April Goal Win: The Liberal Studies Round Table

The process of proposing, organizing, and launching the Liberal Studies round table initiative has been a learning experience and a real privilege. In the past few weeks, I’ve been able to collaborate with amazing English department folks, including the very talented “Team Unicorn”, a group of composition teachers who’ve embraced the cinematic approach to creating slides. Check out one example of a deck used in this group’s English composition online course:

I am pleased to say that the English department worked for the past month to plan and organize our session, and we were ready for our debut today. The presentations went smoothly and we had an awesome turn out. The first hour was devoted to a series of presentations on the topic of teaching personas (defining persona, applying persona to a collaborative online team of teachers, and using the student’s experience to mold the teacher’s persona). The rest of the workshop was devoted to discussion. I’d like to see stronger discussion in the future, and this I think is where my presence would have been best used.

I chose not to present in this workshop (except for providing our attendees with an agenda of the session). I think at this point, people expect me to present, but I wanted to give the floor to some of the English folks who don’t often get heard but have incredible ideas. Instead, I functioned as facilitator. One of my tasks was to create a basic set of slides to serve as welcome, transition, and closing visuals. As you can see, my obsession with The Noun Project continues:

Our welcome slide sets the tone for the session–connect, discover, collaborate.

Our agenda moved from a presentation on the concept of personas to specific examples/applications.

Overall, I found the discussion of personas to be interesting and I know Alex and I gleaned some insights about how we can further work to create a positive relationship with our students. What’s your opinion on teacher personas online? Is it something you think about as an educator? What is your teaching persona?

Tweak Your Lessons: March Updates

The reboot of PCPO is two weeks in, and already the team has seen several areas where “tweaking” will be needed in order to help students successfully complete their major project in the course, the Ignite presentation. Current challenges we face with this week by week process-based model are:

• Students don’t sufficiently study welcome materials and don’t understand the course is based on the major project. There seems to be a disconnect between our communication of the process and their conditioning, which is to complete one task at a time without considering how each task connects with another.
  • Possible fix–schedule GoTo earlier in the week. Require attendance?
• Students are choosing overused or unsuitable topics for the format and approach.
  • Do what we do in class–students must submit ten topics, workshop each one with their instructor, determine which three will work best for the project, then analyze each one using the model Andrew Dlugan proposes in his article “The Secret of Choosing Successful Speech Topics”.

In addition to testing the reboot of the class, I’ve also been working on several of the decks from last month I didn’t have a chance to tweak because of REAL Delivery and SIMPLE Design. I’ll be debuting Tweak Your Resume online next month, and I just used the Brainstorming and Structuring deck in today’s group workshop/planning/design session for the upcoming worst case scenario presentation.

The second version of Tweak Your Resume uses a more cohesive color scheme. I am also experimenting with smaller text and more unified visuals.

This deck will need serious revision before it’s show ready. The content is specific to an in-class project the students are working on, though I’d like for it to become a general purpose tutorial on choosing a topic for and organizing a demonstration speech. In this presentation, I’ve tried to detach from the image-only approach to include vector icons from thenounproject.com

What presentation projects have you been working on lately? What decks are you excited to share with others?

Professional Communication and Presentation Reboot: Infographic as a Teaching Tool

Alex Rister and I have been busy creating videos, tweaking slides, revamping/rewriting/overhauling assignment sheets, and generally obsessing about all things presentation education for the past few weeks in anticipation of our upcoming online course reboot. One of our challenges has been to create a streamlined educational experience that appeals to all learners. We also have to restructure the four week class to focus entirely on one major presentation, the Ignite speech. In an attempt to do this, I’ve chosen to create an infographic tipsheet on choosing a strong presentation topic.  This is a draft/work in progress, and I’d love the critical feedback. What do you think? Is this a welcome and useful break from text-based instruction? Is it too busy to process? Is it learner-centered?

