Double Take #1: To Joyful Teaching
If you have the chance, consider doubling back to earlier posts on Joyful Teaching to check out some of the comments from colleagues about Critical Thinking and Technology, Community and Teaching Naked. Some very thoughtful exchanges are going on in both of these discussion threads.
For a variety of reasons, I am re-reading John Bean’s Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom (2011).
Early in the text, he offers a definition of critical thinking I hope might provoke some conversation.
A Conversation Starter
In What the Best College Students Do — a book with a title that unfortunately raises more hackles than interest — Ken Bain offers an intriguing summary of the big questions he believes faculty should consider when they think about their teaching:
“…the best educators thought of teaching as anything they might do to help and encourage students to learn. Teaching is engaging students, engineering an environment in which they learn. Equally important, they thought of the creation of that successful teaching and learning environment as an important and serious intellectual (or artistic) act, perhaps even as a kind of scholarship, that required the attention of the best minds in academia. For our subjects, that scholarship centered around four fundamental inquires:
“Instant access to knowledge and to each other has changed the nature of community and the speed of work, life, and, most importantly, thought. Time for reflection and interaction is a casualty of the digital age, and one of the primary goals of higher education should be to reclaim this time. The paradox is that the same technology that glues us to flat screens can also be the primary tool for reclaiming this lost time for human interaction. The ability to reach our students wherever they are means that we can extend the classroom and hence the conversation; we can recreate the ideal of students discussing Plato in the dining hall, but virtually.”
Jose Antonio Bowen, page 27-28
Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning
Jossey-Bass 2012
A Conversation Starter
I thought it would be fun to share some quotes from books available in our PDP library as a regular feature in our Joyful Tidings emails.