Fleming College faculty and our peers around the world are building a community patchwork of ‘chapters’ into a quasi-textbook about pedagogy for teaching & learning in higher education. Each patch of the quilt/chapter of the book focuses on one pedagogical skill and is completed and published by different individual faculty members from any institution wanting to join in.
We began our search for pedagogical skills to cover with the University of Michigan’s High Leverage Practices (http://www.teachingworks.org/work-of-teaching/high-leverage-practices), but the scope of the patchwork did not and does not end there. It is dictated by those who want to contribute. We want to tell the stories of our own favorite teaching and learning moves.
The faculty member who authors a chapter offers their take on it. They describe their learners and learning environment and how they deploy or use the skill in that space. It includes instruction on how to use the skill situated in a real example. You are free to agree or disagree with the tips offered or reasoning behind them.
Like the awesome 90’s street wear company FUBU (For Us, By Us), this patchwork is for faculty, by faculty. This is the first iteration of the Patchbook, focused mostly on classroom teaching itself rather than designing learning or learning for ourselves. We dip our toes in course design, digital pedagogy and professional learning here but future versions planned will focus more deeply on those areas. By sharing our teaching, we hope to avoid us all having to climb this mountain separately. We can give each other a lift part ways up at least, so that there is less lonely climbing.
A working version is on Wordspress at facultypatchbook.wordpress.com.
Type of Material:
Open Textbook
Recommended Uses:
For anyone interested in improving their teaching and learning.
-Individual reading for faculty development
-Group discussion around a reading
-Workshop in which faculty create something similar to one of the readings for their own discipline and context.
Technical Requirements:
None
Identify Major Learning Goals:
The Learning Design and Support Team at Fleming College was tasked with revising and re-developing our faculty development model for the college. So I thought, why not create something like what Robin DeRosa and her students had made? Let’s make a how-to-teach manual for each other. Something we can hand to new teachers coming in to our systems and say “We wrote this for you”. It only took a mere six months after that to come up with the metaphor of the community quilt of pedagogy and for the patches to start streaming in. Now we have a collection of 21 stories that tell us how teachers do their teaching in their context. They come from across Canada, the U.S. and Egypt by people who truly love to see their students succeed. "
Goals of this open pedagogical resource:
-Create a repository of effective teaching and learning practice.
-Share contextualized effective practices with other faculty as well as new faculty.
-Provide faculty authors with the opportunity to reflect on their practice.
-Through the commenting feature, engage in conversation around the topics.
-Use this as part of campus faculty development.
Target Student Population:
-Faculty - with all levels of experience
-Teaching graduate students,
-students learning to teach, KPK-12 teachers, etc.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:
Interest in and basic knowledge of pedagogy
Content Quality
Rating:
Strengths:
-uses valid and accurate concepts for effective teaching and learning such as UDL (Universal Design for Learning), activating background knowledge, finding out what your students know at the beginning as well as checking in during the process; facilitating deeper learning, shifting the design of assessments, understanding the effect instructor power over the grade can have on students; making use of cheat sheets, eliciting and interpreting individual student's thinking, adjusting your instructions on the fly, laboratory assessments, respecting students, co-teaching, group work, feedback, mapping the U.N. sustainable development goals to learning outcomes, the positive role of failure, empathy, and professional learning.
-articles are written in accessible language and often include contextualized examples.
-the concept of faculty writing about and sharing their teaching experiences in an ongoing process is very valuable.
Concerns:
-at times, the articles do not reference the research; however, this is partly a tradeoff with the accessible language in which they are written.
Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool
Rating:
Strengths:
The patchbook has a linked table of contents, and it is not necessary to read everything to find what you need.
It is written by experienced educators.
This is the first example I have seen in which faculty write about their personal teaching experiences for the purpose of sharing these experiences with other faculty in a way that invites comments/conversations.
Concerns:
None
Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty
Rating:
Strengths:
This resource is simply organized and easy to use and to navigate both on computer and mobile device. It also has the capability of toggling among multiple font sizes.
Extremely easy to use. The styles of writing are different, so you get several perspectives.
Concerns:
None
Other Issues and Comments:
No issues
Creative Commons:
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