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Annual Retreat Reports

Introduction

President’s Teaching Scholars Teaching: Introduction to Neurophysiology with Dan Barth

The Hillmon Case: An Exercise in Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching

Declining by Degrees: Discussion

President’s Teaching and Learning Collaborative (PTLC): projects in learning and teaching. An exploration.

The President’s Teaching and Learning Collaborative: Publishing and disseminating research projects in the scholarship of teaching and learning in the PTLC

Adjournment

University of Colorado
President's Teaching Scholars Program

Fall 2005 Retreat

“The Wisdom of Practice in Teaching and Learning”

Stanley Hotel, Estes Park, CO

VI: The President’s Teaching and Learning Collaborative       
Publishing and disseminating research projects in the scholarship of teaching and learning in the PTLC       
Mitch Handelsman       
Don Kleier, moderator

Handelsman: Bill Briggs was not able to be here because he was invited to an international conference in Australia.     
We have two vita entries from the work we did on student engagement that have been published in journals, one pedagogical, one scientific. I want to present our work as an example, not an exemplar.    

I wanted to come up with a theme or analogy with a fictional or mythological character. The only one that fit was Inspector Cousteau of The Pink Panther. Briggs and I were like the bungling inspector who bumbles through the whole process and gets an award at the end.       

At each step, we ran into problems and at each we were rescued. Bill and I needed each other and especially you folks.
We weren’t thinking about doing this project. We stumbled into team-teaching. It was Bill’s idea at a PTSP spring retreat. He says to me, "You do group stuff, right? Can you help me with that? Wouldn’t it be fun if you came into my class?       
So as grants came up at our campus, we applied for one and got the money. Our article, “A Measure of College Student Engagement” (The Journal of Educational Research, Jan./Feb. 2005), is in your packet. The money allowed us to hire Nora Sullivan, a graduate student, who kept us focused. We needed to be role models for Nora.       

We went into team-teaching with a practical problem: How to get these students who hate math to stay engaged with the subject. The first semester, I took the class. Bill was unbelievably open. I could raise my hand and say, "Can I try something?" and he would let me.       

We also were saved by other Teaching Scholars who were doing student engagement studies. We were all struggling to define it. The mistake we made is we didn’t collaborate enough.      

In fall 2000, Bill and I were having lots of fun, getting a lot of self-gratification. And we bumbled into these questions: How do students get engaged and how do we do research on it? We had practical goals but no connection between our goals and how we measure it. What we had was an idea. So then we were saved by Carol Dweck, who had shared her research concepts with the Teaching Scholars. We had the questions she asked and we could correlate that and get a number. We looked at Dweck’s studies on learning styles. One of the distinctions we were not making was students may be engaged in our class versus how do they get engaged in college.       

We have interviewed students but haven’t listened to the tapes. Again we were saved, by Nora, who did a lot more than she had to and put us to shame (with her efforts).       

Another bumble: we focused on the micro-world of our class. We talked with Ed Nufer of education at CU-Denver who suggested some Indiana research, and we were saved by that. We were also were save by the journal reviewers, who probably thought we were a bunch of undergraduates with a class project at first. Bill wrote up what we did in class; we presented the concept twice and asked students which was best. I was asking what behaviors or attitudes showed engagement and we were relating those to Dweck. We now had some correlations and were able to show engagement was multi-faceted.

Then we were saved by Annette Towler of UCD, who re-analyzed the data. She said, What you have here is a scale. She made the paper publishable. By doing factor analysis, we were able to measure four reasonable levels of student engagement. Our search for journals was a random walk. We could have been saved by Carnegie’s library and all their journal titles, but we didn’t know about it at the time.

Another bumble: We took a hit, Bill especially, with our colleagues who thought this wasn’t real research. With psychology it was easier than with math. I learned so much about teaching from Bill, watching those two classes.

We were also saved by others around the country. Bill said he has an image of running on many paths and not being sure where they were leading. It was great getting to work with Bill, to get all these data and to get a line on my vita. It didn’t take much money, a faculty grant of about $5,000 which allowed us to hire Nora. When the money ran out, we were just ready to do analysis of faculty engagement, to look at faculty attitudes and behaviors.

The bottom line is this is a positive message: if Clouseau can be a cop, we can be student engagement researchers.       

Cohen: I am wondering if you had talked to the statistician first if you would have redesigned your questionnaire.
Handelsman: No and yes. What we did turned out to be OK. We might have generated 100 items but 23 gave us enough information.
Goodwin: If you do pick up the study again, the National Study of Student and Engagement and of Faculty Engagement might be good. Institutional research at UCDHSC has a lot of data on this.
Handelsman: Your colleagues in the education school were helpful, but we couldn’t use all they gave us. It was like calling the medical school and asking how to do surgery.

Abrams: Now you have a scale of engagement. If you took the same students who come up on the scale of engagement, would they report themselves engaged.
Handelsman: There are different levels or elements of engagement, such as how engaged am I relative to other courses. We had some "performance engagement" — those who do enough for the grade. Students self-report engagement differently; there are different correlations on engagement. Hopefully this will be useful in designing courses.

Burkhart: If the ultimate goal of doing research on teaching is to make it an acceptable and respected endeavor, we have to have results that are useful and where do we get the "Sullivans and Towlers" to help us? Otherwise we will end up with a bunch of numbers and nowhere to go.
Shea: In the collaborative, you will learn how to do educational research. As Mitch was talking, I thought of what Distinguished Professor David Hawkins called "messing about in science,” and I thought how Bill and Mitch messed about to understand the appropriate focus and line of inquiry for the research.
Handelsman: I feel lucky. We literally ran into people. The collaborative is really important. I am not proud — we left it to chance. It would be nice to systemize what we did.

Palmer: How did your teaching change as a result of this? What three or four things do you do now or think about since the research?
Handelsman: If I was asked to write a teaching biography, I would say that Bill didn’t make me more like him, but more like myself. I have never seen someone so transparent. He comes into the classroom in shorts and sandals and says, "The first thing I want you to know is I want to be here." I feel more free in my classes to do what I want to do. Bill would ask, “Do you see what happened? You said, I’m going to tell a story." I use that; I punctuate my teaching more. I play with what I have available [in class] and what I have available is the relationship with the students. I go to class early; I play music between classes. When I have small groups I use a "night club arrangement" and play music.