Partially Ordered Thoughts

(Taking a break from math-themed posts for tonight to share something food-related.)

On Saturday, I made the Cooks Illustrated gyro-like pita sandwiches (delicious, if you haven’t tried them), which required buying a huge container of plain yogurt. I then used some to make blueberry muffins. This still left a lot to deal with. I also had a pile of tasty blueberries left from the muffins. And then there were the lemons left from overbuying to use with the lamb and in the tzatziki. What to do with all of this? Well, up popped a post from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s blog about what she does with those three ingredients. I’d made Rose’s lemon curd a few weeks ago for a blueberry tart with lemon curd, and it’s really simple (follow the directions on the blog that call for beating the sugar, butter, and eggs together to avoid residue). I’ll let Rose’s picture suggest how great this is going to be and not waste any time taking my own picture. I’m off to eat it now!

Feedback and assessment serves as the second leg of the three-legged stool that is course design. Once the goals have been developed, you have to figure out how to determine if your students have met the goals and give them feedback along the way to help them do so. (Yeah, yeah, this is not rocket science, but until you actually start thinking about it in depth, you don’t realize how complex of a problem it can be.) Fink has a lot to say about assessment, and most of it is good and summarizes Walvoord and Anderson’s excellent Effective Grading or Wiggins’ Educative Assessment. The idea behind educative assessment (as opposed to the more traditional “audit-ive assessment” focusing on regurgitation) is to get better learning through forward-looking (or authentic) assessment, student self-assessment, clear criteria and standards (usually via the use of rubrics), and FIDeLity feedback. All of this makes sense until you get to “FIDeLity feedback”, and then you say “WTF?!”. Fink decided to get cutesy here, but the concept is good. He’s suggesting that we make plans for feedback that is Frequent, Immediate, Discriminating, and Lovingly (or caringly) delivered. Definitely a good idea, just way too cutesy of a way to express it for my tastes. My feedback and assessment plans with questions for readers after the jump

During Spring 2009, I took a course on teaching, learning, and the fundamentals of designing college courses offered through the Georgia Tech Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and taught by Assistant Director for Teaching Assistant Programs and Graduate Student Development Lydia Soleil. We read L. Dee Fink’s Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses and Maryellen Weimer’s Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice along with lots of chapters from other books and various articles. I have to say that this course was pretty transformational for me. Unlike your typical “teaching in higher education for PhD students” course that is taught by someone from an education or humanities department and populated by English, communications, and history graduate students because the future STEM faculty have heard awful things about the course’s domination by the humanities, this was a course by and for STEM disciplines. Lydia’s PhD is in physiology. The class members were mathematicians (5), chemists (3), electrical engineers (2), mechanical engineers (2), a biologist, and a civil engineer. All of us were sensitive to the issues of large service courses in the STEM disciplines and the issues peculiar to what we teach. We took the readings and examined them through a STEM lens and managed to come up with good ways to implement lots of things in our future courses. Read more »

(This is part of a continuing series. Part IV came before it.)

Having selected the Axler text, I had to get permission to adopt it. I sent a request to the undergraduate committee along with the preface and table of contents for the text and Axler’s email (discussed previously) about the rational root test. The request was for more than just changing the text, as I wanted to improve the awful description given to the course. (See the request for the existing and proposed descriptions.)

Then I waited. I was at a conference when the committee met, so I just had to hope that they would listen to me, since no one on the committee actually teaches precalculus and most of them don’t care about it at all. I kept badgering the committee chair about things, as he decided to let the committee members have almost two weeks to mull the decision over. Eventually, he had enough votes to proceed with the choice for Fall 2009, but they decided to make it a one-term decision and not mess with the course description. They said they’d consider doing something more once I’d finished teaching the course from the text, which I guess was a reasonable way to handle things if you’re a faculty member scared of letting the people who actually teach a class give input on the course description when it doesn’t even make sense as phrased.

Of course, once I got the text selection approved, I had to work with our Textbook Coordinator to get the info to the bookstores. This has proved interesting. Since I plan to use WileyPLUS and won’t require the students to have the physical text, the bookstores really don’t have to do anything. However, some students will want a real book. Unfortunately, students have a hard time reading shelf tags (I worked in the Textbooks Department at the NDSU Bookstore back in the days when it was the Varsity Mart, so I know this all too well), so I didn’t want them to just put books out there. Inevitably, some poor student would buy it, unwrap it, sign up for WileyPLUS, and then find out they don’t need the book but be unable to return it. Fortunately, Engineers Bookstore decided they won’t stock the text, just order what the Athletic Association wants for scholarship student-athletes, and Barnes & Noble at Georgia Tech has a “Go to Class First” adoption status that is more emphatic than just “Optional” and makes it clear students shouldn’t buy the book until they’ve come to class. The number of emails it took to get this all straightened out was annoying, but we did get it taken care of. I’m really glad we’ve got a great textbook coordinator to help us with these things.

With the text finally lined up, I’ve now been able to work on designing my course. I’ve got lots of ideas, and I’m getting them formulated. Later this week, I’ll post about the first couple of steps in the design process—determining situational factors and setting learning goals.