More favorite Intro jigsaw prompts

Following up on my previous post, I will now share a few more of my favorite jigsaw prompts from my large section of Introduction to Psychology. Feel free to steal, alter, and/or critique these to your satisfaction.

Watch the video called “Why incompetent people think they're amazing - David Dunning” (https://youtu.be/pOLmD_WVY-E) on YouTube (just 5 minutes long). Part of the challenge of being a college student is knowing how to study effectively. What does the Dunning-Kruger effect imply for your perception of your own study skills? What could you do to avoid the Dunning-Kruger effect?

ANSWER: Dunning-Kruger means they should not trust their self-perceptions about study skills (or many things). To fix, search out feedback, and keep learning!

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Much of psychological science attempts to answer what, when, and how questions, like: What is the brain made of? When do people develop empathy? and How can we treat depression? Evolutionary psychology seeks to answer one why question: Why does the brain work this way? The good thing is that the answer is almost always the same, no matter what aspect of brain function we’re talking about: because it is adaptive to work this way. First, what is meant by adaptive?

Second, try to answer the following questions from an evolutionary psychology perspective:

1.    Why does the brain store information (memory)?

2.    Why do we experience emotions?

I’ve already told you the answer to both questions (because it’s adaptive), the trick is to explain how these things are adaptive. Give it a try.

ANSWER: adaptive means it helps survival and/or reproduction. Memory helps us remember useful things like where to get food or avoid predators. Emotions are helpful because they alert us to important things in our environment. Also helpful for communication.

BTW: I (we) use Gazzaniga's Psychological Science (6th edition). Nice text, and I really like Norton's InQuizitive system, which I assign and rely on to deliver the content in the course so I can do the jigsaws in class. Maybe in a later post I'll talk about my views on lecture in this class. They have evolved.

Neither fame nor money

Credit, fame, recognition, money. In most of academia these come from one thing: scholarship. Even at my University where "teaching excellence is job #1" the rewards for scholarly productivity outnumber those for excellence in the classroom (although it's getting slightly more balanced). I was aware of this preference for scholarship from my first days as a grad student, so I've played this game well enough to get a job, tenured, and promoted. But it's never sit well with me. The reason I got into this profession was teaching. The mission of my institution is teaching. What my students want is quality teaching. So if I put all my attention, time, effort and expertise into teaching, what does that get me? Satisfaction, pride, gratitude from my students -- all significant and energizing. But not fame or money.

I have no illusions of this blog resulting in any more fame, and certainly not any more money. But maybe I'll feel better by taking the actions I describe below. Maybe not. 

I should admit that teaching excellence can and has garnered accolades, for me and others. In fact I've been involved in creating and administering teaching awards on campus that actually come with a monetary award. And SoTL is a clever and effective way to focus on teaching while enjoying (a lesser degree of) the plaudits of scholarship. 

My real complaint is that I spend hours of hard labor on my teaching, really most of my time and productivity in any given week or semester, and that results in nearly no recognition outside of my students. I understand that teaching is my job, and it sounds like I want a cookie for doing it. But there are plenty of cookies for scholarship, and that is less of my job than teaching.

So here's what I plan to do: I will use this blog to push out some of my favorite teaching materials. My idea at this point is to share some of the jigsaw prompts I have written for my Introduction to Psychology course. Just a brief description of the jigsaw: it's a cooperative learning activity where students develop expertise on one area and share that with their classmates while learning from them about their areas of expertise. I do this in Intro by giving students questions to answer by accessing the text, the web, YouTube, Wikipedia, any source they think appropriate. I have written 4 - 7 jigsaw prompts for each day of class in Intro (a ton of work that I really enjoy). I will share my favorite prompts. Feel free to steal them, use them, critique them, ignore them. I claim a Creative Commons license to this material. (CC)

The point, I suppose, is that I am very proud of this intellectual labor. I am not saying I think it is excellent or exceptional -- just the opposite, really. This is what instructors do every day: scholarship of application, based on scholarship of discovery (if done right). I can tell you one difference between my jigsaw prompts and my disciplinary publications: I know more than just a few people will read and benefit from the jigsaw prompts.



 

Topic: Critical thinking
Consider the psychological claim, put forth by President Trump, that he’s a “very stable genius”. That factual claim may be true or false, like any factual claim. In order to evaluate that claim we should apply critical thinking to it, as described in the text. What are the 4 mental activities and how would you use them to evaluate this claim? Keep in mind the role of your own biases in evaluating Pres. Trump’s psychological claim!

Where have I been?

It's been just over a year since my previous blog post. Why the lacuna? I can confidently say that it has NOT been sloth (or any of the other deadly sins). No, I have had quite the year. Most of it has been good, but there was one overwhelming negative commitment. I will spare you, dear reader, most of the gory details. Here are the pleasant things that have taken so much of my time:

• I was Chair of the Faculty Senate, and in fact I was re-elected to a second term. What a learning curve! Too many things came across that desk to list here, but we completed our University President's 4-year evaluation, approved a bunch of policies, and dealt with complications from the negative commitment discussed below. Worked with many excellent colleagues (and a few pills). 



Bern

• I taught abroad for the first time! An excellent experience that I recommend to all faculty, and I regret that it took me this long to do it. I taught in Bregenz, Austria with KIIS. A beautiful country with open and pleasant people. Did a bunch of weekend trips to Munich, Vienna, Innsbruck, and Bern, Switzerland. Fabulous all around.

Munich

 
 

• Worked with many part-time, adjunct, and grad student instructors on their teaching. Many (especially the grad students) had never taught before, and there was considerable mindset-busting needed. Many started out planning to lecture (read powerpoints) and give 3 exams. Wrong. Say hello to flipping with a jigsaw! Also, meet the Finkian maxim that the person doing the work does the learning. I could see the lights flickering on in their brains. Quite enjoyable. 
• I won the CPE Acorn Award!

  

  Me and Prof. Dr. Freud

But all of that was overshadowed by the dark cloud of budget cuts. For a variety of reasons, but mostly due to our Governor's ill-conceived cuts to higher education, my University had to cut about $25M from our budget. That's a significant chunk. The University formed the Budget Advisory Committee, and I was put on it as a faculty representative. That group started meeting in December and completed it's work by mid March. We met, oh I don't know, 10,000 times? Sometimes for 2 hours, sometimes all day. We asked each unit in the University, academic and otherwise (athletics), to come up with plans to cut 10, 15, and 20% of their budgets, and from these plans we came up with our recommendations to the Board of Regents and the President. More than 500 recommendations. We recommended suspending programs, cutting funding, and worst of all, eliminating positions. It was a dark time for the University, and I can tell you it was the hardest thing I have ever done, at least professionally. Truly miserable. The elimination of positions had to go through many channels, including the Faculty Senate, and I can tell you that was the least pleasant Senate meeting I held last year. I certainly hope we never have to go through that again. 


So that is what has kept me from this blog. The worst of it is over (budget cuts), and I hope to have more time for blogging. I even have an idea of what my next series of blogs will be about. Hint: where's the credit for all the work we put into creating our classes and course materials? Maybe the Internets?