2011 Provost's Teaching Innovation Prize Winners

Sponsored by the Office of the Provost, CRLT, and the University Library 

The winners were recognized at the 14th annual Enriching Scholarship event on May 2, 2011.

The five winning teaching innovations are:

Leadership Crisis Challenge

 Picture of Susan Ashford Professor Susan Ashford
(Ross School of Business/ Management and Organizations)
Professor Ashford is accepting this award on behalf of the Ross Leadership Initiative.

The LCC simulation forces students to make decisions under acute time pressure and to trade off competing demands, thereby addressing the difficulty of teaching these key elements of leadership. Intangibles such as judgment, courage, and integrity are hard to meaningfully broach with traditional teaching methods. However, leaving these skills to be learned in the field has costly financial, social, and career consequences.

The intensive exercise runs 24 hours and presents a realistic business crisis that poses vexing questions: What does a company “owe” the community in which it does business? Should the natural environment be sacrificed for shareholder wealth? Can companies admit wrongs in today’s aggressive legal climate? In the absence of any “right answer,” students must think hard and critically together regarding the best response, exercise integrity in making judgments about how to proceed, and exercise courage in standing up for those judgments under fire.

Acting as corporate executives, student teams present their plans of action to a confrontational Board of Directors (played by Ross faculty), who evaluate the quality of their decisions. The best student teams move on to a final round press conference where they face rapid, contentious questions from actual journalists (Knight-Wallace Fellows). Throughout the simulation, students are faced with changing circumstances conveyed by time-release documents, videos, and other interactive elements.

Student Comments:

“…there are no preceding examples to guide you, no textbook reading to help your decision, and every answer at some point will feel like the wrong answer.”

“In many ways the amount of information we were given was intimidating – in other ways, we were starving for information. …the case writers did a great job providing just enough ambiguity to make the case challenging.”

“…the [LCC] not only allowed me to apply lessons learned from my accounting, strategy, and management courses, but also taught me about making challenging, high-level decisions as a team, given limited time and incomplete information.”

“To stand in front of a hostile audience and defend yourself – that’s an opportunity that you don’t get that often in b-school.”

“It’s common to go into a business setting and have to work with VPs who may span different continents, who’ve never met or worked together before, to address a crisis in that moment. So I found the whole challenge to be very realistic. I think having this experience will definitely help me in the future.”

The LCC “really for forced students to draw upon skills that they may never have realized they possessed.”

 

Teaching Ethics of/with New Technologies

 Picture of Paul Conway Professor Paul Conway
(School of Information)
LSA senior Evan Moss provided invaluable support for the technologies used in the course.

In SI 410 Ethics and Information Technology under-graduates explore the ethical issues posed by the use of social information technologies. Integrated learning activities work with two distinctive new technologies as both objects of study and pedagogical tools.

Through MediaWiki, students experience directly the ethical challenges of anonymous collaborative writing. The ability to model behavior within a closed (and safe) community makes it possible for students to take risks that would be unethical if conducted in Wikipedia itself. A further advantage of the wiki format is that students not only produce original writing, but also participate in a sufficiently high level of editorial revision for the course to satisfy the LS&A upper-level writing requirement.

Using Evolver, digital avatar software, students document the process of creating both realistic self-portraits and fantasy versions of themselves and then write about what personal identity means in virtual environments. Students find that this process deepens their understanding of the material provided in course readings and lectures.

The pedagogical techniques pioneered in this course may be easily adapted to team-based writing exercises in other disciplines, including, but not limited to cases where modeling authority roles and authorial identities are important learning objectives.

Student Comments:

“We used MediaWiki to create a rich encyclopedia on topics in IT ethics far beyond what the curriculum could cover.”

“Through reading scholarly articles about the ethical implications of anonymous collaboration environments, I was able to establish a framework for my understanding. However, it wasn’t until I was actively participating in the MediaWiki when I started to fully realize the ethical dilemmas and dynamics of such concepts.”

“I learned the majority of the course’s contents through this active communal interaction, and I feel that I did so in a way that far surpassed more traditional methods of learning (e.g., reading essays and memorizing the facts and ideas expressed therein).”

“Professor Conway was able to maintain control and closely monitor the environment, which allowed me to work free of fear that my performance wasn’t being measured accurately.”

“After an initial foundation of content had been created, students began to go through each other’s topics and draw connections… allowing us to determine how different information related to the overarching course theme, and therefore other content, by juxtaposing everything at once.”

 

Infusing Technology for Guided Continuous Learning in a Large Gateway Course

 Picture of Brenda Gunderson

Senior Lecturer Brenda Gunderson
(LSA / Statistics)

By carefully selecting and interweaving technologies, instructors can guide large groups of students through challenging material in a way that feels highly personalized. The 1,500 students who enroll in Statistics 250 each semester eagerly engage with a suite of technologies that gives them multiple paths for developing, practicing, and testing their understanding of concepts and relationships.

  • SMART Presentation Tools: A tablet PC allows the instructor to make the problem solving process transparent and guide students to see connections to earlier material.
  • Lecture Capture Technology (UM Blue Review): Students can review recorded material multiple times.
  • Clickers: Difficult questions are paired with peer discussion.
  • PreLab Video Wrappers: Brief videos made with Jing teach a software feature or introduce an online learning resource.
  • Online Homework + e-Textbook: Assignments link to the relevant section of the e-textbook. Paperless homework is submitted automatically and returned quickly with tailored feedback from GSIs.
  • GTD™ Lists: Posted weekly, the Getting Things Done list itemizes what students can do to be better learners.

