I started teaching in the College of Natural Resources at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point in the fall 2004 semester. I was not fresh out of a Ph.D. program nor was I new to working in academia. I have worked professionally in various capacities in several states across the United States. My job immediately prior to coming to UWSP was as an Associate Professor Extension Educator with the University of Minnesota as the state specialist for farm forestry. In that capacity, I ran 50+ short courses a year for adult audiences and conducted quite a lot of applied research in farm forestry. While the position at U of M was a wonderful job, I really wanted to move into a career track where I could teach at the college level. When I was offered the position at UWSP, I jumped at the chance as the College of Natural Resources is respected as one of the best in the country.
I wanted to participate in the FACETS seminars because I sought to improve my teaching skills. Although I was not new teaching, I had focused on a very difference audience, landowners and natural resource professionals, I wanted to gain more insight into teaching college-aged students. In discussions with various faculty members and administrators, the FACETS program kept surfacing.
The idea of FACETS really appealed to me. For the three years prior to my move to UWSP, I had done professional development in alternative educational approaches targeted at adult education. I had received grant funding to establish farm forestry learning groups. I had formatted many of my short courses to use collaborative learning models, and, my evaluations were consistently excellent for these workshops/group meetings. I appreciated the opportunity to continue my professional development in educational methods. At the time I entered the FACETS program, I had two real needs as I redeveloped my UWSP courses: to update my college-level teaching skills as my only previous experience teaching this age group had been in graduate school under much more controlled settings, and to help me better understand this generation of college-students, so different than those I encountered in graduate school. From the beginning of my time at UWSP, I realized this generation presented some very unique opportunities and challenges to me personally and professionally.
I believe that one of the main things that I learned from FACETS was that a teacher should take time to reflect on teaching. I have begun to use this to improve my teaching. I believe that I am seeing improvements in my students’ ability to achieve learning goals as a result of my emerging reflective practices.
FACETS--The Vector of Change
Originally, my purpose in writing this paper was to discuss how I am using what I learned in the FACETS sessions in my teaching. I wrote a paper that concentrated on generational differences and “backward educational design.” Both of these topics were specifically addressed as part of the content of the FACETS session. Both are wonderful topics. The generation I teach now is so different than the one in which I was raised, and the method of backward design has really allowed me to alter my student assessment (grading, examination, etc.). I submitted this paper to Susan Gingrasso who obviously
FACETS is a vector of change not only by what has
been directly presented during each of the three sessions but also
because each session actually got people thinking about and reflecting
on their teaching.
Shifting My Focus
Because I was new to UWSP and needed to develop course materials very quickly, I spent most of my time focusing on content. In the case of a few lectures, it was obvious that this focus on content made for a very dry delivery. I realize now that I should have spent more of my time focusing on transmission and less on content. After attending the FACETS seminars, I spent a lot more time reflecting on how to teach my students. What are my real learning goals for them? What do they need to be able to do when they leave my class? How can I assess their learning? How can I emphasize the points I need to and minimize the concentration on minutia? How do I help students develop problem-solving skills? How do I communicate some of the basics in the field without ruining their fresh perspective on the subject? I spent a lot of time thinking about how to communicate and how to communicate and focus on what the students really need to know. I will include a few examples just to illustrate this point.
I reflected to Examine Teaching-learning Issues
Example 1:
I co-taught a course called Regional Silviculture, the study, cultivation and management of forest trees, in the 2005 spring semester. This course is divided into six segments, of which I teach three: Northern Hardwood Management in New England, Management of Allegheny Hardwoods and Management of Oak Forests. I have worked professionally in each of these regions. This personal experience with these regions has given me a large repertoire of examples as well as some entertaining stories. After teaching the Northern Hardwood Management section, I tested the students using my best “real world questions.” I am very mindful of the need for these students to be able to use problem-solving skills…to be able to apply in practice what they are learning in abstract. My questions were not unlike what many of them will be doing after becoming employed in the field. A fair percentage of the students did not perform as well as I had hoped. Why not?