A Superteacher’s Views on the Learning Divide

This 11th year of teaching has been one of contemplation and reflection on the craft of teaching. Today, I thought a bit about the apparent divide between a teacher’s perspective on learning and a student’s perspective on learning. I believe a starting point to correcting this situation is teachers and students communicating. Here is how I managed to reconcile the two over the course of my educational journey as student and teacher:

A real teacher’s only job is to serve and help her students. At our core, we want all of you to succeed, to reach beyond the miasma of the average, the just good enough, to true mastery. Mastery to me means more than just scoring well on tests (tests suck. Seriously); mastery is reaching a level of immersion and understanding that leads to true passion, perhaps even the ecstatic bliss of knowing one’s purpose in life. I know this because I’ve experienced it myself with teaching. I resisted for a bit, always remembering my humanities and AP language teacher Dr. Earls, who taught me that learning is the thin veil between human and troglodyte. But yes, teaching is what fuels me, what keeps me motivated to be more. It’s this drive that should fuel your love of learning, but for so long learning has been a chore on a checklist, whose mark is the letter grade, a number on a sterile scale.

So, we come to an impasse. You believe learning is about getting a grade. I believe learning is about earning a grade. You believe your fate is in my hands. I believe only you can determine the course of your own education–you are entirely responsible for the choices you make.

I learned this as an undergraduate at the University of Florida. My first semester, a complete failure, is the one I’ll remember most because it forced me to live with the consequences of the choices I’d made. I reveled in my newfound freedom. I was away from home, living the awkward teenager’s dream of dorm rooms, dining hall food, and 6-dollar football games. I wasted my time sleeping, watching TV, going to the movies, and generally not going to class. I also wasn’t smart enough to save my money to purchase the class notes that semester. I’d chosen to take a particularly challenging course, AST 2037: Search for Life in the Universe because I loved science fiction (naturally), and assumed it would be an easy pass. I was wrong. The class threw so much math and physics at me that I was instantly lost, but instead of helping myself to learn, I gave up. So, after weeks of not attending my classes I earned the lowest grades of my life–a D+ in astronomy, two C+ in biology and to my utter shame, theater appreciation, and a B in art history. I knew instantly my scholarship was gone. I was downgraded from a Florida Academic Scholar to a Merit Scholar, putting more of the financial burden of school on me.

I worked for the next four years with single-minded purpose, never taking a summer off, taking on several concentrations to finally graduate with honors. I never blamed my teachers for my failures, nor did I hold them responsible for what grade I earned–if I earned a C on a paper, it was because of me. If I’d not taken advantage of the time given to me to work on an assignment and turned in what I knew was sub par work, I took the ding to the grade and added it to my list of “do not ever do this agains.”

So, it’s difficult for me to see it any other way, to feel that I should apply rules only in certain instances or occasions, to subjugate the worth of someone’s education by not holding them accountable to the standards everyone is expected to meet and exceed. To me, doing so would cheapen your education, making it worth less, making it less impacting on your immediate community and the larger human community. Yes, I want you to succeed, and I will do anything within my power to help you–within the scope of my responsibilities.  I am a guide, facilitator, evaluator, and cheerleader; I am not the learner, the one who must embark on a journey with a new set of tools, face a series of challenges, and return to the world with a new boon–mastery. You are the learner, the hero on your own journey.  I commit myself to ensuring you learn, to clarifying ideas, providing you with guidance and constructive critique, to constantly updating and polishing my craft to better serve your learning needs. I only ask that you embrace the call to adventure and make your world better through learning.

Tweak Your Teach: Design Thinking for Educators Vol. 2

My exposure to design over the past four years–TED’s mission of spreading ideas through the marriage of technology, entertainment, and design; the work of those who work towards the cause for cinematic presentations, and the work of instructional design folks like Julie Dirksen–has definitely impacted my approach to building and revising my courses. I am in the process of reworking the online version of Professional Communication and Presentation and redoing my on campus lectures for the course, so, the design treat I found in my inbox on Monday couldn’t have come at a better time.

