Have you discovered like us that when you go to professional conferences, the most enjoyable and productive moments occur when you are sitting down informally with friends discussing old memories and new developments in the field?
It’s that time of year when faculty are not only winding down the fall semester, but already gearing up for the spring. While spending last weekend at the 34th annual Lilly International Conference on College Teaching, we gained an insight into some concepts that will help you prepare your syllabi.
Early Friday morning we found ourselves seated at a table with old friends Dee Fink, who wrote the seminal Creating Significant Learning Experiences (2003) and Greg Wentzell, the Conference’s assistant director. After a lively discussion of our diets and health habits, we segued into a debate on the essentials of a good class. Now we’re big believers that 90-95% of syllabus preparation for the majority of professors is content, not pedagogy. Why? Because most disciplines train their students to think of the field first and the instruction second, if at all. So, accepting Gerry Nosich’s theory on focusing a class on fundamental and powerful concepts, and trying to simplify things for professors only recently starting to be concerned about student learning, we posed a question: what is the minimal amount of significant pedagogical material that a professor needs to include in each class?
We started by agreeing on the goal of college instruction—in our Achieving Excellence in Teaching; A Self-help Guide (2014) we proclaimed it deep learning, while Dee likes the phrase “significant learning experiences” and someone else voted for “life-long learning.” We then proceeded to Dee’s sequence of activities for the whole course, and after adding in some material we had gleaned from Make It Stick (2014)—a book we have discussed in previous posts–we jotted down on the back of a conference flyer something we now call the four foundations of deep learning—the four R’s of higher education.
Receive Information
First, students must receive information. Here the instructor–no matter whether the basic methodology is lecture, discussion, small group work, or watching a video–dispenses contextualized data (printed or online) for the student’s consumption. This information will be added to the student’s old knowledge to construct new knowledge.
Retrieve Information
Second, students must retrieve information through practice in order to move it into their long-term memory. In-class activities such as discussion, whether teacher-student or student-student, provide one method for retrieval. Daily tests at the beginning and end of class likewise necessitate retrieval. Short and long papers in and out of class offer an opportunity to apply that new information. The more frequent the retrieval opportunities the instructor delivers, the greater the chances for deep learning. (Tweet this quote.)
Rate Information
Third, students must rate the information through meaningful and fairly immediate feedback. Developing student critical learning skills is important, for critical thinking is essentially the evaluation of argument and information, but students also need the instructor’s aid. Sometimes that feedback is verbal (such as in class discussion), sometimes it’s the grade on the paper or test/exam/quiz (as well as the instructor going over the correct answers), and sometimes it’s an email response to a student question, but it has to be as immediate as possible.
Reflect Information
Finally, students must reflect on that information. Students need to become metacognitive, monitoring their learning process, and that process must be stimulated. (Tweet this quote.) Mid-class and end-of-class reflections on a daily basis help build that understanding. An effective end-of-class assessment asks students to reflect upon not only on what they learned, but what ways they found worked best to achieve knowledge.
When we started our grade-school education, its basis in learning was the three Rs—reading writing, and `rithmetic. Now the four Rs of receiving, retrieving, rating, and reflecting provide a solid foundation for higher education. When you begin making your syllabus for next semester, don’t just worry about what you will be teaching—emphasize the how in each class session, and you’ll be starting students down the path of deep learning.
Author
Dr. Russell Carpenter is director of the Noel Studio for Academic Creativity and Program Director of the Minor in Applied Creative Thinking at Eastern Kentucky University. He is also Assistant Professor of English. Dr. Carpenter has published on the topic of creative thinking, among other areas, including two texts by New Forums Press. In addition, he has taught courses in creative thinking in EKU’s Minor in Applied Creative Thinking, which was featured in the New York Times in February 2014. Meet Russell.
