Dr. Elizabeth Barkley Workshops

For me, yesterday's workshops led by Dr. Elizabeth Barkley were very thought provoking. As we lead faculty to create engaging assignments that can be assessed for our Intstitutional General Education Competencies and our Program Learning Outcomes, it will be good to keep the principles in mind that she shared. It would also be good to check out her two books for assignment inspiration ideas.

I am noticing that when consultants come, and the audience is multi-discipline faculty, that the "content" of their presentations is going to be best principles for effective teaching and the method is going to be (hopefully) putting those principles into practice using engagement/active learning/collaborative learning techniques (that's what Barbara Millis did for her two presentations during Employee Development Day).

I did come away with some new knowledge:
motivation = value x expectancy
student engagement = motivation x active learning
I had never had the language of positive transfer and negative transfer, but certainly in math, we see this all the time and it is very helpful to be aware of it as you teach so you can alert the students.
I never thought about the fact that we store ideas in memory by similarity and we retrieve them by differences -- I can see how sharing this with math students will be very helpful.

I thought the way she used the MATCH acronym with the quote at the end was a very clever, brain-based learning technique.

I was very impressed with her power points -- minimal words, images, and she used animation appropriately.

She did use a lot of STEM examples (the Title V STEM Grant paid for her to come) as I asked.

It will be interesting to see the compiled ideas from the two workshops on the worksheet. I think the repeated group activity of filling out the worksheet automatically limited the number of SETs that were introduced during the workshop.

At least many people will be aware of her books and hopefully will check out SETs and CoLTs.