Source: Renato Ganoza via Compfight cc

The  creators of the Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit, Riverdale School and design firm IDEO, have released volume 2 of this amazing resource. This new volume of the toolkit icludes a basic introduction to what design thinking is, a streamlined process for using design thinking to improve the educational experience (whether it’s curriculum, space, process/tool, or systems-based), and a new workbook feature that takes educators through the design process. The workbook provides educators with a framework for completing short-term or long-term projects both individually and in groups.  Download this superteacher resource at the Design Thinking For Educators website.

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Tweak Your Teach: Women as Academic Authors

One of the key frameworks of any professional academic career is published research. One reason I did not pursue a PhD in Literature is because I found that pure research paled in comparison to actual teaching. However, one of my goals for 2013 is to finally return to school to pursue my Ed.D in educational leadership or instructional design. Another goal involves submitting a paper on the community of inquiry  and the community college model to an educational conference. So, research must and will be done! I ran across this interactive infographic from the Chronicle of Higher Education while conducting preliminary research on schools and ideological approaches to the studies of educational leadership and instructional design:

The infographic provides a historical analysis of the place women have had in academic research in specific fields (I found it interesting that most humanities are left out of this list) including education. Here are a few interesting numbers:

• From 1991-2010, women accounted for 46% of articles published in the field of education, with the two biggest areas being student learning and teacher development.
• From 1665-1970 women contributed only 3.9% of articles on mathematics, 5.4% from 1971-1991, and from 1991-2010, that percentage increased to 10.7%.
• From 1665-2010, women published more articles in pollution and occupational health than all of political science (domestic and international) combined.

It is interesting to see which disciplines have grown and which still have some room for growth. Does academic authorship reflect other demographic imbalances in academia and professional work? What do you think?

Tweak Your Teach: The Teaching Portfolio

I am excited to continue working on Tweak Your Teach and the rest of my blog in the new year. I’ve just updated the site to include a teaching porfolio section that I will be adding to and growing over the next few weeks. What exactly is a teaching portfolio and what is its purpose?

According to Rutgers University’s Center for Teaching Advancement & Assessment Research, a teaching portfolio is a “flexible document” that details a teacher’s “teaching responsibilities, philosophy, goals and accomplishments.” This traditionally print document contains the breadth and scope of an educator’s experience and includes three major areas:

1. Teaching Responsibilities (What I do)

2. Teaching Philosophy and Statement of Competency (Why I do it)

3. Evidence of Effective Teaching (Proof that I do what I say)

A strong portfolio is dynamic–it changes constantly and includes both specific goals and measurable data indicating those goals have been met. More than proof of concept, a dynamic teaching portfolio shows an educator what he or she has accomplished and what he or she still needs to grow. There are several excellent print guides as well as examples available. One of the most highly recommended is The Teaching Portfolio: A Practical Guide to Improved Performance and Promotion/Tenure Decisions.

However, several  comprehensive guides to the portfolio process that don’t cost a penny come from reputable educational institutions like Rutgers. Two of my favorites are A Guide to the Teaching Portfolio by the University of New Hampshire and the very comprehensive and useful guide from the Center for Effective Teaching and Learning at the University of Texas at El Paso.

As I begin this process, I have many great examples to draw from, but find the approach to the standard portfolio to be a bit stale. I am working on ways to make it more dynamic and interactive, drawing from my design skills to further enhance how usable this is as a tool  for me and for others. I’ve added a few preliminary elements to the portfolio section, the most recent of which is my teaching philosophy. I’ve truncated this down from two pages to one, but would definitely like to add specific goals to the end. This draft focuses on my self-definition as a “super-teacher.” I began using this term several years ago when I saw a stark difference between those who teach because they cannot do something in their field and those who teach because teaching IS their field. Those are the super-teachers, at least the ones who call teaching their bliss and work towards the betterment of education for all. Check it out in the new teaching portfolio section under “About Me.”

Are you a teacher? What’s your philosophy on teaching? What do you draw inspiration from?