And so, I reflected. After considerable thought, I realized that if I wanted them to be able to apply this material in other than an abstract method, I would have to create opportunities for them to get some practice at it. After all, I had delivered most of the material in an abstract manner. Many students, although not all, had not had the need nor the opportunity to apply their knowledge to a real world setting. When I started the section on Management of Allegheny Hardwoods, I completely changed my delivery of the content. I still presented the abstract materials, as these are needed to fully understand why forests respond to treatment in the manner that they do. However, I included an additional class session for which I printed data from some of the stands that I had worked with years ago in the Alleghenies. I divided the class into discussion groups, gave them this data and a list of landowners’ objectives. Their instructions were simple: decide how to manage these stands to reach the landowner’s goals using the concepts we had discussed and what they knew from other classes. When the time for the test came around, the students did remarkably better. Teaching strategies that emerged from my reflecting on learning really worked.
Example 2:
I am teaching Soil 360: Field Experience in Soil Inventory Methods, an immersion class in forest soils, this summer, 2005. Each section lasts for four days, 8-12 hours a day. This course is one of a set of six total courses that each student will have taken by the end of the summer. I will be repeating the same class every week to a different set of students for six weeks of the summer.
Much of my Ph.D. work focused on soil impoverishment and how it impacts tree growth and health. I think this is an incredibly important topic for natural resource managers to know and understand, and, from experience, I know this is a knowledge and skill set that many natural resource managers lack. So, once again, I found myself facing the same conundrum, teaching a subject for which I have good content knowledge and for which I am truly passionate. However, I wonder how I can convey this knowledge and passion. While I have the benefit of an existing curriculum for this class, I still want to teach this class well and in an interesting manner. A class in soils may sound tedious and uninteresting, especially when many of these students have just come from other classes that involve such things as trapping and radio-collaring wildlife both of which have the element of danger and the warm fuzzy appeal of small, brown-eyed mammals, or collecting fish from lakes for population census, which has the appeal of being on a lake with electro-shocking equipment and turning up at least a few enormous fish. Digging a soil pit has less curb appeal.
So, before teaching any of these sessions, I reflected about the knowledge, the skills, and the type of exposure these students needed to leave with after having taken the class. Once again, with an established curriculum, this was easier; however, how I could deliver this class so that the students can gain these skills required some careful thought. I reflected on how to instruct this class. And, I reflected on how I should assess that they had reached these goals. I also reflected on what I disliked about certain soils classes and how to avoid these issues, what I did not learn when I took soils classes, and why.
I discussed the more tedious and difficult concepts in-the-field where I could show them what I meant, not just tell them.
I began teaching this class after this reflective exercise. The first thing I did was to keep lectures to a minimum. I discussed the more tedious and difficult concepts in-the-field where I could show them what I meant, not just tell them. I concentrated most of the class time on activities so students spent a majority of their week digging about in the faces of soil pits and looking at soil core samples. This required that I avoid correcting these students too soon. They had to struggle with the tasks and make some mistakes. It also required me to use most of my past experience to figure out some of the weird things we saw. Nature is seldom as clean cut as what the textbooks show. The students and I used the main concepts over and over again through their work with field examples. When it came time to assess them, I targeted the final exams to determine whether or not the students reached their learning goals. And, they did.
Students’ Responses to My Teaching
At the end of the week for each of the first two groups I taught, I gave a simple question to act as aid to the university’s standard evaluation, “Did you feel you learned a lot about soils that you did not know before this class?” The answers were gratifying. I include a few below to illustrate.
- “Yes, I also feel like you taught it in a way that I understood while still making it fun. You also brought in other stories, which gave me an idea of how this stuff really works. Plus, you are a funny teacher, so I was usually engaged in what you were saying.”
- “Yes, I was able to put words with pictures… (In a previous class) …we were introduced to a lot of terminology, but it didn’t mean anything to me.”
- “I thought this class was very good. I like how you were able to relate it to our own majors even if we weren’t crazy about learning about soils…”
- “Yes, I have had soils classes before this, but there were a lot of things in 360 that I had never heard of, such as Bs, Bhs or Bt (note for reader: these are specific types of soil layers) and what they are diagnostic of. Good class.”
- “…I was lost on the first day, 1 but after that it all came together…”
If I had taught this class in the same way that I had received some of my soils classes 10-15 years ago, I do believe they would not have been quite as positive. I also do believe that my students would not have performed nearly as well on the exam. Or, to put it bluntly, at least half would have failed the final. It was very gratifying to see them break down soil profiles, a cross-section of soil by depth, and classify them correctly. It was even more gratifying to see them be able to directly relate soil factors to forest growth and health, all in only one week.
