Certificate in College Teaching
Michigan State University
Core Competency 2: Creating Effective Learning Environment
Description
Certificate in College Teaching Workshop - Creating Effective Learning Environments was a session which discussed peer instruction as a method to enhance learning. An effective learning environment is driven by the students and their needs. The instructor is responsible to identify the characteristics of the learning environment and adopt a variety of approaches to make it most effective. This workshop session centered on the five easy steps to peer instruction. Although a number of ways can be used to create learning environment, this method increased students' involvement by offering many opportunities for expression their thoughts.
Artifacts
Artifacts Rationale
In the workshop, we watched a videos on the steps of peer instruction. Everyone wrote down the steps that they observed and compare their steps with those of their neighbors. Each group was asked to reach consensus on the steps. The above process graph demonstrate five easy steps my group identified.
Interpretation/Reflection
The workshop and session about creating effective learning environments has a great influence on my teaching and personal philosophy, which is reflected in the teaching philosophy in Part IV. This session is useful in that it not only discussed how instructors can create effective environment through a simple method, but also through the tools they can use for instruction. This has challenged me to think critically about how I frame questions in my teaching and how to enhance students’ involvement in my classroom.
What has impressed me was that the individual who led the workshop provided us with opportunities to practice what was preached. We first watched a video to see what an effective learning classroom is like. Then we were treated like a large classroom and participated in a variety of class activities including, individual and group work and larger discussion. This is incredibly effective because we were able to see things in action. Additionally, we could ask questions and express our concerns and learn from other people’s teaching experiences.
The key of the five easy steps to peer instruction is asking appropriate questions. How to analyze and improve questions is discussed in this workshop session as well. It is useful practice to analyze the question in terms of three ideas: 1) where in the learning cycle the question is focused 2) what the Bloom’s Taxonomy level of the question is 3) whether the question contain believable distractors. With the criteria listed above, we worked in groups to analyze three questions, which enabled me to come up with good questions in my teaching.