Tweak your Teach: Dr. Tae’s Building a New Culture of Teaching and Learning

I am working on a new section to the blog that focuses specifically on education. In keeping with the tweak theme, I’ll be posting new articles under the category ” Tweak your Teach.” If you read this blog, you know, I am committed to the “tweak” in all its forms. Tweak your slides, your speech, your life, and definitely your teaching. At no time has this final point been more important in American education than now. Dr. Tae is one of my favorite educators.

Dr. Tae uses storytelling, simple truths, and skateboarding to present his case for a new culture of learning at TEDxEastSidePrep

His 30 minute talk, “Building a New Culture of Teaching and Learning” is inspirational and a must watch for superteachers. In this inspiring talk, Tae ses humor, impeccable logic and evidence, and the testimony of educators as well as weaving in his own personal and professional anecdotes to convey a simple and very sticky message:

School sucks, especially in science and math.

Tae then explains that the problem is not mutually exclusive to secondary schools. The entire educational model–from elementary to university level is broken. But why is the system broken? The problem begins in secondary schools. Firstly, schools do not hire great teachers because the focus is on certification and not qualification or quality. Further, the structure of schools is broken. Our students are given a fixed and finite amount of time in which to learn something and their performance is based on grades, which are coercive by nature. I had this experience–Mr. Feldman, my high school physics teacher is one of my most memorable teachers–because he was so completely awful. He demeaned students who were not already great at math and science and showed complete contempt for the entire experience of teaching his students. He taught me that physics sucks and that I am not smart enough to understand it. Definitely NOT the goal of education. This is a product of the standardized test driven model of education we inherited after the industrial revolution. The problem is compounded in universities, which have become a depersonalized experience, where the culture of open discourse and the exchange of ideas are considered burdens to the more “important” work of research.

So, what is Tae’s solution? Skateboarding. No, really, skateboarding. Tae then reveals a very simple truth.

To learn something properly, you work your ass off until you get it right. That’s it.

Schools are in complete opposition to this model. Schools don’t give students open time to master a skill; in school, students are motivated via coercion, but true learning must be self-motivated and guided by responsible mentorship; in school, students often turn to cheating (because what matters is the grade, not true learning), but according to Tae, real learning cannot be cheated. Mr. Feldman’s counterpart was Dr. Earls, a published author and authority in humanities, who pushed me to take control of my learning, who helped me to see the place education could have in my life, and who truly cared about empowering her students to be more than they already were or are.

Tae’s model of education is wonderfully idealistic–when I first encountered this talk two years ago, I was and am still stoked to know there are teachers committed to a renaissance of teaching and learning. Ultimately, Tae’s solution involves more than just a restructuring of the education system; it is the creation of a culture of education where each of us takes a role in teaching others, whether formally trained or not.

I think it’s important that you watch the video, dear reader, so I won’t rehash everything (even though I really want to). Instead, I’ll focus on just a few key points from each of the major segments of Tae’s talk.

All of us can share and teach. It is our responsibility to distribute and share what we know. We can all be great teachers; we can share our knowledge freely and really change our world. Knowledge should not be selfish. Teaching and learning are part of our cultural habits. They should not just be something we do in school. Share what you know. Watch Dr. Tae’s talk and be inspired to Tweak your Teach!

Superteaching: A decade in review, a decade in progress

As part of professional development for the English department, my colleagues and I have been tasked with revamping our CVs, creating a teaching portfolio, or developing a professional online presence. As I’ve worked on creating a portfolio and have a website, I, of course, began revamping the CV right away and am currently working on ways to maintain the traditional purpose and format but still make the document more rich than just 11 pages of fluff. The process of creating an extensive body of work has led to a bit of retrospection.

A Superteacher in reflective mode…where am I going? Where have I been? (Source: JD Hancock)

January marks the end of my tenth year of teaching at the college level. I began as a green composition instructor at the University of Central Florida. My first and only UCF class was overwhelming, nerve-wracking, exciting and ultimately rewarding, but I still wasn’t sold on this as my career. I resisted the common “Oh, are you going to teach with that?” question that often came after I stated my major was English. In my mind, there had to be something else I could do with this degree. I was both right and completely wrong.

