National Forum for Active Learning Classrooms, Day 2

Today's discussions focused more on faculty development (at least the ones I attended).

Kurt Richter's talk on University of North Carolina's Active Learning Academy had a nice focus on the continuum of classroom activities between a lecture and complete student-centered collaboration.  One insight out of this discussion was that the big step is to get faculty to move from all lecture to something besides lecture -- and then they see the benefit more easily and shift further along the continuum.  I believe that most faculty who only teach through lecture do not think that that is what they are doing, so some class observation may be in order to give them convincing evidence.
North Carolina's Academy does exactly that -- if you join, you agree to have others observe your class, and not just once or twice but multiple times with multiple folks from multiple disciplines.  That can be quite disruptive to your class.
One resource introduced at this session was http://info.catme.org/, a site for smarter teamwork.
Advice to faculty was -- change only one thing but make sure that is done the right way.  50% of new stuff will fail, but that means that 50% will work for next time, so you can use that and try a different 50% of new stuff that will fails, shrinking down your margin of errors in only a few years.

Idea from this session:  Can we change our student evaluation questions to reflect better what happens in the classroom?

Tawnya Means from the University of Florida was showing us how she incorporated a number of students remotely into her active learning classroom.  Interestingly enough, because of the tool she was using, she could have increased the number of remote students but did not choose to.  Adobe Connect was what they are using, with a very sophisticated switch system to allow for flexible audio and video in and out puts.

Here some of the thoughts in our session:

After that Diane and I guided our session on scalable faculty development, and the conference finished with the discussion of what a classroom is and where we learn.  Key is the creation of authentic learning experiences, but also to remember that all of our students learn all the time, but not because they are in what we designate a classroom.  Tom Fisher talked about his experience of letting his students decide where to hold individual class meetings, and to his surprise not a single student chose a classroom -- instead, they all chose public spaces, allowing others to participate actively or passively in the class.
Tom also gave us some suggestions on what kinds of spaces may be in our future:
Justified Architecture:  http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/node/4672
Teksing Bamboo Wood Schools:  http://www.slideshare.net/namansharma35513/passive-design-strategies
We need to blur the classroom and shift the language away to different kind of space names to make learning less confined.