Aaron Fried: Goals-Assessment Report: Section 1 – Teaching and Professional Effectiveness
I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day. – Douglas Adams
Teaching Philosophy
My teaching philosophy sorts into three areas I think are the important in creating a high quality and successful professor of Anatomy and Physiology. The three areas are Curriculum Design and Instructional Style, Growth Mindset and Awareness of Learners, and Assessment and Feedback.
Note: Almost every picture can be made larger by clicking on it and all links will open in a new window.
Curriculum Design and Instructional Style
The first step in developing as an instructor is understanding how to create and package a cohesive unit of instruction. This takes an ability to create an objective-driven course that includes units and lessons that provide students an intentional experience. A learning experience should follow a path where all learning in the course is related to the intended outcomes for both the course and provides a clear blueprint for a student that helps to motivate and provide a clear path for completion.
The best method for developing quality, outcome-driven curriculum is backwards design. Backwards design starts with identifying the desired outcome for the instruction and then developing the methods for understanding whether a student has achieved the desired outcomes before selecting content or instructional methods. By starting with the end in mind, every decision about the instruction is better directed towards an intentional path towards the desired outcome.
Tantamount to creating a great blueprint with backwards instructional design is the selection of methods of instruction that are based on solid cognitive psychology. In order to maximize the potential for learning in my courses, this means both selecting active learning strategies that fit my learning outcomes and developing metacognitive strategies that help individual learners understand how they learn in order to maximize their learning.
Active learning places an emphasis on the student becoming more of a participant in the learning environment and challenging learners to take basic knowledge and skills and apply them to higher level problem solving. By creating an environment rich with active experiences, the student becomes more extrinsically motivated and is provided an opportunity to take control of the learning process.
Growth Mindset and Learner Awareness
Students are humans. They come from diverse backgrounds and academic preparation before landing in my class. In my years in higher education, I have experienced a long bemoaning that “students are not ready for college.” I think that this is a fixed mindset that ignores the reality of K-12 education, but also it sets students up for failure. If students are not ready for college, what can you do to help them? Instead, I think that college educators need to shift to a growth mindset where we are worried about whether our courses are student ready.
Community colleges were originally designed to provide a stepping stone for both economic mobility and college attainment that was previously unavailable to students without means. The goal was to reduce inequities in our systems. Challenging students with a growth mindset can change the dialog between student and instructor. Instead of assuming that students cannot meet the challenges of college, I need to find out where the students are in their journey. I need to use metacognitive strategies to help them set goals and show them how to meet those goals.
Metacognitive strategies help learners understand their process of learning. This is a critical step for many learners, especially learners who have experienced frustration with learning in the past. By providing students with strategies that help make their process of learning more explicit, you are helping the learners develop not just skills in your class, but life-long skills that will transfer into many other situations.
Assessment and Feedback
Well intentioned curriculum, great instructional strategies, providing students a welcoming space for growth all require that students understand where they are on their path to meeting their goals. Where many of those intentions fail is in the use of assessment methods that do not match the outcomes or seem arbitrary and also in a lack of feedback about their performance. Planning for assessment is a crucial step in backwards design and should follow the development of learning outcomes. Frequently assessments are created after the instruction is delivered or is used despite the goal of the learning outcomes.
Good assessment should be selected based on the learning outcomes. It should be authentic and should assess at the level of the learning outcomes. If the learning outcomes call for application, the assessment should not involve only recall of information. Additionally, assessment should provide low stakes practice that provides students with a feedback mechanism to regulate what they are learning and should authentically build towards more summative assessments of how the student meets the learning outcomes.
So how do I make those things happen?
Instructional Design Process
During my graduate instructional design training, I was introduced to Robert Gagné’s Nine Events of Effective Instruction[1]. Since that introduction, I have always strived to model my instructional experiences within my courses based on these events. Why? In short, Gagné provides a research-based taxonomy that is prescriptive, not in terms of what pedagogy actually works, but in terms of a sequence of events that must occur in order that instruction can be as effective as possible. In evaluating my effectiveness as a teacher, I feel that it is important to use these events frame WHAT I do when preparing for and teaching students and also describe WHY I feel like these strategies are important and effective. This narrative is not intended to describe any single class or unit of instruction, but rather to provide reference to how I use these principles on different occasions and to provide some of the strongest examples of how these events are used to scaffold many different kinds of learning experiences within my teaching repertoire.