Source: gumuz via Flickr

I entered the world of editing, copywriting, and marketing eager to prove myself, to dive into my favorite activities: consulting, editing, revising, and proofing others’ work. I applied for every job I saw on Monster and Career Builder; I bought a suit, a red pen, and waited…and waited….finally, I realized no one would hire me! Why not? Not awesome enough at English? No. No experience with professional writing outside of academia? Yup. That was it. So, to gain some experience, I worked as marketing writer and editor for my step-father’s A/V rental company and did freelance work for a local design firm, Lapiz Design.

To make ends meet, I also picked up an instructional assistant/writing center consultant position with Valencia College (Valencia Community College at the time). A short time later, I was offered the opportunity to teach English composition. Being the completely broke and desperate post-grad, I took the class, thinking it would serve as a good source of income until my editing ship came in. What I didn’t realize right away (but learned by the end of that summer semester) was that this would be my calling, that the hours I spent creating transparencies of poems, hunting down vinyl recordings of Dylan Thomas, and coming up with ways to engage beyond the assigned textbook for my course, would lay down roots that are now so ingrained in who and what I am that I cannot imagine my life without teaching.

Source: Mr. T in DC via Flickr

I was offered a full-time contract at a smaller campus of Valencia College. My acceptance would mean five wonderful years at the Winter Park Campus of VC. It was here that I really found my way, a mentor in my department chair, and learned important lessons about classroom teaching, curriculum development, and community and college involvement. It was here that I also began a love affair with the community college (RIP) model. I absolutely thrived in an environment committed to learner-based methodologies and initiatives. I also learned the impact faculty, staff, and students can have on the quality of education the entire community receives.

After five years and a poor judgment call, I was adjuncting, teaching 7 classes per semester with little room for growth at a small campus, so I accepted a position at Full Sail University, where I’ve had the pleasure of further expanding my skills as teacher, presenter, course developer, and now presentation designer. Regardless of challenges (teaching for a for-profit university is at times a sharper learning curve than at a community college), I would not trade the most amazing opportunity of my professional career so far, teaching Professional Communication and Presentation. I have developed a love for new subjects, public speaking and presentation design, that infuse every aspect of my professional and personal life. I have become a crusader for beautiful slides and dynamic delivery.

The last ten years have yielded a body of work I am proud of, and a constantly re-stoked fire for learning and responsible, sustainable education that I cannot wait to share with others. In the past decade, I’ve:

• Taught 5,500 students
• Taught 20 different courses or versions of courses
• Developed 11 different courses either independently or in collaboration with amazing teachers
• Have attended 30 final project presentations
• Authored and delivered 17 presentations
• Sponsored three student organizations
• Have been inspired by amazing teachers, among them, Christin Upshaw, Sophia Buggs, and Alex Rister
• Have been mentored by two incredible humans, Kim Murray and Chris Borglum
• Immersed myself in three new subjects, the most current being my absolute bliss and joy

The first ten years have been fruitful and productive, but I have a few more goals to accomplish in the coming decade. Among them:

• Truly bring my blog up to speed
• Work on the balance between mastery and failure in the online environment
• Continue to seek out opportunities that are learner-centered
• Earn an Ed.D. in teaching and curriculum or educational leadership
• Move into instructional design and administration

So, final words/thoughts on my first ten years: I’ve only just found my groove. I am stoked for more!

Source: pwbaker via Flickr

Conquer Presentation Anxiety

Today is the first double (8 hours of class) of Professional Communication and Presentation’s October class. We will cover TED, “naked” delivery ala Garr Reynolds, storytelling, and presentation anxiety. In preparation for today’s talk on the subject, I’ve tweaked my already existing deck a bit. Public speaking fear or at least nervousness/anxiety is a common challenge for presenters at all levels of experience. Even if we don’t like to admit it, there is at least one communication situation that will have us running for the nearest door. I share with my class I am always nervous for a few minutes on the first day of class, and I am positively awful in interviews. What sort of communication makes you apprehensive?

 

Happy Wednesday!