Together, these technologies let students discover new ways to understand the material. They can receive appropriate guidance both inside and outside the classroom, so that their learning is continuous, not a set of stop-and-go chunks. This innovation is flexible and readily extendable to many large gateway courses at our university and beyond.

Student Comments:

“The integration of technology in the classroom helped make the class feel smaller and more manageable.”

“The pre-lab instructional videos, along with the multiple applets really help you to visualize the concepts.”

The extensive online homework assignments are “convenient to access and require you to both mathematically and visually demonstrate the knowledge we learn in class.”

iTunesU “gives me instant access to explanations of difficult content, a sort of ‘on-demand’ office hours that helps me better prepare for exams.”

“The many technologies [used] nicely complement each other, allowing students to quickly grasp key concepts and make concrete what before seemed abstract.”

“Notably, the online homework tool allows graduate student instructors to provide feedback on individual responses, [commenting] on what error students made in their logic and how to think about the question in the future. I find this immensely valuable, as it allows students to quickly identify and understand their mistakes.”

“Lecture teaches how to apply an equation to a problem. Lab teaches us how to make the computer do it, and our online homework mixes the two.”

 

Securing Our FUTURE: Foundations for Undergraduate Teaching - Uniting Research and Education

 Picture of Brian Coppola  Picture of Joseph Krajcik  Picture of Mary Starr Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Brian Coppola
(LSA/ Chemistry)
Professor Joseph Krajcik
(School of Education)
Lecturer Mary Starr
(School of Education)

This program fosters collaboration between first- and second-year undergraduates in LSA gateway science and mathematics courses with local middle and high school teachers. FUTURE gives undeclared undergraduates the chance to design and implement a lesson in an authentic classroom setting, leading many to consider a career in teaching.

Two to three U-M students are matched with an in-service teachers who propose lesson ideas that they’ve previously lacked the resources to carry out. The U-M students visit their host’s classroom and enroll in the FUTURE seminar, which covers practical, ground-level ideas about teaching, learning, and instructional design. Students have access to the ideas and experiences of previous participants, as well as consultation time with LSA and SOE experts (graduate students, post-docs, faculty members).

To date, FUTURE has engaged 30-45 students per semester and15-20 teachers in six schools across five subject areas. These are school districts in which students typically do not succeed in science and mathematics. FUTURE’s impact extends well beyond the delivery of a single lesson as students come to envision U-M as a place for future interactions. Indeed, the program has already had its first instance of a Detroit high school student not only enrolling at U-M, but now being part of a FUTURE teaching team herself.

Student Comments:

“I was entrusted with the task of creating a new, exciting, and engaging experience for high school students that I would have direct ownership over. … Meeting weekly with other faculty and student staff from IDEA, I worked through my troubles, celebrated my triumphs, and created what was ultimately a physics-based high school crime scene project that I to this day am proud of.”

“I have had the pleasure of being a part of the FUTURE program all six semesters here so far, and I plan on continuing my senior year as well.”

“I think that many students never even give teaching actual consideration. Most that are talented in the sciences or math tend to go into medical school, or dental school, or become engineers... [I]t really takes a first-hand experience like FUTURE to help give students a well-rounded background to make informed career decisions.”

“Inquiry based learning is something I wish I had a chance to experience in high school. It allows for a way of new thinking: relying on yourself to come up with a solution to a problem.”

“I realized that being passionate about science did not limit me to just a career in medicine, as I previously thought. What I saw through FUTURE was that I could translate my passion into an effective teaching tool and impart that same passion in younger students in my community.”

 

ZOOM: Teaching Time, Space, and Approaches to Knowledge

 Picture of Douglas Northrop Professor Douglas Northrop
(LSA / History and Near Eastern Studies)

 

“Zoom” is a course in “Big History.” It moves through a range of disciplinary perspectives (astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, etc.) to tell the universe’s story from the Big Bang to the end of time. This approach covers 13.7 billion years and puts human history into terrestrial and cosmic contexts.

The primary, semester-long assignment engages students in thinking directly about how materials presented by guest lecturers from different disciplines relate to one another. Students form groups centered around a particular discipline and then create a set of wiki pages profiling their discipline: what types of evidence it considers, how it goes about evaluating that evidence, and examples of content knowledge that the discipline has produced.

Students collaborate across groups in order to create linkages, both literal hyperlinks and intellectual connections, among wiki pages and disciplines. A structured peer-review process guides students as they critique other groups’ work and determine how it might connect with their own.

The pedagogical innovation is twofold: it puts wikis to use to encourage new ways of thinking and collabora-ting, and it gives students the chance to take ownership of their learning as they teach others, creating an open educational resource that reflects what they have learned and the connections they have made in Zoom.

Student Comments:

“Never before was it clear to me that we can use the techniques and knowledge gained from multiple disciplines to tell the story of human history within the context of the universe.”

“If we had moved linearly through time, starting with the Big Bang would only leave room for the entirety of human history during the last minute of our last class. He chose instead to move logarithmically, “zooming” through time and space with brief stops along the way—the formation of the Earth, the first hominids and humans, the Industrial Revolution, and even stops in the distant future.”

“Asking us to create a knowledge base that’s not only part of our grade but potentially viewed by hundreds of people encouraged us to research both the subject we were teaching and the audience we were catering to.”

“Zoom changed the way I think about history and education.”

“Educators can talk at great length about complexity and making connections, but [this] class allowed me to see history at its most beautiful and complex for the first time. As I prepare to enter a new classroom of my own as a history teacher, it is my greatest hope that I might help my students see history in a similarly rich, engaging, and innovative way.”

 

For questions about the Teaching Innovation Prize email Provost'sTIP@umich.edu

 

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