Ed Neal Presentation
Two things I want to do before we start here. The book Lion is referring to is this one we designed for Higher Education volume 23 number 7 — Higher Education Reports. And, the other thing I wanted to give you was the URL for our teaching center, which has lots of stuff up on our website. All of our publications are available. In the handout, it has some of our materials in there but we have a series of monographs called, "For Your Consideration." Each one is on something like testing, the first day of class, or something like that. And, you have a handbook of teaching. I want to give you both of those things before we get started. You will notice on the cover of this handout packet, we have the contact information for the three evaluator persons and our email addresses and so forth. We talked a lot about what to do today to help get you ready and make this project work more easily.
The purpose of this workshop is to examine some of the guidelines for systematic instruction that Lion was talking about and review some of the ways that such an approach to design help provide a basis for making deciscion, how you test, how you teach. And, so I have two objectives. By the end of this workshop we hope to impress that all of you will be able to: 1.) write course outcomes in precise measurable terms and; 2.) appraise the common levels of the outcomes you've written. Two objectives, that's our target.
We're loose here in the workshop, so if you have a question, we want to hear form you. We want to deal with these issues when they come up, not wait until the end.
So, I started teaching college in 1968. I was twelve years old at the time. As an Assistant Professor in History and when I went down the hall to my first class, I had under my arm the syllabus, which consisted of one page. It had the dates and it had the dates of the tests and things of that nature on it and what the readings were. The essential information. Now, one of the problems that I had was that I didn't know how to design a course. I designed a course the way I thought that my professors had designed them because I had the artifacts. I had the one page syllabus from all of my classes, assuming they had a syllabus at all. So, I asked my buddies in the two weeks I had to prepare my classes before the semester started, "so what do you do?" The first semester I was there, I wasn't teaching Russian History which was what I was hired for. I was teaching Western Civilization, just a nice short subject. We had two semesters to do it so we broke World History down into two semesters and we had a whole semester to do to the year 1500 to the present day in the second semester.
As I contemplated the enormity of this task and I asked my buddies what to do, I said, "Well we all use the same textbook and where most college courses get designed is from the textbook." You pick the text, you pick the book and go from there. From the survey of courses, the best textbook is the one which has sixteen chapters for the sixteen weeks in a semester. It's real easy. You divide the things up and if you've got films you figure out, "well, I need thirty minutes here for a film here on the French Revolution or something like that," and you have to have tests and those days we gave a midterm and a final. And, then I went to my office and started writing my lectures. That was course design. Now, I was a bit dissatisfied with the outcome. It didn't seem like the students were learning a heck of a lot from the courses. I was not happy. I was bored silly with my lectures. Although, the first time I delivered the one on....it was really interesting. I gave fifty minutes on …in Persia and everybody went to sleep except the girl in the front row. Now, this was a college in Georgia, West Georgia College, Carrolton. And, she just hung on every word. She was just fascinated. I should have been sort of suspicious of this. Afterward, she came up to me and said, "Dr. Neal, that was such a wonderful lecture. You know my mother was a …" I knew something was wrong.
What was wrong with this was the traditional mode. What my problem was, I was focusing on the inputs, the texts, the films, the day we're going to do. I was not looking at the outputs, what was coming out of the other end of the pipeline. In my classes in Western Civilization, they got a lot about Eastern Europe and Russia, not that Eastern Europe has a hell of a lot to do with the development of Western Civilization in the big picture. The Americanists on the faculty gave a lot of American History in their courses on Western Civilization. It's what we knew. What do you leave out when you're looking at three thousand years of history? We had no decision rules and of course it favors we got this content, we have to shove it into the students, the most efficient way to do it was lecture. You can never quite cover it as fast as you thought you could. There are whole generations of college students who know no history past World War II because they never got it in any of their history classes. We have two choices when we get behind. You either truncated in …fashion. You just stop when you've finished and that's what you got. Or you talk a lot faster. I had professors who did both. So, that's the problem.
When I switched fields about thirty years ago and started learning about the fact that maybe there is some stuff here that I can learn about how to design instruction better, you start with the outcomes. So, the focus is on the outcomes and the focus is on learning. What I want these students to leave the room knowing? Once I've identified those things, I throw out the stuff that doesn't relate to those outcomes. In every course there are three levels of stuff. There's the things that are essential, the things that are good to know if you know the essentials, and there are the things that are nice to know if you know the good things. And, what we generally end up doing in the traditional mode of design is we just throw them all in there. Of course, the things that are essential are things you're most interested in and that you're researching at the present time. You need a decision rule because there is always too much content, there's always more than you can handle. How do you make that decision? Also, if you're focusing on the learning, you have to start thinking of something other than lecture. Lecturing is a very efficient way to provide factual information or your well crafted arguments, your predigested and premasticated ideas on a silver platter for the students.
The other thing is that if things go array or if students really get excited about one aspect of the course and you say, "Gee, this is taking longer," you can look at the outcomes for the rest of course and say, "Ok, some of these I think I'll …these outcomes." You can compromise content, because it's like…, everywhere you cut it, it's like…. But, if you have a more precise way of looking what the outcome is, you can say, "this is outcome is more important." You focus on what's important.
The first thing we have to do is how to write an outcome, how to recognize it. And, the first exercise in your handout is look at these objectives, these outcomes, and decide whether or not they are written in a precise enough language that one could measure them, observe them, test them in some way, precisely. Don't hesitate. Go ahead and circle yes or no and commit yourself. But, if you circle no, see if you can rewrite it in a way that you feel would be more accurate, more precise. Pair up with a partner and compare your answers and discuss those for a few minutes to see how your partner answered those questions. . . Reactions?