What is a Pulse Smart Pen? – Youtube video with closed captions explaining the Pulse Smart Pen from Livescribe. (Click “CC” button in bottom right, then click “Transcribe Audio” to utilize closed captions)

I am passing this great stuff on from Ross Peterson-Veatch, PhD out of Goshen College.
“A local High School Math teacher (who happens to live on my block),
just sent me this cool link. I thought I’d pass it on. Seems like a
great way to promote exploration of visuals in teaching and
presentation. Doing a “mouseover” on any of the “elem…ents” will
generate a pop-up example of that visualization concept.

Have a look:
http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

The larger web site is about “Visual Literacy” and has some fascinating stuff on it.http://www.visual-literacy.org/ Enjoy!”
I went to both sites and found them VERY useful and a great example of the UDL principle multiple means of representation.See MoreA Periodic Table of Visualization Methods www.visual-literacy.org

Wil Richardson is one of my favorite bloggers.  He’s a 2o year veteran teacher who now oversees instructional technology and communications at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, NJ.  He’s my favorite visionary these days on all things learning.

In this reflection, he draws attention to the NYTimes magazine article this past Sunday on the Quest To Learn school in NYC, a school organized around gaming.  The school involves sixth and seventh graders and will add a class a year until they are grades 6-12.  Pay particular attention to the video that is linked at the end of his reflection.  This man’s vision for the activity based, collaborative learning that goes on at Quest is a transformative vision, one that contrasts nicely, and somewhat discouragingly,  with the vision of reform advocated in Time magazine’s theme issue on education this week.  The two futures laid out couldn’t be more different.

I think we who work to make University teaching more accessible to a wider range of students need to be tweaked by transformative examples such as Quest.  I don’t know about you, but so often it just feels like we are playing the higher education game, making learning more easily attainable for our UVM students when perhaps what we should really be thinking about is how to change the game, not how to improve the game.  Some questions for us:

Should we be thinking about how to help faculty change the game?

Does gaming itself play any role in what we should be advancing to faculty?

Is gaming so much a future vision that it creates a learning setting beyond UDL?

How can we advise faculty on the facilitative uses of technology when we ourselves are relatively limited in our own use of it to serve our needs and purposes?

Is UDL a reformative practice or is it a transformative vision?  What should it be?

If our goal were to be transformative, what technologies and web-based programs would be useful for us?

It’s questions like these we should be considering from time to time, and it’s people like Will who can help us think through our responses.  When you get into his blog, scroll down through it and read the statements from parents who attended back to school nights at their sons and daughters schools.  Ouch.

David and Roger Johnson, one a counselor educator, one a special educator, set out in the early 1970s to define and refine the successful practice called cooperative learning.  Embraced by special educators, cooperative learning as a task structure became a major tool to achieve the integration of students receiving special education services under PL 94-142 into regular classroom settings without sacrificing the integrity of the academic program.  Other task structures, individualized learning and competitive learning, usually led to inequitable achievement outcomes.  Cooperative learning, when done well (as the Johnsons advised) usually meant every student learned more than they would either doing the work alone or in traditional ability grouped fashion.

Cooperative Learning groupwork has become a mainline instructional practice used by all educators who want to promote high rates of learning for all students, most especially those students at the margins.  Many of the attributes of good cooperative learning fall within the three principles that guide the design of Universal Design for Learning practices advanced by CAST and the Universal Design for Learning Project at UVM.  Regardless of the target audience, all cooperative learning activities must adhere to the basic criteria for effective cooperative learning as set down by David and Roger Johnson in the early 1970s:  positively interdependent tasks, face to face interaction, group processing, individual accountability, and the learning of small group and interpersonal skills.

Others have carried out lines of research into the effectiveness of cooperative learning task structures that can be helpful to us.  Of particular interest to me is the work of Elizabeth Cohen and Rachel Lotan of the Program for Complex Instruction at Stanford University.  Cohen and Lotan used expectations states theory, a theoretical base for understanding small group interaction based in sociology, and created an approach to planning cooperative group work endeavors called Complex Instruction.  Their addition of status theory to the basic criteria laid down by the Johnson’s in the 1970s is a helpful addition to teaching teachers how to plan, teach, assess, and understand cooperative learning activities.

It takes time and training to become an effective cooperative learning educator.   To think that higher education professors could be successful cooperative educators by virtue of their advanced degrees is patently absurd.  Deep content knowledge has little in common with deep pedagogical knowledge.  To teach group work practices successfully requires familiarity with what cooperative learning is and how to use cooperative learning practices in the college classroom with late adolescent / young adult learners.  We have much to learn about how to do this, how to teach college professors how to use cooperative practices.  But we have very broad shoulders upon which we can stand.  To get us started, I’d like to offer this set of observations.

Observations Regarding Effective Groupwork in College Classrooms

1.  Knowing how to work in a group is not an inherited trait.  Successful group practices can be taught.

2.  Effective group work has both task and interpersonal requirements.  Students need to know how to negotiate both sets of issues.

3.  Small groups naturally evidence a range of ability for any given task.

4.  The nature of a group task affects how well a group can work collaboratively.

5. Teachers need to take class time to orient students to collaborative projects and practices.

6. Group work should be graded on a point system.

7. Posting realistic benchmarks increase the quality of student work.

8.  Permitting students to put their own particular “spin” on a group product will increase student motivation to do their work well.

9. Being honest with college students about the particulars of cooperative learning procedures is the best path to follow.  Honesty is key to helping the groups solve their own unique issues of working together.

10.  Group work usually takes longer than teachers want it to.

11.  Small groups are better than big groups.

12. Heterogeneous ability groups are preferred over homogeneous ability groups.

13. Good group work needs to be publicly recognized.

14. Presentation skills are different from groupwork skills.  If you want good presentations, teach and model good presentation skills.

15. College departments should be responsible for promoting the skills and knowledge for working productively and gracefully in a group setting in their coursework.

16. The majority of college students come to college having had negative cooperative group experiences in secondary education.

C. Rathbone
UDL@UVM
September 1, 2010