TLT Symposium reflection: is teaching essentially real life Inception?

Apologies for the bizarre title, but one line from the movie Inception (2010, directed by Christopher Nolan) that impressed me the most, was "You need the simplest version of the idea, one that will grow naturally in the subject's mind."

The keynote talk of the symposium was focusing on how to instill an idea and make it last in someone else's mind, defined as SUCCES, or Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Stories. The part of the talk that impressed me the most, was his demonstration of how to make your papers, ideas, talks, presentations and other communications "stick" with the audience. As a PhD candidate I have too many occasions where I had to give an "elevator speech" when asked what my research focus is, as well as other occasions such as teaching, seminars and writing manuscripts for submission. I have been unconsciously some of the SUCCES idea, but hearing the idea demonstrated in such a easy to understand and relate manner (essentially, the talk itself was a fine example for SUCCES), was beyond inspiring.

After the keynote talk, I went to three seminars focusing on introducing new technologies (VR, shared educational resource, and remote education). Variability, as a characteristic of successful teaching, has been on my mind for a while and I found the idea of implementing new technologies very refreshing, but also challenging, and in some cases limiting.

Reflecting on the experience, I found myself wondering how to incorporate SUCCES into the discipline of plant science. This field of study calls for a lot of hands-on experiences and some form of autonomy to convey and digest the knowledge better. Bite-sized information may be more effective when it comes to more theoretical classes, but taking notes in a lecture in plant science is only half way done. Traditionally the course design in plant science includes lab sessions, and field trips. But after taking some inspirations from the new technology seminars, ideas such as incorporating VR or AR into teaching plant science, such as displaying a time lapse video of plant growth in virtual reality, could be a good variation from conventional lectures, provide a "story" like context, and still convey credible information.

I was very excited to have the chance to learn about ideas and participate in discussions with other educators. The take-away from this experience will provide me with some inspirations, if I get to design a class in the future.

Designing a syllabus focusing on the hands on component

Before getting into this topic, here's a brief background: syllabus is not popular in Chinese universities. The course instructor usually tells the students how the grade will be given between quizzes, midterms and finals, and that was as close as students can get to a syllabus. Course projects are fairly rare in the course design procedure, and therefore not considered a part of performance evaluation. College education in China is very different, but the one aspect that stood out was the lack of autonomy on the students' part.

I experienced a little bit of a cultural shock when I walked into the classroom for the first class I took at Penn State. The teaching assistant handed the students a syllabus, detailing the course schedule, course objective, evaluation standards, contact information of the instructor, and resources students may find useful.

It never crossed my mind that a syllabus would be so helpful in the learning experience of students. When the opportunity of designing a syllabus came up during AEE530, I was very excited, as I could finally put down what would be an ideal syllabus in my opinion.

I chose to create a syllabus for a class I took two years ago (Plant Ecology, HORT450). The class was no longer offered since Dr. David Mortensen retired. But the idea of combining lectures, experiments, field trips, and most importantly, a student-chosen final project has become an ideal system to design a class that inherently involves a lot of hands-on practice.

Keeping the idea of maximizing students' experience as much as possible, I put down the course objective, resources, and evaluations plans emphasizing that students can choose their own final project ideas. Speaking from my own experience, being able to know in advance the topic/activities of a certain lecture is very helpful for me to prepare my study. I incorporated that into a weekly schedule of what the lectures or field trips will be about.

The peer review response I received was mostly positive, with comments like "this is a class I'll be interested in taking, if I have background in plant science". During the deep dive process, Jesse also gave me a similar remark. I was glad to say that I feel like this would be a helpful and tangible class for the students to take.

Student introduction: Xiyu Yang, Ph.D. candidate in Horticulture

Hello everyone!

My name is Xiyu Yang, currently a second year PhD candidate in Plant Science. I work with Dr. Jonathan Lynch, focusing on identifying and probing the ideal crop root phenotypes.

I finished my undergraduate study in Plant Genetics and Breeding at China Agricultural University. I had been focusing on biology and chemistry since high school and the choice of studying biology in the university seemed like a natural choice. I applied for a few research intern and assistant positions during Summer breaks throughout my college years, and the idea of going to grad school started to formulate.

I applied to the master of science program in Plant Science at Penn State in 2015, and finished my master's with Dr. Lynch in 2017. Given the minimal opportunities in the job market as an international student, and driven by the idea of further study and research, I continued into the Ph.D. program.

I love the idea of teaching in college after my PhD, but realized I'm not at all knowledgeable in teaching. Taking this class has been a positive step towards that goal and studying the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) has been incredibly helpful thus far!

