Five Gears for Activating Learning - Introduction

Hello, I'm Cynthia Desrochers and this is my colleague Mike Rivas and together we represent the Teaching and Learning Group here at California State University, Northridge. The Teaching and Learning Group is a group of eight colleagues that came together just a little bit over a year ago in the fall of 2012 and our main purpose was our common interest to take a look at student success in the classroom. Although the Cal State Northridge people have done wonderful things about changing policies and various other things to increase student success, we wanted to focus at this point on just what faculty do with students in the classroom to promote classroom success. So together we ultimately came up with a project that we've entitled "Five Gears for Activating Learning." This is a project that I think you'll be interested in and we want to share it with you. So our project has three main purposes. The first is to use very explicitly the most current research on how people learn. Second, the purpose is to develop a common language about how humans learn. And the third is to analyze the effects of technology and various other approaches to teaching and learning on how students are learning at California State University, Northridge. Why did we choose these three potential purposes for the five gears? Why did we say research on teaching? Well, as a university setting if we have eighty years of research we feel like we should be using it. We're on the cutting edge so we want to have faculty be able to articulate and use consciously tried and true gears, lenses, principles of learning, whatever you want to call them, for how students learn. Secondly, we want to share a common language so that when you and I talk in a faculty meeting we're speaking the same language. And when we have a learning challenge, now we can address that learning challenge that are unique to everybody's course and try to apply these five gears very directly towards meeting the challenge or meeting the obstacle that we face in that particular course. And third, there are always new course redesigns, new technologies, maybe you want to try service learning. When any of these new approaches come to your awareness, consider what impact do they have in terms of these five gears. I look at flipped instruction, which is where students are again having information at a beginning level first exposure outside of class, and coming into class and doing the more difficult complex tasks under the watchful eye of the professor that's guiding their practice, and in terms of these gears that increases student success, in terms of personal support it increases student connecting prior knowledge because you're there to make connections with them and give examples. Practice and feedback, the students can practice right in front of the faculty member and get targeted feedback. In terms of deep learning and mastery, let's hope that they can do complex problem solving with the faculty there. So, if you were to look at any new technology or any new model of instruction, apply these five gears to see what is the benefit or lack of benefit in implementing them in your repertoire of teaching tools. When our group first came together, we began reading the text "How Learning Works." This is an excellent book that was written in 2010. It summarizes research from the last 80 years in terms of how people learn. It was perfect for our purposes because its examples dealt with college teaching. So often the literature deals with K12 and faculty can't identify with those examples. Every example in that book dealt with what happens in university settings. After a year of work and reading that book and studying other articles, we agreed upon five main gears for activating student learning here at California State University, Northridge. I might add here that these five gears are interactive. One doesn't necessarily have to come before another, but they all have to be together and used in concert for a student to achieve mastery. It would probably be useful for you if you think of a class that you're currently teaching so that you can think of examples of your using of these five gears right along with us as we go.