Hey, Instructors: Show Us Your Essential Questions!Posted on November 18, 2013 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorI’ll show you mine, and you can show me yours.I have written before on designing a course “backward” from essential questions, using the “Understanding by Design” system created by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. Also here at Seminarium, others have described their own experience with “Understanding by Design.” A key idea is that we teach, not so that the learners will acquire particular facts in our subject matter, but so that they will develop enduring understandings that can be transferred into other contexts and subject matters. Toward this end, early in the process of designing or revising a course (“Intro to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible”) or unit (“Latter Prophets”), you want to come up with the “big ideas” and “essential questions” toward which the assessments, activities, and resources are oriented. These are my own, for the course “Introduction to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.”
Quite Possibly the Best Resource in Your LMS: ForumsPosted on November 17, 2013 by Nathan LoewenOn what side of the flipped classroom do I put my forums?Class forums are butter of how I teach “introductions to world religions”-type courses. Forums help me keep my students as far as possible away from approaching “world religions” as a mind-numbing memorization marathon of beliefs and practices that distances them from thinking critically about religion. Students can do that in an anatomy and physiology class, should they choose to study medicine. I think it’s far more interesting for me and the students to have the intro course engage in the current theoretical and methodological debates of religious studies. My goal is for students to learn how to critically think and discuss with others. . . .
Posing Questions—Part III: Nourishing Great QuestionsPosted on November 8, 2013 by David RhoadsHow can we create a hospitable atmosphere in which question-asking is an integral and valued part of the classroom experience for students and teachers alike?Maybe we need to be absolutely clear that we actually, really, honestly do want questions! To try and generate an atmosphere hospitable for questions, I have sometimes said, “You may have had a bad experience in the past asking questions in class. But I want you to know I welcome them. I know you may feel they expose what you do not know. But that is the whole point of learning. . . .
Teaching with Meta-QuestionsPosted on November 8, 2013 by Jane S. WebsterWhat’s the point?Do you ever get those blank why-are-we-talking-about-this stare? Is your answer too often, “Just because?” Today’s challenge is to consider your larger course agenda and how it maps onto student curiosity. More specifically, it is time to identify the metaquestion you hope your course will answer. . . .
Scarcities 2: Online Learning PlatformsPosted on November 4, 2013 by A+ Brooke Lester, CuratorMy first forays into online learning were projects undertaken to address the “scarcities” of the face-to-face classroom. These were “embellishments” on the classroom that I discussed at the time in terms of collaboration, diffusion, and asynchrony. The “flipped classroom” stands too as a widespread attempt to address the scarcities of the brick-and-mortar learning space. This is why I find myself approaching “online learning” with an attitude different to some of my colleagues. Where some view the online platforms as threatening to “take away” goods associated with the face-to-face classroom, I had first turned to the online platforms seeking relief from the traditional classroom’s scarcities. In a previous post, I wrote about the face-to-face classroom and its scarcities (particularly time, space, permeability, and malleability). This week, I describe two kinds of online learning space and their own scarcities.