Annual symposium focuses on student learning, new ideas

Faculty and staff dedicate the entire year to teaching eager students, but on May 20–22, they will gather to teach other teachers.

The 11th annual Teaching and Learning Symposium, located primarily at the Pyle Center, invites faculty, staff and students to a series of sessions and workshops to share experiences and interests in practices, pedagogy and themes of interest to the UW–Madison community of educators.

Symposium planners anticipate more than 350 participants, with presenters and panelists ranging from undergraduates to graduate teaching assistants to faculty and staff.

This year, the theme is “From Teaching to Learning,” which encourages educators to look more deeply into what’s going on in the classroom on the other side of the podium.

“The idea of that is to help the campus move from focusing on teaching performance as the goal to the question of what students are actually learning in our classrooms, labs and other educational experiences we provide to them,” says Aaron Brower, vice provost for teaching and learning.

Sponsored by the Teaching Academy, Division of Information Technology (DoIT) Academic Technology, the General Library System and the provost’s office, among others, the 2009 symposium will demonstrate more substantial and innovative uses of technology in the classroom.

The symposium began in 1999 as a DoIT-sponsored technology and teaching and learning symposium.

“The symposium started with technology squarely at the center; now student learning is at the center, with technology and other teaching practices as the vehicles to get there,” Brower says.

Rather than “technology for technology’s sake,” he adds, this year’s presentations will not focus on how to use technology, but rather what learning-enhancement opportunities certain forms of technology provide.

“Education is moving from a card catalog world to a Google world, creating a lot of implications for how knowledge is stored and retrieved, how we learn and how we discern information,” Brower says.

Project proposals were assessed for efforts to engage students both in and out of the classroom, innovative approaches, collaborative efforts, peer mentoring and unique uses of technology.

In addition to being reviewed for student-engagement efforts, the proposals were also judged on how they intend to involve symposium participants and what participants will take away.

“We want the symposium to reflect what it means to be an engaged learner,” says Mo Bischof, assistant vice provost and co-chair of the symposium’s planning committee. “We want to do more than talk about engaged learning; we want to engage all learners, including participants.”

In fact, this year’s symposium will incorporate more activities, field trips, small discussion groups and an open discussion lunch in an effort to put into practice the theme of active learning.

The Teaching and Learning Excellence Web site, UW–Madison’s collaborative meeting place for faculty and staff, will allow symposium participants to communicate with one another throughout the three-day affair, as well as provide an opportunity for presenters to post content online for participants to review and study.

“My hope is that the connections and the learning that takes place at the symposium really connect people,” says Bischof. “It’s not a point-in-time conference, but an opportunity to meet others and to stay connected beyond the symposium.”

Some notable projects include:

• Social Justice in the First-Year Classroom: Three First-Year Interest Groups (FIGs)

This panel discussion will focus on three different FIGs with social justice themes: “Health Care Systems in Contemporary America,” taught by Sarah Kruger; “Race, Ethnicity, and Equality in American Education,” taught by Tara Affolter; and “Multicultural Coalition Building,” taught by Tess Arenas.

A FIG consists of 20 first-year students who live in the same residence hall, or “residential neighborhood.” Each FIG cluster is comprised of three classes, a main seminar that sets the theme of the FIG and two others that include relevant content.

Greg Smith, assistant dean in the College of Letters and Science and FIGs director, will present background information on the FIGs program and introduce the three instructors.

“We wanted to demonstrate the first semester of college can be an appropriate time to get students connected rather than waiting until they’re further along in their education,” he says. “Students who get engaged early tend to stay engaged, and it makes for a more enriching experience through their four years.”

Kruger says most of her FIG students have had a positive experience.

“They feel like they belong to a group and they have resources available to them because they are in three courses together,” she says.

• The Case for Case Scenarios and Narratives in Teaching and Learning

During this interactive panel discussion, educators will discuss evidence of accelerated learning when students are confronted with prevalent scenarios. The discussion will feature educators from the departments of Pediatrics and Communicative Disorders and from the Writing Center who have explored the use of a Web-based case scenario learning module.

They will share several prototypes they have designed that incorporate video, audio and other media elements to simulate realistic situations where decision-making is crucial.

“With this type of instruction, students become active learners because they are called upon to engage mentally and emotionally in simulated situations that require them to apply new knowledge,” says Les Howles, an e-learning consultant at the DoIT Department of Academic Technology. “Learning, doing and making decisions can be tightly coupled in a well-designed case scenario that provides context, challenge, and corrective feedback.”

Along with showcasing the case scenarios designed for their own educational contexts, panels will preview an authoring version, currently under development and expected to be ready for use sometime this summer. Once this authoring version becomes available, instructors from across campus will be able to create their own case scenarios, which will enhance the learning experience for UW–Madison teachers and students alike.

• Engaging First-Year Students in Large Lectures: What Works, Doesn’t Work and Why

Last fall, Wren Singer, director of the Center for the First-Year Experience, decided to talk to professors who teach large lectures that particularly appeal to first-year students about their experiences with this demographic. It turned into a full-blown research project involving standard interviews with more than 30 professors.

Singer, along with faculty she has interviewed, will discuss the main themes that emerged from her interviews.

“Lots and lots of research, as well as everybody’s own memory and their own anecdotal experience, indicates that the first year of college is a very critical year in a person’s life,” she says.

During her interviews, Singer realized that not only was she gaining insight from her research, but the faculty she spoke to were as well.

“It seems like during the conversations many of the instructors were reflecting on their teaching for the first time in awhile,” she says. “Just the act of having the conversation and asking them questions about what they’re doing in class refocuses them.”

Singer adds that faculty have been receptive to her offering solutions and techniques that other faculty she interviewed shared with her.

At the symposium, Singer hopes participants will do the same by reflecting on their own teaching.

Next, Singer intends to extend her research to interviewing teaching assistants and students on their experiences in these large lectures.

More information, including a schedule for the three-day symposium, is available at 2009 Teaching and Learning Symposium.