Collaborating across disciplines and the Commonwealth: Engaging students in community-based learning

The School Environmental Action Showcase is in its fifth year at George Mason University. This event may be the largest STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) showcase in Virginia. Seven hundred youth, from kindergarten through high school, present their environmentally oriented research at Mason’s Center for the Arts in April. The Mason leader, a science professor, has coordinated with a communication faculty member to support SEAS. SEAS is funded by the 4VA Wind and Watershed partnership. It also includes faculty and students in a James Madison University course, community NGOs, dozens of regional K-12 schools, state and federal agencies, Mason admissions and sustainability offices, public officials, and student volunteers. Youth present projects such as planting radishes to improve the cleanliness of Virginia waters and designing wind turbines to increase energy production. This proposed lightning talk will share highlights, Mason students’ feedback, and lessons learned about teaming across disciplines.

Why and how to support students in team assignments

Once employed, our graduates will be judged on their ability to be effective team players. In some professions, people’s safety and even survival may depend on good teamwork. Yet teamwork assignments in university courses are not generally a popular option. Team projects are often viewed as a difficult and frustrating requirement, by students and faculty alike. Few instructors receive any formal training on how to create effective team assignments or on ways to educate their students about strategies for success in their team activities. In this session, we discuss ways to educate students about the value of team experiences in their courses, so that they are motivated to improve their teamwork skills. We examine the dynamics of both face-to-face and virtual teamwork, in workplace environments and in a college setting, so as to understand the underlying reasons for the challenges inherent in team activities. Then finally we explore some techniques that instructors can use to design and deliver team assignments that support a positive student experience.

SENCER “Do-Now” KQED social media in the classroom

By developing opportunities for students to learn through compelling current events, learning environments are improved. Inspired students discover relevance to their lives, create dialogue and gain confidence in their ability to expand civic capacity. Social media has been used to provide an experimental venue for this enhanced learning in selected courses nationally through project SENCER (Science Education for New Civic Engagement and Reform), an NSF sponsored national education reform initiative. In the fall of 2015, the New Century College course Mysteries of Migration was one of six courses selected nationally for the inaugural SENCER collaboration with KQED in San Francisco, where social media blogs called “Do Now” are flourishing. In this session, I will discuss the implementation of “Do Now” blogs into Mystery of Migration’s semester–long case study assignment. This course is interdisciplinary in scope, integrating the biology and ecology of migratory organisms with public policy. In this session I will discuss the student reactions and evidence of learning through the use of “Do Now” and the merits of implementing social media into existing courses.

Teaching strategies to promote imagination and creativity through student choice

High-agency learning activities empower students to take more active roles in their own learning, directed by their interests, curiosities, and choices. Educators, particularly K-12, have long asserted that student choice of learning activities encourages a greater degree of personal engagement with instructional content, leading to more confident, interested, imaginative, and creative students (e.g., Kohn, 1993; Ronan, 2015). However, implementing these strategies at the college level often proves challenging as course instructors merge learner engagement strategies, such as student choice, while still sufficiently addressing course objectives and content. Additionally, creating supportive classroom environments that promote “open-ended” assignments at times are met with student resistance. This session is designed to provide ideas and tips to instructors wishing to employ student choice to enhance active learning, imagination, and creativity in their courses. Presenters will share best practices for implementing student choice in learning activities and assignments, primarily using examples from asynchronous and synchronous online courses across various disciplines at George Mason University. We also will encourage participants to reflect on how learning activities and assignments in their own courses might be adapted to include student choice to promote imagination and creativity in university-level learning across course delivery formats.ReferencesKohn, A. (1993). Choices for Children: Why and How to Let Students Decide. The Phi Delta Kappan, 75(1), 8–20. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20405017Ronan, A. (2015, March 20). 7 Ways to Hack Your Classroom to Include Student Choice. Retrieved March 16, 2016, from http://www.edudemic.com/7-ways-to-hack-your-classroom/

Helping to realize “computer science for all”: Student outcomes of self-pacing in introductory programming courses

Sparked by a series of national campaigns to increase interest in computer science, computer science departments are inundated with students who are interested in learning how to program. Despite the interest, introductory computer science course have relatively low completion rates (approximately 55% at Mason) and high rates of academic integrity violations. In response to this environment, the Computer Science department at Mason received an external grant to redesign their introductory programming courses to a self-paced, flipped format. Implementation began in Fall 2015 with a quasi-experimental methodology that tracks students from an experimental course and a control group (those who took more traditional introductory CS courses) over the course of the semester. Data collected includes grades on assignments, self-report surveys, and classroom observations. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of a self-paced, flipped curricular design in an introductory experiential computer science course on the immediate (in course) completion. In this short lightning talk, we will present data from student surveys and classroom observations identifying any difference across the control and experimental groups. Preliminary results identify a significant increase in student completion upwards of a 20% difference across the groups. In addition to increasing knowledge of the impact of self-paced courses on student retention and success in computer science, we offer an alternative method to collect data on classroom observations via the Real-time Observation Classroom Application (ROCA). ROCA allows for efficient data collection and comparison of specific pedagogies to student engagement measures.

