The Pedagogy of the 21st Century

Emotion chemicals impact our learning

At the 28th Annual Distance Learning and Teaching Conference,  the keynoter James Zull reported that there are "emotional chemicals" in the brain that impact our learning.

Two points:
First, when we learn something there is a positive chemical reaction that both makes us feel good for having learned something, but also the chemical (dopamine) enhances our ability to learn even more.
Second, we as teachers can and do affect the chemical reactions in our students' brains. When we put pressure or stress our students, that increases their adrenalin and it shuts down their learning. When we create a positive "safe' learning environment we stimulate serotonin that allows the rationale/cognitive area of the brain to function and take on the learning tasks we as teachers want them to learn.

Audio Feedback Has 3 Benefits

"I have used audio comments on projects and I am planning to use audio even more often this term because I am concentrating on motivation, fast feedback, and self-reflection." -Marcela Raphael

Why is it so important to satisfy our students?

Teachers often ask. The answer to "Why is it so important to satisfy our students?" is that all of the educational research from the last 86 years, since Eduard Lindeman's classic work in 1926, has shown that by responding to our students' needs we help them to increase their learning.

All of the educational researchers, Knowles, Houle, Apps, Nadler, Bischoff, Brookfield right on down to all the online educational researchers like Howles, Conrad, Palloff & Pratt, Donaldson, Boettinger- - they all agree that by positively responding to how our students learn we as teachers increase their learning.

Boring But Important

Another way to sneak in non-entertaining issues is to have a 5-minute daily lesson called "Boring but Important".

Sometimes I try to make this funny by calling the topic "juicy, exciting, sexy"which they know it isn't, but you're acknowledging their cooperation. Again, put it at the head of tasks to get it over with. - Lisa Stewart

Making Boring Work More Tolerable

Lisa Stewart on making boring or hard work more enjoyable or tolerable for students:

“I try to deal with this situation by bringing that topic out into the open for discussion. I remind studens that there are things they want to learn and things I feel are important for them to know, so we'll negotiate the two. I usually make the offers (so that something totally undoable doesn't come up).

"How about we do the harder, less interesting aspects of the lesson up front while you're at your most attentive, then we'll play a vocabulary game, and if time allows you can begin your homework (so that they don't have to do it at home)." Often students are satisfied; the negotiating shows them I care about what they want and they're willing to reciprocate.

Try Audio to Grade Papers

We are getting more reports of teachers using audio to grade reports, papers and other student assignments. The teacher would do a little audio personalized on the assignment and the individual student. Some teachers report that actually doing it by audio is faster and easier than writing everything down.

And students like the personal tone of the audio as well. Writing can seem impersonal sometimes.

Tips for Teaching Talented Students

Tips for teaching gifted and talented students in an online course.

1.Ramp it up. Make it as challenging as possible.

2.Rely totally on testing, not on homework. No busy work. Smart students want and need the challenge, but not the boring repetitive simple stuff. Challenging is good, more work is not.

3.Allow quiz outs. If they know it, let them prove it and move on.

4.If you grade based on attendance and penalize for late work and other stuff not related to learning and knowledge, your smart, and really smart, male students will drop out, mentally if nothing else.
If you would have flunked Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, don't even try teaching the gifted and talented.

5.Let them teach. Let them create content.

6.Let them go. Forget your control urges, and if they go off on a tangent, let them. It's called a "teachable moment" when you lose control and it's almost always the most exciting time of the course for both students and you.

7.Get ready to have a great experience.

From "Enabling Learning and Completion," a new chapter in the Fourth Edition of Advanced Teaching Online, by William A. Draves, just released.

What Only You The Teacher Can Do

If the relational and contextual answers were out there, your students would not need you the teacher. But they/we DO absolutely need you the teacher. You are the most important factor in any person's learning (every study concludes). So one of the things you do is to relate, to put into context, to make important or unimportant. By answering questions maybe you are telling them what is important.

William A. Draves, co-author with Julie Coates of Nine Shift: Work, Life and education in the 21st Century, now celebrating the Tenth Anniversary Printing

Will This Be on the Test?

Several teachers have noted that young people "want answers quickly." Part of what is going on is that there is now unlimited information in the world. So what young people have to do is to narrow down and throw out extraneous information.

When they say "Will this be on the test?" they are asking, in part, whether this is important, does this relate to that, or is this just trivia.

-William A. Draves, co-author with Julie Coates of The Pedagogy of the 21st Century

Clear Expectations Lowers Stress

“Make sure everything in your course is crystal clear so students aren't stressed, and that it's ready in advance of the course. Students stress out more about not having clear expectations . . that they'll miss something because they didn't know it was expected of them.”  Jackie Pommer