instructional design:
- Discuss what you currently do in your teaching that fits your vision or your students and your instructional priorities?
- Have conversations with your students about their visions for themselves?
- Discuss the ways you know or might assess what you do that works or what doesn’t.
- Try to candidly identify what you do that impedes or hinders your ability to teach to your end vision for your students, and then look for ways to diminish those barriers?
- Examine the ways you assess your learners. Do your assessments promote enduring understanding, deeper learning, and continued investigations?