Talk less, teach more: Tactics for converting from lecture courses to active courses

Evolving from a lecturer, a "sage on the stage," to an active learningguide, is hard. Especially if you've lectured for more than 25 years.Especially if you like to talk. Especially if you give "engaging andexciting" lectures. I have recently used perseverance, resilience, andmore than a small dose of stubbornness to push myself to "talk less, teachmore." I've made progress but I'm still working on it. In the firstpart of this talk, I will explain why I realized this change is necessary. Iwill describe many reasons why this was hard for me and may be hard for you.I will use general principles to explain how I am making this transition.During the second part of this talk, I will share specific tactics from myown classes that help "activate" problem solving courses,skills-oriented courses, design courses, and analysis courses. For example,instead of doing what I traditionally would have done (such as solvingproblems for them, showing them case study examples, talking for an hour), Iemploy tactics to engage students (such as students trying to solve problemsbefore I share solutions, students finding their own examples). One or moreof these tactics could help with almost any type of course. The session willconclude with a brainstorming session where we will discuss how activeexercises could be incorporated into your classes with minimal effort.Participants will develop the ability to create interesting active exercisesfor their own courses.

Curriculum creation: Reflection as a tool for enhancement

Reflection plays an important role in the development of new courses and curriculum. Professional skills development is the focus of two newly developed and required courses, one of which uses reflection as a primary pedagogical practice. These foundational courses are scaffolded by design. The scope of this presentation will be on the first of these two courses, designed for students entering the university environment and serving as early exposure to the field. Presenters will share the role that reflection played, and continues to play, in the development of these courses. One assignment, a product of this reflection, will serve as a focus of this presentation. It was developed to challenge students to consider past experiences and how they might apply to the development of their professional skills, both now and in the future. Peer review and feedback sessions serve as another instructional tool to facilitate this critical thinking process.The first focus of this presentation will be on continual instructor reflection on course and curriculum design as a method for enhancing the pedagogical approach, instruction, and assignments, and it will continue to play a role in the assessment of course outcomes. The second focus will be on the role that critical reflection plays as a pedagogical practice in course design and classroom instruction. Session attendees will be asked to reflect on their pedagogical practice and the role reflection has played in their approach to classroom learning.

Integrating thought provoking conversation into writing: Blogging in the classroom

In this session, we will discuss a strategy to encourage students (both undergraduate and graduate) to read the material and engage in thoughtful conversation with their peers outside of class. In a blogging format, students are required to choose 1-2 partners from the class to discuss outside of class, on a regular (at least bi-weekly basis) the class the readings, the class discussion, and any other course materials, such as films, with each other. One advantage to this format is that often students who are not strong participators in the classroom are able to gather their thoughts and engage with their peers through this assignment. Not only does this technique encourage reading of the course texts in their entirety, but it encourages synthesis and applicability to daily life. We call these assignments “integrative essays” because they encourage students to integrate course readings and life experiences as well as the observations of their peers. These assignments have been used in Women and Gender Studies and sociology courses that focus on gender, race, sexuality, intimate partner violence, and institutional violence.

Faculty and Student Perspectives on Redesigned Learning Spaces at Mason

Mason is reimagining learning spaces on our campuses to foster active and collaborative student learning. This commitment is part of our strategic plan goals for innovative learning and supporting teaching and scholarship excellence. While we currently have 12 classrooms intentionally designed to support active learning, both the Peterson Health Sciences Building and the Robinson rebuild offer significant opportunities for increasing the number of these learning spaces. As part of this initiative we have created an iterative design and implementation process that leverages faculty and student experience feedback. This poster will highlight preliminary findings (e.g., satisfaction, sense of community and connectedness, types of learning experiences, etc.) from both our faculty and student surveys from the 2015-2016 academic year.

Course management strategies for first time online instructors

The presentation examines the practice of teacher presence from students’ perspectives. It is based upon a comparison of student feedback from the first and second fully online deliveries of a required course entitled, Education Law. While a review of the literature reveals that teacher presence is created through degrees of active engagement, instructors new to online teaching may misinterpret learners’ perceptions of what constitutes an acceptable degree of presence. Student feedback, from the first delivery, suggested the expectation for teacher presence was higher because the course design featured a number of collaborative, project based learning activities. Instructional planning that gives balanced attention to content mastery and course management by reframing the functions of the instructor’s role will assure that learners’ enthusiasm and engagement are not casualties of the context. A review of the course evaluations from the Summer 2015 semester revealed that an intentional contemplation of communication variables including timing, interpersonal and inter-group messaging must be purposefully planned to minimize the potential for confusion. This suggests changes for the Summer 2016 semester, including the use of proactive course management strategies to increase student satisfaction, facilitate the display of metacognition, and extend creative problem solving skills to authentic applications. Faculty will learn about how the initiation of these changes in course management impact students’ perceptions of teacher presence.