[1] Gagné, R.M., Briggs, L.J., & Wager, W.W. (1992). Principles of instructional design (4th Ed.). Fort Worth, TX. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers.
Instructional Delivery – Gagne’s Events of Instruction
- Gain attention.
- Inform learner of objectives.
- Stimulate recall of prior learning.
- Present stimulus material.
- Provide learner guidance.
- Elicit performance.
- Provide feedback.
- Assess performance.
- Enhance retention and transfer.
Following are several examples of how I create instruction in a manner that incorporates these events into my course design.
1 – Gain the attention of the students
At the start of a unit of instruction, or at the start of a lesson for the day, it is important to draw the learner into the learning experience. To bring students into a ‘learning space’ I like to use simple but open-ended questions:
- What is reproduction?
- Bones are as strong as steel, so why do they break?
- What is the difference between a male and a female?
Many of these questions seem simple and students can offer something as a description. The idea is to use a brainstorm question to have a student start think about the topic, fire up their brain. Sometimes the questions can even start to challenge their preconceptions.
2. Inform the students of the objectives
In a conversation between Alice and the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat laments that if Alice doesn’t care where she is going, any way will get her there. In instruction, this type of philosophy is just not acceptable. Students, especially novice learners, need to know where they are going in order to get there. Clear and concise statement of objectives is crucial to guiding students to what is important and informing the assessments of what students have learned along the way.
In my teaching, I use several methods of providing students with objectives aligned with overall course learning outcomes. Students are also presented with a reading list on the first day of class (see Sample Reading List on left). These reading lists are provided via Blackboard and correlated with classroom objectives with the objectives provided by the textbook with page references for the textbook. This display also allows students to understand the portions of each chapter that are relevant to each lecture. Also, each topic presented in class starts with a presentation of simple language objectives for that topic. Students are encouraged to use this to both frame the upcoming presentation of content and as a prompt for studying. “If this was a short answer question, how would you answer it?”
3. Stimulate recall of prior learning
Students bring a variety of prior learning to the Anatomy and Physiology classroom; some of it pertinent, some of it good, and some of it in the form of misconceptions. It is important to frame new learning in respect to prior learning to drive new learning outcomes. This stimulation takes many formal and informal turns in my teaching.
Informally, almost every class starts with a quick refresher on the previous class. This usually takes the form of a question-and-answer sessions with students. This is an important “where did we leave off prompt” that helps the students return to that place we were before moving forward with new material. Also, I find that before we move on, it is important to see if students have put that information together as correctly as possible. With anatomical systems, students must consolidate what they are learning into their own mental models. If their models go unchecked, how will they know they are learning more correct information? In creating a comfortable environment for failure, yes failure, students can be exposed to their misconceptions, so they know they need to be changed.
Prior recall takes a more formal role in a series of weekly quizzes. These quizzes are only worth 5 points, but they help to pace students and see how good they are at recalling more factual content from the course.
Short video to demonstrate the female reproductive hormone regulation.
4. Present the content
My goal when I am teaching content is to present content in a manner that 1) helps students organize this new information, 2) helps them create mental models to represent what they are learning, and 3) provide them with opportunities to demonstrate this learning and the new models in a safe environment so that they can work towards a better understanding.
In order to help students organize information, I give them copies of powerpoint images so that they can focus on taking their own notes. Presentations are organized with the overall objectives in mind so that students are very clear on what content is related to which goals. There are clear points where we stop and summarize individual content objectives.
The more I teach, the less I try to put words on powerpoint slides and the more I try to use powerpoint as an organizer for discussion, especially in larger sections. I try to present small chunks of information and then stop and use that information to make models that represent what we have been trying to discuss. This involves breaking moving between computer display and whiteboard usage. Whiteboards make a great place to design mental models of what we have been learning because they provide the flexibility to change portions of our models to adapt as we learn new things.
During content presentation, I try to use as many strategies as possible. In class, I commonly use lecture, analogy, clinical case study or case correlation, graphic organizers, creation of mental models or simulation, and Socratic questioning. I am constantly searching for whatever strategy might be the best for each type of content. During the pandemic, I turned all these presentations into online videos that are less than 10 minutes. I encourage the students to read the text and take notes and then watch the videos and takes notes and then try to consolidate the notes by fitting the two together and making sense of how the information fits together.
5. Provide learning guidance &
6. Elicit performance &
7. Provide feedback
These three events of learning are intimately tied together. I cannot describe how I plan for one without also keeping in mind the rest of these events.
