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for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
Like many teachers of large classes, Professor Donna Charlevoix (Department of Atmospheric Sciences) wondered what her students were getting out of her lectures. Prof. Charlevoix worried that she was too focused on the motions of teaching, while her students were concentrating on little more than the acquisition of information that would help them correctly answer questions on a test. Reflecting on these concerns, Prof. Charlevoix came to understand that her teaching practices mirrored those of many professors she had encountered in her own education, and that these common teaching practices were not conducive to the types of outcomes that she believed were important for today's students. Struggling with the question of how to make changes to her instruction, Prof. Charlevoix sought the advice of professors from the College of Education's Department of Curriculum and Instruction and began reviewing educational literature that focused on best practices. Eventually, Prof. Charlevoix became acquainted with the John Dewey-inspired inquiry learning and began to recognize how that method's emphasis on student-centered exploration could be effectively used to help her students develop a deeper understanding of the atmospheric sciences.
Prof. Charlevoix feels that using the inquiry learning process in her class allows her teaching to best build upon her students' natural interest. With inquiry learning, students discover course goals and objectives through their own exploration of particular problems rather than through instructor-led presentations or readings. Prof. Charlevoix thinks that this problem-based approach can be grafted onto popular curiosity about weather and climate. For example, she feels that most people want to know why it gets colder on one day as opposed to another, or they intuitively ask "what's going on?" when they observe a storm traveling through a particular area. Prof. Charlevoix uses these types of questions as the basis for inquiry lessons in her course. The students then use a variety of computer-based and online resources to "solve" the problems. In solving these problems her students are able to master basic meteorological knowledge, and, more importantly, develop an introductory knowledge of the critical problem solving skills necessary for all sciences.
Prof. Charlevoix's confidence in the power of inquiry learning emerges from her perception that she cannot imagine a subject that does not lend itself to the inquiry process. Still, Prof. Charlevoix admits that not all learners are uniformly drawn to inquiry learning. She suggests that inquiry learning can create a level of anxiety for students who fashion themselves after the "typical scientist type." Charlevoix finds that these traditionally-oriented students sometimes develop a level of discomfort when they perceive that they are being taken on an academic tangent or when they are being asked to delve into the ambiguity of a particular situation. The reason for their discomfort, Prof. Charlevoix believes, is that these students are typically most comfortable working with numeric values, formulaic processes, and procedural practices toward the sole objective of generating "correct" answers. Prof. Charlevoix thinks that part of the problem with traditional classroom instruction is that it revolves around the idea that science is taught as "fact." By moving beyond common, traditional teaching, Charlevoix believes that students can be encouraged to become comfortable with ambiguity in a way that enhances their ability to think about ideas differently. To help all students become comfortable with inquiry learning, instructors can start by introducing short and simple activities and exercises that build on inquiry learning's five steps: Ask, Investigate, Create, Discuss, and Reflect. In an attempt to get her students to think about ideas more broadly, Prof. Charlevoix applies what she calls a "twist" to her instruction. Rather than starting her classes with a lecture, Charlevoix starts her instruction by posing questions. This twist in the format of instruction is intended to distract students from focusing on the acquisition of information for the purpose of answering test questions, and is instead designed to engage students in the initial stages of the inquiry process. In order to do this, Charlevoix asks lots of "why" questions. Why do we care? Why are we talking about this? Why would we want to know more?
http://www.atmos.uiuc.edu/courses/atmos100/index.html
In
an attempt to develop a course that was more meaningful for her
students, Prof. Charlevoix organized a team to redesign ATMOS 100:
Introduction to Meteorology. The team consisted of two fellow professors,
a graduate student in Atmospheric Sciences to help design the guided
inquiry lessons, and a programmer who built the interactive modules.
ATMOS 100 is a large course with 150 to 300 students and 5 to 10
lab sections divided into groups of not more than 30 students each.
With such a large class, Prof. Charlevoix decided to use technology
to enhance the learning environment of the course. Lecture sessions
are held in a CITES "smart classroom" where Prof. Charlevoix
makes full use of the display and computer facilities to provide
a "multimedia presentation" in each class. Professor
Charlevoix also makes extensive use of the online Illinois
Compass system to disseminate information and interact with
the entire class through discussion boards and homework assignments.
While the online and lecture portions of the course are important,
most of the redesign work went into enhancing the laboratory portion
of the course. To enhance the labs, Charlevoix and her team began
to develop ideas for interactive Java application models that would
be accompanied with inquiry-based lessons. Within eight months,
the development process was finished and the newly developed materials
were ready for testing in the classroom.
Prof. Charlevoix believes the redesign of the Introduction to Meteorology class was instrumental in increasing its enrollment numbers over the enrollment numbers of the once favorite, non-inquiry-based Severe Weather course. She knew the course had crossed the threshold of popularity when she overheard a student say, "This is cool. Too bad this isn't like a video game you could play at home." After relating this story, Charlevoix asked rhetorically, "What is wrong with fun, if students are learning? What happens in education that by the time students get to college, learning is no longer fun?"
During the testing phase, several problems were identified. The most significant of these problems involved the excessive length and detail of the guided inquiry lessons and curriculum guides. In order to fix this problem, Prof. Charlevoix and her team ultimately discovered the balance between the number of instructions needed for focusing students' attention and the amount of time that was needed for students to develop understandings through the process of "playing" with the interactive computer modules.
Students
enrolled in ATMOS 100 are encouraged to explore and play with interactive
applications (such as the Smog
City simulator and the Hurricane
Tracker) as a way of developing their understanding of complex
issues; however, these students are not placed in situations where
their inquiries are random and unfocused. Instead, students are
provided with short lesson introductions that act as both a foundation
and a framework for learning, as well as short lesson wrap-ups that
tie everything together. With this approach, Prof. Charlevoix is
not specifically telling her students exactly what to do during
the learning process, or pointing out one "correct" answer
for each topic, but is guiding them on a path of learning and inquiry
much richer and rewarding than traditional content-retention models
of learning.
After enjoying a number of successful semesters with the revised ATMOS 100, Prof. Charlevoix now reflects on and considers the course's popularity with students. With a focus on fun as well as the development of complex understandings, ATMOS 100 attracts students from diverse majors. Many of these students develop a budding interest in meteorology and show interest in taking other courses in the field. "The bottom line," says Prof. Charlevoix, "is that if students cannot relate to, or see the value in what they are learning, they are not going to care." Students have to look at ideas in different ways and then look beyond those ways. This is the foundation of inquiry learning and it is this process that ultimately helps students communicate their ideas while recognizing that others may have examined the same ideas in different ways. The goals are not to develop answers per se, but rather to help students become comfortable with intellectual discovery as a process and to encourage them to develop complex, nuanced understandings of a topic. These goals, of course, represent the highest ideals we hold for education.
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