The Impact of Reflecting on My Teaching
Reflecting on teaching is a useful tool. Being a new faculty member at UWSP, I think that this is a good time to find out what works and what does not. Even though I am in the middle of teaching these summer immersion sessions, I am already looking at the fall and spring semesters with a different attitude about how I will approach my teaching. Already, I know I will incorporate many more problem solving exercises. I plan to offer the option of an immersion section to replace several of the 4-hour lab sessions. I will integrate discussion sections that meet outside of regular class hours. I may include “just-in-time” quizzes to be held outside of the classroom. I will also change the exam format to directly assess the level of student attainment of learning goals. I have already spent a lot of time thinking about how to teach these courses to bring a rich context to the content.
FACETS has served as a vector of change mostly through encouraging me to reflect on my teaching. While the direct content has been useful, this indirect impact has been more significant. I think that this has made me a better teacher. Pondering what skills the students really need, how to convey these skills, why something did not work, where to trim the less directly useful content, how to order the delivery for better understanding, and how to identify potential trouble spots…this kind of reflection has made me a better teacher.
Future Challenges and Afterthoughts
My discipline in the College of Natural Resources will be faced with many retirements in the next several years. The current professors do an excellent job of instructing, and have a way of teaching that gets students to apply their learning to real life situations as evidenced by the fact that students who graduate from the CNR are respected across the country as some of the best prepared in the field. With the new hires that we will have to make in the next few years to replace these retirees, I hope to develop a learning group that will focus on teaching skills. I plan to be involved in continuing to offer this teaching and student-centered education to our students. I also hope to learn what I can from these retiring professors in an effort to improve my teaching skills.
I am currently busy developing materials for a new course I will teach spring 2006, Native American Forestry, and a course that is new to me, Ecological Monitoring. During this semester, I have been busy updating the Forestry 432: Silviculture, for which I have considerably altered the delivery method. I have included discussion groups that meet outside of class. These discussion groups read papers that are a good supplement to the lecture. I have also incorporated two discussions based on forest stand data that allow the students to apply the skills they have learned in class to a practical forest management condition. The lab is nearly entirely field-based with the indoor portion allocated to computer modeling, using Forest Vegetation Simulation and Stand Visualization Software. of the stand data that they measured in the field, or to the Geographic Information System work with their forest stands. We met in an actual “classroom” only on the last two days of lab to do their presentations of proposed forest management plans.
I have also altered my assessment and examinations quite a lot separating the exams into three types of questions to target each of the three levels of learning: rote learning, understanding, application.
The multiple-choice, fill-in the blank, and others of this type target basic rote learning. The short answer questions as well as some of the situational questions target understanding, and the landowner story problems target application. Generally, I give the students stand data from measurements that I have done on stands in the past plus a set of landowner goals and let them use their skills to propose methods to manage these stands. While this approach to examination has definitely helped my students develop their ability to apply their skills, there has been a major downside for me. Generally, silviculture has 70-80 students, which means that I have an incredible amount of reading to grade the short answers as well as several pages of essay responses. If one students’ exam takes 10 minutes to grade, which is on the low side, the total minutes in grading is 750 minutes, 12.5 mind-numbing hours, not including breaks.
Overall, this application-based approach has worked very well. I am nearing the end of the students’ presentations of silvicultural plans in the lab and I am very pleased with how well they are doing.
Finally, I am giving them a survey at the end of the semester that asks for their input on each of the main “experimental” parts of the class. I think this will work as a good feedback loop in the process.
Overall, this application-based approach has worked very well. I am nearing the end of the students’ presentations of silvicultural plans in the lab and I am very pleased with how well they are doing. Most have really internalized what I have discussed during class. I think that this will definitely benefit them in their future as foresters.
Brief Bio: Prior to coming to UW-SP in 2004, Mike worked professionally in West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Wisconsin. He has a strong field-based knowledge of Appalachian, Midwestern & Great Plains ecosystems. Before coming to Wisconsin, Mike worked as a Regional Extension Educator in Natural Resources Management and Utilization & as the Agroforestry Management Extension Specialist at the University of Minnesota. Mike´s degrees are Ph.D. Forest Resources from Penn State University; M.S. Biology and a B.S.F. in Forest Resource Management both from West Virginia University. Contact Mike at: mdemchik@uwsp.edu