Charlotte Ure

Creating An Effective Learning Environment

Description

Creating an effective learning environment is a challenging part in both designing a course, as well as holding it. An instructor needs to be aware of the students' needs and lesson plan accordingly. The atmosphere in the class has a great impact on students' motivation, their learning, and as a result on their success in the course. In a good classroom, every students' voice is heard. Although I try to teach inclusively, it is easy to discriminate unknowingly. It is vital to stay vigilant against discrimination in the classroom for both, instructors and peers. To create an effective learning environment I like to to use flipped-classrooms, group work and peer instructions, because it challenges students on a different level, builds their soft-skills and can uncover common misconceptions.

Artifacts

Reflection

Creating an effective learning environment is essential to being a successful teacher. Students should feel comfortable participating in class as well as using their peers and instructor as valuable resources.

To meet this competency I participated in the Teaching Institute May 12-13, 2016. We discussed how to design meaningful clicker questions and how to use clicker questions and peer instruction in practice. According to Prof. Bennett Goldberg (Boston University), the following five steps are essential to effective peer-instruction using clicker questions:

Due to small class sizes, I haven't been able to experiment with clicker-questions myself. In the future I would like to try them in a big lecture setting.

However, I have used many different concepts of peer instruction in my classes. One technique I implemented is the flipped-classroom approach, that I used in my classes Transitions to Proofs in Fall 2015, and Calculus 1 in Summer and Fall 2016. Transitions to Proof is a very challenging class for students. It exposes them for the first time to various proofing techniques, that are a prerequisite for higher courses in mathematics. The course is designed as a flipped classroom. Students learn new material from a book at home and take quizzes online in D2L. Additionally they have weekly homework. One particular student commented on the evaluation form that this class lets him learn deeply about the math through reading and proving. Most of the class time itself was spend working on problems in small groups. I would walk around the class room and help the students that "got stuck", or have students explain their work to me.
In Calculus 1 I used a different approach to a flipped classroom. Students watched videos, made by a faculty member at MSU, and filled out notes at home. I would check these notes in the beginning of each class. This allowed me to concentrate on problems during class time and even skip entire sections if the students seemed to be able to learn the material on their own.

In all my classes I try to make it very obvious to my students that mistakes happen and that we can sometimes learn more from a meaningful mistake than from a correctly solved problem. In certain instances it can help students to see me, or one of their peers make a mistake so that they are willing to volunteer answers to my questions. To establish this atmosphere, I take every students' answer serious. Especially as a tutor in the Math Learning Center, I let students propose different ideas for solutions. Then we figure out together, which way works best. I believe that this helps students more, than just giving them the "correct" way to solve a problem, because they can explain afterwards why this way was best. One of my students in Transitions to Proofs in Fall 2015 commented that: "She has a lot of patients to solve every problems", highlighting my dedication to work with every student individually.
This is another reason, that I enjoy doing group work in classes. It gives students the opportunity to discuss their ideas with peers without fear of being wrong in front of the entire class.

One of the issues I encounter when doing group work with students is that I need to motivate my students accordingly. Not every student has an intrinsic motivation to work through a problem. Therefore , in the summer session of Calculus 1, I implemented group-quizzes. These were solved in groups of three or four students. Since the group quiz counted towards the final grade, students were very willing to solve the problems. I remember in particular one student that pointed out that she didn't like her new group, because she always had to explain parts of the problems to her peers. I congratulated her, that she had grown to be at this level.
On the other hand I tried to keep the actual impact of the group quizzes on the final grade very low, to not punish students for flawed attempts.

In my experience students learn better if they are emotionally invested in the subject. Often students don't feel that way about my subject, mathematics. Therefore I have to make sure to root the classroom topics in their fields of expertise. I try to design problems and examples for class, that have applications in various natural sciences. The struggle for me is however that I am not an expert in that other subject. Therefore I would love to one day work with instructors from other disciplines to design meaningful projects for college students.

A big part of an effective learning environment is inclusive teaching, which requires vigilance on the side of the instructor. For example my class Transitions to Proofs was predominantly non-native speakers. Being a non-native English speaker myself meant that I could emphasize with my students on this matter. However, it was a big challenge for those students to participate in the group discussions. One of the ways I tried to counteract this, was by letting the students discuss in their native tongue, if their entire group had one single native language. I still required them to be able to explain the matter to me and their peers in English.

Overall I believe that it is an instructors duty to create a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere in the classroom, so that students feel comfortable to participate in class. Every new class poses a new challenge to me, to get to know my students and to create this effective learning environment.




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