During learning experiences, I believe that students need to be active participants. I spend the first weeks of class trying to forge a relationship with the students in the class so that they can feel relaxed to both ask and answer questions. As we hit checkpoints in class, I start by asking questions. Then, as a class, we critique or reconstruct our mental models. It is during these occasions that I try to challenge the students by altering portions of the mental model. For example, after we have created a model for how the female menstrual cycle is controlled intrinsically by hormonal regulation, we try to alter the model by introducing different birth control methods. In this example, by eliciting the performance (model hormonal regulation to describe birth control), I have ample time to provide scaffolds in the form of questions to the students (learning guidance) and provide feedback when the students are correct or incorrect with their conceptions of the model.
In creating the model, the students apply their new learning (elicit performance). As the model is being created, I can scaffold the type of outcome by using certain questions or prompts (providing learning guidance). I give the students study guides that cover the most important parts of the unit. During the active class sessions, students work in groups to consolidate their understanding of the study guide questions and then share with the class. The class can then weigh in on the answers. Instead of providing students with answers, I try to use questions to see if I can help them figure out the problem. I can help correct misconceptions and guide students towards a better outcome (provide feedback).
As a more formal way of providing students with guidance and feedback while demonstrating expected performance, students complete writing prompts centered on the main physiology phenomena of the week. Each writing prompt makes the student use the mental model to problem solve. For example, after learning about the female menstrual cycle (mental model from above), they will be asked to write a few sentences about how a Progestin-based birth control might work within their model. It forces students to demonstrate that they can apply the model and problem solve using that model.
8. Assess performance
Assessing student performance is a challenging process and I try to use several different methods.
First, on a day-to-day basis, I ask as many questions in class as possible. This helps me assess where the class is when it comes to proceeding with the content.
Second, as previously mentioned, I use weekly quizzing and writing to test different levels of understanding. Students also receive prompt feedback because the quiz grading is automatic, and I can focus on the writing prompts.
Finally, students take several examinations during the semester. These exams serve as assessments and use a variety of types of questions to assess learning outcomes for each unit of the course. I am using less multiple choice questions and more writing because I can better understand and help students learn from grading their writing.
9. Enhance retention and transfer to the job
This is a challenging event to accommodate in a basic science course. Essentially, my job is to provide the science background so that professional clinicians can train students clinically. However, I feel like it is important to provide some of this clinical correlation so that students can start making those connections before they start their clinical practice. One point of pride that I see when I look at my student evaluations is that clinical correlations I present in class help them make connections between their learning and how they will apply the science that they learn when they are in clinical situations. Some of these comments are described in the collection of student evaluations attached to this section.
Active Learning Process ANd Metacognition
Learning Process – Active Learning
Main takeaways from Make It Stick
Retrieval practice improves knowledge and retention.
Interleaving, or spaced, varied practice improves retention and knowledge.
Certain “desirable difficulties” improve learning.
Elaboration, generation, and reflection are effective study strategies
The least competent overestimate their competence the most
While people may have different learning preferences, these preferences do not reflect learning (or instructional) styles.
Those who adopt a growth mindset are the most effective learners.
Robert Gagne’s Instructional Design Model is based on cognitive science. This interdisciplinary science has focused on understanding principles of neurobiology and psychology in order to understand how people learn and how to create instruction to take advantage of natural cognitive process and maximize learning. A few years ago, I read Make It Stick as part of a common read at MVCC. Many current active learning strategies are extensions of cognitive science described by Gagne. Principles of elaboration theory and metacognition were in the fabric of the instructional design theories I worked with in graduate school. Additionally, I have worked with generative learning strategies as the driving concept for selecting instructional strategies.
To me, that means working from simpler to more complex (elaboration theory) while providing students an environment that forces them to have to be an active participant in integrating learning into their mental models (generative learning) while providing them with strategies and opportunities to understand how they are learning and how to improve (metacognition) are fundamental to how I construct learning situations.
The principles of active learning (see list from Make It Stick, left) match up well with Gagne’s events of instruction and are why I have made an effort to use more writing in my A&P instruction.
From above consider, use of study guides and warm up questions as well as continuous quizzes helps provide retrieval practice opportunities in a low stress and low stakes environment.
Using writing prompts that are not just repetition of course concepts but force application and elaboration on physiologic process (desired difficulty) create opportunities for elaboration, generation, and reflection. Again, this is in a low stakes environment, but it also allows people to see how much confidence they have in their understandings.