TLT Symposium Reflection

The symposium was a show of great ideas and technological innovations for use in teaching, all very good, some very bold, some easy to apply, others not so much... But yet, in the middle of those talks, in between trying hard to follow the speakers fast English - sometimes loosing track of it - and trying to picture all that being applied, I felt like "wow, that's so much... why again are people trying so hard to incorporate all that in the classrooms?". 

This sounds like a very stupid question I guess. But I think at that moment I was relating this to what I experienced from the education system in which I grew up in Brazil, where in a big number of colleges and schools, specially the public ones, there is a noticeable lack of infra-structure, transportation, textbooks, and preparedness of teachers. It just sounds like too much when there is a need for the basic things first, kind of like putting modern racing tires in a 1940 VW beetle that won't go past 50 mph.

That is why I think for me the most marking moment of the event was Dan Heath's talk. It was... eyeopening when he made everyone realize the reason why many don't achieve their course dream. When he reasoned about the importance of the syllabus and the appropriate way to make it. When he gave a lesson on how to make ideas stick, how to catch students attention and make them want to learn... The more conceptual tone of his presentation, showing the role of the professor's skills and understanding of their students learning process on their actual learning, independent of how many technological devices you have at your disposition, was something that I could see yielding more results at the moment. At least from my perspective.

A True "SUCCES" Story

I learned a lot while attending the TLT symposium this past Saturday.  The keynote speaker was the was best speaker I have seen at a conference.  I think it further validates his credibility that the underlying theme of his presentation was on making ideas stick and I still vividly remember the majority of the presentation a few days later.  It really resonated when he discussed the concept of sticky ideas and related it to urban legends.  In order to get students to remember we really need to find a way to grab their attention.  This reminded me of the interest approach Dr. Curry mentioned in a previous class regarding crop circles and how they related to irrigation methods.  The unexpectedness of seeing an image of crop circles at the beginning of class acts to really pull in the students’ attention and participation.  As Dan Heath directly quoted, “unexpectedness buys attention and curiosity sustains attention.”  I was really interested when he talked about the concept of “the curse of knowledge.”  I thought that was an interesting factor that many teachers don’t take time to self-reflect and consider before teaching a class.

The individual seminar I found most intriguing was on the topic of using virtual reality in the classroom, specifically using it to facilitate “virtual field trips.”  I had no idea that Penn State has 3 virtual reality rooms on campus.  While sitting in on this seminar, I thought of the potential connection between VR technology and achieving higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.  I was also very surprised to see that the VR field trip showed better performance results than the actual field trip.  I do see many potential pitfalls to the widespread use of this technology, though, with the main concern being cost and logistics, especially for larger classes.  I found the seminar very intriguing as I had never even considered the use of VR for facilitating learning.

An event I don't want to forget.

I will be honest; Saturday's symposium was my second one, and if someone asked me what do I remember from the first one, a year ago, I would be blank. In addition to the delicious food I ate on 2018 symposium, my mind could only retrieve vague memories. I remember I was as excited as I was last Saturday; however, the valuable knowledge that I know I learned rested hidden in some broken synapsis. Will it happen the same with this symposium? That was the question I made to myself time and time again while drinking roasted coffee and eating beagles during the multiple breaks. Actually, I noticed that it is a question I make to myself frequently, and I guess the reason is that I don't want to miss a thing of this beautiful and varied life.

But going back to my discouraging question about forgetting, Am I going to forget this symposium? And, I'm glad to say that not only this event but also our AEE530 class have given me the inputs to say NO, I won't forget. And I consider there is something different from last year that made me see this symposium differently: my current motivation to understand how do we learn. And that motivation, as we have seen in our course, is a critical factor in for learning.

Regarding the symposium, the first talk fit like a glove to help me answer my concern. If an idea, message, or whatever we want to communicate is Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and in a Story form, it will be more likely to remembered or to stick. And because it is expected that I won't remember these six words the next year, Dan Heath created a simple acronym that I'm not likely to forget, "SUCCES". I also had the opportunity to participate in Mr. Heath’s Questions/Answers session, space where great questions and magnificent answers came and went. I won’t forget an emotional story about how easily life changes. In this story, due to a mentor, Mr. Heat canceled his law career, changing what he studies, what he writes, and the audience he speaks.

