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The Role of Spirituality in Teaching

The Biggest Challenge in my Teaching is:

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How to Encourage Students to Look Outside Their Disciplines

Facilitating Communications Skills for Students

The Future of Education is not Technology

How to Balance Teaching, Research, and Service Demands

Excerpt from A Life In School

What I Try Hardest to Accomplish in my Teaching is:

How Do You Balance your Personal and Professional Lives?

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Readings

University of Colorado
President's Teaching Scholars Program
Fall 1999 Retreat Report

Facilitating Communication Skills for Students

Panelists: Ron Melicher, Bill Krantz, and Bob Pois

Ron Melicher said that one of the things we are all facing is how technology is changing communication. We may be communicating with each other in radically different ways ten years from now. Perhaps at the 20th reunion of the President's Teaching Scholars we will all be participating via monitors. A glimpse of the mountains will occasionally flash across the screen. He said this facetiously but wanted to make the point of how technology is changing communication. Consider the issue of distance education. Consider how different email is from talking to someone in person. The tone of a written message can be very different than using the same words in a conversation. Ron has been at the university for 30 years; he teaches case courses. Two of his students were kept from graduating because they would not make an oral presentation. In the case courses Ron teaches intragroup communications. He said that we put students in groups but don't teach them how to communicate in groups. He wants everyone to participate but doesn't enforce it totally now. Peers evaluate the content and the presentations. Ron tries to help students most with their oral communication skills.

Bill Krantz told the story of being in college and wanting to be a journalist. He had to take a required speech course, and he didn't speak loudly enough. He went out into a cornfield to practice, and the farmer who owned the field came up and said that he had had considerably less problems with crows since Bill had been practicing. For every single class that Bill teaches, he offers an optional one hour independent study to help students with the class and their communications skills. He noted that it was great there was a program like the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) that offers research money to undergraduates. Some students use these funds to present papers at professional meetings.

Bob Pois noted that he wouldn't greet the communication revolution with enthusiasm. The advance or decline of cybertechnology won't help problems of student writing and class discussion. There is no magical way to deal with the problems. Good papers are rather rare. He gives students every opportunity to rewrite their work. In smaller classes, students have to write drafts, preferably two. He encourages shy students to have their classmates read their work to the group. Bob uses lots of small groups to encourage communication. Students can present arguments to each other. They can visit him during his office hours and present an argument just to him. He helps them hone their ideas. He has tried to show them how shy and incompetent he was, but that didn't work. Bob exercises a lot of patience with shy students. They can work with them or be paired with less shy students. Two of his best students were terrified to speak.

Mike Shull noted that shyness can not be tolerated in grad school if students want to learn to debate.

Robert Camley said that his goal is to help his students learn to talk about physics and make connections with all the different fields of physics. The students prepare relatively simple 10-minute talks and then they move on to more complex topics. Students who know the subject pretty well gain a lot from the class. There is a lot of student interaction; the discussions are student-driven. Students who are weak gain something. They learn to communicate effectively by practicing.

Jack Kelso said that we tend to emphasize communication going in one direction; listening is every bit as important to learning as talking.

Jim Palmer discussed his experiences with team teaching. He has taught a half a dozen courses with Bob Pois. Bob uses the Socratic method so that the level of discussion is elevated very quickly with most students participating. When a hand goes up, Bob stops in mid-sentence. He listens and responds with a comment, a compliment, or another question. Students write better and are more articulate when they want to tell you something that you may not know about. Students are proud of service learning experiences, for example, where they can speak with authority about their experiences.

Denny talked about assessment and intervention classes. Minicomps are given to help students prepare for oral comps. Questions are put in envelopes and handed out to students. They have ten minutes to outline a response before giving the answer. She helps them to prepare for oral comps by teaching them how to integrate material, how to tell stories, and how to shift the topic when necessary. She gives them clues to be successful.

John Taylor mentioned concept tests. There is a question on the overhead projector, and the possible answers are cued to particular colors. All the students have colored cards. They have a minute to think about the answer; students talk about it with their neighbors. Then they simultaneously raise the colored card that correlates to the answer they think is correct. "It's a sensational teaching technique when it is done well, John said. "Students are forced to think right away. When it goes well, the classroom is quite noisy."

Dennis Van Gerven admitted that he is a lousy listener. There is an art to communicating that you are listening‹with body language, with patience, and with kindness.