Having quizzing and writing occur on a regular schedule allows the use of that content interwoven or interleaved into active learning sessions (lecture) allows for students to see how pieces fit together.
Finally, shifting language to a growth mindset and helping students understand that they can learn if they participate in the process regardless of how they think they learn best shows them how they can use these learning strategies for longer than this course.
Here are several examples of how I have been able to apply these instructional design principles to to higher level curriculum development within my academic area.
A&P Toolkits
In 2019, the A&P faculty were selected to develop toolkits to improve the quality of our online content between sections of our A&P labs sections. This was funded by the Strong Start to Finish grant (SSTF). The original goal was to provide instructors consistent background information and have a collection of study resources for students. As part of this project, I built a variety of online tutorials for our histology labs to be used in an online format.
These toolkits were the foundations that were used to build the lab courses during pandemic recovery.
BI110 Syllabus – Sample
BI110 Course Development
The Health Information Technology Program is a completely online program. MVCC’s anatomy and physiology courses were a barrier to the online program because they are not offered in an online format.
After much discussion and coordination with the School of Health Sciences, I developed an online, introductory anatomy and physiology course that also met MVCC’s General Education Natural Science requirements. This required breaking the normal General Education conventions because BI110, Introduction to Anatomy and Physiology, became the first MVCC course to meet the Natural Science requirement with out having a lab attached to the course.
Health Sciences Program
In 2017, Lisa Cooley (then Dean of the Health Science Department) approached our department to ask for our help in developing a program that helped prepare students for our Allied Health programs (like Nursing, Respiratory Care, Radiology Technology) but also gave those students a plan in case they do not get into one of those programs.
Although our department did not fully understand the problem, my colleague Shannon Crocker and I decided to work on a solution. MVCC traditionally has upwards of 1000 students a semester enrolled in General Studies, up to half of those students were interested in careers in Health Science. Many of those students were self-advising or recieveing advisement from Humanities advisors who were doing their best to give advice about a field they did not always have experience in.
In order to develop a new program, we first had to figure out what the most important outcome would or could be (Backwards Design). This was difficult, mainly because for all of the students in New York who want to enter into Allied Health pathways, SUNY does not have a unifying plan or a sincere Transfer Pathway for these types of students. We knew we could not create a career pathway because health professionals need specific terminal degrees for successful employment. The closest transfer pathway that exists is the Health Education pathway. Two SUNY schools (Cortland and Brockport) had those programs to transfer into. We started looking at all of the possibilities for future transfer beyond our Allied Health programs and Cortland and Brockport. We analyzed SUNY Upstate Medical University, Utica College, SUNY Polytechnic, and a variety of other schools that had Health Science, Health Professions, and other health related programs. From that analysis, we were able to identify a set of important program outcomes and start to identify courses that should make up the core of the program.
We presented the proposed program to our Allied Health Programs and we presented them to several transfer partners for feedback. We were able to get Brockport and Cortland to sign preferred transfer agreements.
We also had to ask two departments to make some changes in courses . The chemistry department was able to resurrect a Chemistry course originally designed for allied health in order to help us keep the program credits down. We also asked the Humanities department to get General Education Status for their Ethics course so it could be used as a general education requirement and be transferrable.
We were eventually successful at guiding the proposal through our school’s and the college-wide curriculum process. SUNY and NYSED issued final approval and registered the program so that MVCC could start students in Fall 2020.
This program now provides a successful pathway for student into allied health and other health science programs but it also takes students out of General Studies, which can doom students because of the ill-defined (because it needs to be) program pathway.
As of the Fall 2021 semester, there are 397 students in the Health Science program making it one of the top five cohorts of students on campus.
Health Science Program Outcomes
- Identify and access resources that provide accurate, evidence-based health information.
- Use critical thinking skills to analyze information related to health and wellness.
- Respond appropriately to people’s needs within diverse cultures and communities.
- Communicate effectively in various formats, which may include written, oral, and technology-related methods.
- Evaluate healthcare/community issues, options, and strategies related to quality of life, chronic disease, and death.
Program Description
The Health Science program provides foundational learning for students who desire entry into any of a number of different health and health-related professions. It is designed for students who want to focus on healthcare careers in fields such as nursing, radiological technology, surgical technology, and biotechnology. The Health Science program is also a transfer program that meets the requirements of the SUNY Health Education Transfer Pathway. Students interested in careers in community health, health education, health counseling, or public health can utilize this pathway as a foundation for transfer to programs leading to these health-related careers.