As I learned from the book HPL II, emotions play a role in developing a neural substrate for learning. And this was a fact that came to my mind when I was in the session of “Learning through the art of storytelling.” Although storytelling is not as important to transfer knowledge as it used to be, two things make it still relevant, especially to increase learner engagement (there are more, but I prefer to stick to Dan’s “S” of Simple). The first one is that storytelling emotionally connect the learner, and the second one is that It makes complex concepts lucid, especially when linking theory to practice. And despite the session described a process that some professor followed in designing a course based on storytelling, the topic of the course was even more interesting to me: children adoption. I won’t forget that just before entering the session I was talking to a friend about my interests on child adoption, a topic that was told us then. Even more Unexpected, the professor who guided the session revealed us that she, as an adoptive mother, was one of the main characters of the story told to us.

The exercise of writing this note has made me think again about what I’ve retained from this great event; I’m sure this activity itself reinforces my symposium experiences, which will help me to don’t forget. 

Finally, being aware of this blog existence allowed me to dive into the thoughts and reactions of other students towards the 2018 event, the one I had forgotten. I could recall, for instance, about the keynote speakers. Probably I wouldn’t be able to do it if I wouldn’t know about the Blog, which took me to the conclusion that knowing where information is can be as worthful as knowing the information. I’m convinced that the massive amount of useful information generated demands us to be efficient and strategic in the way we organize it. I would love to hear from you about methods to keep information that allowed you to retrieve it successfully.

TLT Symposium: Thoughts and Reflections

I had never attended this symposium before, so I really didn't have any idea what this event would actually be like. I planned which talks I would attend, woke up early, had a great breakfast, and looked forward to anything I might be able to learn during this symposium. I will say, I'm glad I attended this event for reasons I'll get into.

Firstly, the keynote speaker was phenomenal. Dan Heath almost immediately captured my attention when he started his introduction as he delved into ways to improve teaching as well as overcoming common challenges. Coincidentally (on purpose, I'm sure), the part that stuck with me the most was his emphasis on making your talks, knowledge, and overall delivery of information 'stick' with people by making your ideas unexpected yet simple. While this was overall interesting to listen to, it was not necessarily new information as if anything you try to teach doesn't stick, that you and your student have effectively wasted each other's time. What really stuck me was when Dan began discussing the "Curse of Knowledge." This concept I know all too well, both on my own end trying to share my ideas with others during talks or in my writing as well as trying to understand the material of some of my own peers. As a result, I try very hard to avoid these scenarios when I teach by learning the material with the students/peers I would be educating. I read what I plan out and dissect each word, each term, to make sure that enough information is present that people are able to refence idea's they're already familiar with. While I never got to listen to his explanations for Credible, Emotional, and Stories (although I lean their importance later), I still found Dan's talk on SUCCES(S) to be the most interesting part of the symposium. 

There were two other talks I thought were interesting. First, "Learning through the art of storytelling" discussed, well, using real stories as an effective teaching method. The main draw in using a strategy like this is upon listening to the real stories told by real people, students will become emotionally invested (remember Dan's 'E' in "SUCCES") in the material and as a result, both retain the material better and become storytellers themselves. This is done by storyboarding stories told by these speakers and having students identify key moments in the story in order to summon empathy within themselves. This was a very straight forward talk and an interesting method of teaching that I never really considered until now. 

Second, ending the final round of talks, I attended "Serious games and gamification: What has research shown us since 2014." Ever since I learned that my middle school began using World of Warcraft to teach story building and money management, I needed to know why people thought this was a good strategy for teaching. As an occasional gamer myself, while I know of ways in which certain games and platforms can be used to teach aspects of life and some skills, I always believed there were better ways to teach the same idea. If the game isn't focused on the 'learning' aspect of the experience, I believe that the core idea of what might be gained by playing games is ultimately lost. The talk delved into the pros of using games to teach, examining the use of intrinsic vs. extrinsic rewards, allowing students a safe place to fail and work at their own pace, as well as finding ways to tie concepts into real-world situations, among others. Despite this, along with the other cons mentioned in the talk such as having the game be a closed system, lack of control over content, and an inability to analyze the gameplay done by students, I remain unconvinced that games should be used as a serious way of trying to teach any school subject-type material. While certain games can certainly improve social skills, and other more difficult games teach aspects of mathematics or other subjects, in the end I still think that other, more conventional methods of teaching are more effective and less risky. I would be open in the future to more ideas like this, however.

That more or less wrapped up my experiences at my first TLT symposium. I'm glad I attended and got to listen to ideas and opinions from many successful teachers. The shark-tank-like event was particularly great, and I'm a little upset only one could be funded (I thought they were all great). I'm excited to bring what I experience into my AEE 530 class and discuss with my peers what they got out of this enlightening experience.