The Kolb Learning Cycle

1. What would need to happen on (your) campus to have more faculty using more pedagogical approaches that accounted for who our students are as learners?

2. The Kolb Learning Cycle Concrete Experience Reflective Observation Action Experimentation Abstract Conceptualization

3. The Kolb Learning CycleIn formal learning situations, learning preferences Work with others on concrete tasks Concrete Experience Working in groups, Listening, receiving feedback Reflective Observation Action Experimentation Experiment with new ideas, simulations, practical applications Abstract Conceptualization Lectures, readings, analytical models

4. “Mere activity does not constitute experience.” John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916)

5. National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) • “Complementary learning opportunities inside and outside the classroom augment the academic program…service-learning provides students with opportunities to synthesize, integrate, and apply their knowledge. Such experiences make learning more meaningful, and ultimately more useful because what students know becomes a part of who they are.” (2002 NSSE Annual Report)

7. “I have become more aware of my surroundings, have learned to look more deeply into the words of writers, and have learned to formulate my own opinions. Perhaps what I like best about this class is that it synthesized all of my years of book learning and applied it to why I was here in the first place. Lately I’ve been having difficulty justifying the cost of my education versus what I really learned about what is necessary in living. I was beginning to think my time was wasted; that history was a bunch of fluff that had no use in society anymore...I don’t think I ever really knew what it meant until I was trying to incorporate my experiences [in the community] with the many readings we worked with.” Student Journal Entry

8. The Learning Paradigm • The “purpose is not to transfer knowledge but to create environments and experiences that bring students to discover and construct knowledge for themselves, to make students members of communities of learners that make discoveries and solve problems.” Robert Barr and John Tagg “From Teaching to Learning,” 1995 (Change, Nov./Dec.)

9. Professor Patricia Owen-SmithPsychologyOxford College of Emory University RECLAIMING A PEDAGOGY OF INTEGRITY National Teaching and Learning Forum Newsletter, 2001, Volume 11, Number 1. “When I began teaching in 1986 I reinvented the model I was educated with. It was, after all, the only one I knew. But at some level I recognized that this model worked for me neither as a learner nor a teacher. My students were performing well on exams, but it was increasingly clear to me that they did not have the conceptual clarity or the ability to "uncover" material that would serve them well as learners.”

10. “One aspect of the change in my attitude was that I looked at my students and myself differently, and realized that I had to leave the lectern, figuratively and literally. I abandoned essentialist assumptions about pedagogy - that some universal template of the teaching transaction existed - and began to introduce multiple pedagogical methods into my work to accommodate the multiple styles of learning expressed by my students.”

11. “I stopped lecturing on a routine basis. When I did lecture, I made two assumptions about the place and quality of lectures in my classes. I believed that my students could read and comprehend the basic facts presented in the text, and I believed that maximum content coverage by me in lecture did not necessarily maximize student conceptual understanding . Therefore, my lectures were directed, more times than not, toward the philosophical issues and dilemmas surrounding the factual material (i.e., the why and how and the unexamined assumptions and implications).”

12. “I also began sending students out into the community to experience the connection between theory and praxis. Many educational psychologists remind us that the absence of experience might explain why students misunderstand. Through theory/practice or service learning opportunities, students were challenged to negotiate the tension between their strongly held beliefs and the discrepant images and information gained from their actual experiences in social service agency work. They were compelled to reflect on the limitations of theories and assumptions in making sense out of and reconciling real world problems.”

13. High Impact Practices • First-Year Seminars and Experiences  • Common Intellectual Experiences • Learning Communities • Writing-Intensive Courses • Collaborative Assignments and Projects • Undergraduate Research • Diversity/Global Learning • Service Learning, Community-Based Learning • Internships • Capstone Courses and Projects

14. Why are High Impact Practices Effective? •Time on task •Substantive interaction with peers and faculty •Encounter diversity •Get frequent feedback •Require reflection and integration •Real-world application

15. What is Deep Learning? • Attend to underlying meaning as well as surface content • Integrate and synthesize different ideas • Discern patters of evidence • Apply knowledge in different situations • View issues from multiple perspectives

16. Critique of Democratic Engagement White Paper Jennifer Simpson (2014) Longing for Justice: Higher Education and Democracy’s Agenda (Chapter 3) • Failure to identify that all scholarship has a political agenda • Does not articulate explicit democratic values • Has not addressed the role of power (“obscures the workings of privilege and power”) • Does not tie “norms of democratic culture” to concrete practices of injustice at the individual and institutional level (“refusal to name injustice”) • The suggestion that democratic norms have been beneficent to all in equitable ways represents a dismissal of history and radical denial of current practices (“uncritically accepting democratic norms”)