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?

Intro fire hose

The biggest challenge facing Intro to Psyc instructors has been the same the entire time I've been teaching: how to cover everything. There's a familiar mantra among Intro instructors that every chapter in the book is an entire course later in the major, and it's mostly true. The point is that there are 12-18 chapters in most Intro texts and only 15 or 16 weeks in a term, so that's roughly a week to cover an entire semester's worth of material. An impossible task. The temptation is to employ the fire hose approach and blast students with as much material as you can squeeze into class time. This is a mistake, of course, for several reasons.

By far the most important reason this is a bad approach is that it doesn't work, if student learning is the goal. I remember feeling the pressure to cover everything as a new instructor. Intro is a required course for Psyc majors, and I felt like the instructors of courses taken later in the major were depending on me to lay out some foundational knowledge of the discipline that they could build upon. Since many of those instructors were my senior colleagues, I certainly wanted to come through. So my goals included students mastering the content of every chapter, which I now know to be an impossibility. This summer I counted the number of bold terms in the text, and the result was 560. Five hundred sixty. 560! I can assure you that I don't know all 560 terms and I've been at this for quite a while. The most talented instructor using the latest edtech and SoTL-infused design could not get students to master that much content. So blasting through all that content will not produce the desired learning. Do. Not. Do. This.

Another reason not to attempt to cover everything in Intro comes from a topic the very first chapter in most books: psychology is a science. This means that our current knowledge is not sacred, and in fact it will be outdated at some point in the (perhaps) near future. Would you consider using a book from the 1990s? Me neither, and our fancy books in 2017 will seems as unappealing years from now as the text I used as an undergrad (and which I still have!). At some point there was an instructor desperately trying to get to the facilitated communication section of the book. Don't be that person. In addition, I use an OER text, meaning the content is free and accessible to anyone with a device that hooks up to the web. Information is free.

My course of 190 students contains exactly 3 psychology majors. Now, I hope to recruit some of my students to the Major, but the overwhelming majority of students are taking the only psychology course of their lives. If anything this puts more pressure on me to make sure they know some things really well, because this is the only shot they have at it. But the list of things I really want them to know as they live their lives and work at non-psychology jobs is much shorter than 560 items long. I spent much of the summer going through the text and coming up with what I call the Most Important Concepts (MICs) for each chapter. I tried to limit myself to just one or two per chapter, and this was really tough. For example, what are the MICs for the chapter on the brain and neuron communication?* Or what's the one MIC for the chapter on disorders?** I tried to think about what I wanted someone to know about the topics 5 or 10 years from now. This reduced my goal for student learning from mastering everything to mastering 30-40 things. Much more realistic.

If I was teaching anatomy to pre-med or nursing students my goals would be different. In courses like that mastery of content is vital, critical, perhaps life-saving. No one's going to live or die because of what they learn in my class. Don't get me wrong, I believe in the importance of my discipline and I have seen students' lives improved because they took a psychology course. But mastery of every scintilla is not required.

So that leaves the question of what to cover. Again,  I think the better way to think about it is to recognize that students will not master all the content in the text or that you blast them with in class, and that there are things that I/we really want them to learn and remember for years. But that can't be too many things, and they are likely the big themes from the course, not the definitions of any term. What we as experts in the field can provide our students is some curation of the material, reducing it down to a digestible and nutritious series of nuggets. Do that and put down the fire hose.

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*I compromised on 2:  

• Neurons are the building blocks of the nervous system and have three main parts, and  
• The brain has parts that do different things

**Psychological disorders are often just extreme versions of normal, even healthy, feelings and thoughts