Health Science Program SUNY Submission
SUNY Program Registration Letter
Final Health Science Program Display
Continual Redevelopment of Lab Technology Solutions
In our A&P labs, we use technology to solve some of our instructional problems. When I started at MVCC, students used microscopes to learn microscopic anatomy and histology in our labs. This was a tedious process, mostly because what we would spend most of our time teaching was how to use a microscope and not how microscopic structure support macroscopic structure and functions?
At the end of Spring 2011 semester, the A&P faculty decided to reduce the amount of histology in the lab in favor of adding more anatomical exercises. I was able to program some of our histology exercises into an online tutorial so that students would still get exposure to that content. Using this platform is important for our students for several reasons: 1. They receive exposure to content outside of the classroom, but in a directed format that we control. 2. Students assessment data can be collected to demonstrate their performance in the course. 3. This collected assessment can be used to transform student learning by adjusting to areas where they are not performing well. 4. Students receive timely, consistent, and useful feedback about how well they are learning course content. This was programmed into MasteringA&P, a commercial product that we stopped using in 2018.
We have also used a physiology capture system called PowerLab. This allows us to capture data in our labs and analyze the data. For example, we can hook a student up and collect ECG data and compare that to pulse data to see relationships between those two events in real life. Since my start at MVCC, I have been working to update all our physiology labs to operate as a scaffolded inquiry; using simple questions about the data to help students construct more complex understanding of physiologic models. In 2018, we invested in the new PowerLab software update called Lt. Lt created a more friendly interface that we could use with out students in lab to scaffold their experiences.
Lt had features that allowed us to use Lt for both physiology experiments AND histology labs. When we put our histology labs online, we knew students had a more consistent experience, but we lost the live support they needed to make connections. Also, Lt allowed me the ability to edit the labs from anywhere, so fixes could be made in real time.
All of this development ended up being prelude to what I would have to do with A&P content due to the SARS-CoV2 pandemic that changed our teaching in 2020.
Capstone Example: Covid Online Development
What are we going to do to recover and develop our inquiry-based process and deliver it online and make it consistent for every student?
March 8th, 2020 left the A&P team in the position of figuring out how we were going to delivery lab content in a manner that got us through the rest of a semester. While not easy, we were able to collect pictures and videos to get through the short term and made that work. However, it eventually became apparent that we were going to need a longer term solution. We had already committed to not using publisher content because of the cost for students and our inability to mold the content into a format that fit out more active, more inquiry-based approach.
I decided that I wanted to find a way to develop self-guided tutorials based on the content we had collected from our lab and using our lab manual and teaching methods as a guide. I wanted to use HTML5 coding because that is both accessible and, hopefully, future-proof because it does not require a proprietary player to work. Additionally, I wanted the tutorials to be SCORM compliant because when used in Blackboard, the tutorials would be able to collect the interaction data from our students so we could understand how they used the tutorials and also give them credit for doing so. I chose to use Adobe Captivate to make the tutorials because it was the most friendly and affordable solution.
So… That meant I had to:
- Learn how to use Captivate.
- Learn how to Make the tutorials SCORM compliant.
- Make sure that the tutorials were compliant within Blackboard.
- Capture the content that we needed from our lab or from other open source places on the internet.
- Develop and work with the other A&P faculty to test, implement, and revise 28 total anatomy or physiology labs into stand alone tutorials! (in 6 months…)
And it took 6 months and we are still revising and creating. It has forced me, and the rest of the team, to look at why we may have doing certain things and decide whether they are still important. We have created some lasting tutorials that will also help support our students beyond the pandemic and have discover that we may be able to, for example, create a hybrid version of the lab in the future using this experience.
In all, 14 labs were created for each course, A&P 1 and A&P 2. We we able to organize toolkits that were created earlier in 2018 and 2019 into master shells so that each lab instructor could upload the entire lab into their course and they would then be responsible for administering the course and teaching rather than having to design their own solution.
Here are several demos of the Captivate Tutorials created for anatomy labs. When you click the link, you will have to register for the player site (sorry) and then open the player on the page that tells you your pop-up blocker stopped the file from opening.
When creating videos or other content, we tried to also model good Covid safety protocols.
We also made plenty of mistakes…