1 Common Ground: A Course Portfolio Approach Josh Tenenberg University of Washington, Tacoma Qi Wang Tacoma Community College IS-SOTL 2005 Conference October 15 th, 2005

2 Summary Slide Teaching vs. Wildnerness Camping Disciplinary Commons: Program Objectives Disciplinary Commons: Program Structure An Opportunistic Pilot Study Interaction Pattern WHY Questions Rationale: Teaching as a Design Activity Rationale: Folk Pedagogies Qi’s Lessons about her course Josh’s Lessons about his course

3 Summary Slide (cont.) Lessons Learned about the “Disciplinary Commons” project

4 Teaching vs. Wildnerness Camping “Leave no Trace” is great for wilderness camping … … but a bad idea for teaching: “Aside from his syllabi and fading memories, he had no real record of what happened in those award winning courses” (Huber, 2002)

5 Disciplinary Commons: Program Objectives To have great conversations about teaching among people who love to teach. To create a community of practice by situating these conversations in a single geographic region within a single discipline. To talk across institutional boundaries. To develop as reflective practitioners, individually, mutually, and collectively. To help one another become better teachers.

6 Disciplinary Commons: Program Structure Monthly meetings between Computer Science faculty within a single geographic region during : one cohort in England, one cohort in Washington state. Sessions focused on teaching and learning in our courses. Each participant completes a Course Portfolio on a course they teach during 0506 academic year. Portfolios are the vehicle, not the destination. Project websites: US: UK:

7 An Opportunistic Pilot Study Qi Wang (TCC): Spent the quarter in residence at UW Tacoma in Winter, 2005 Josh Tenenberg (UWT): served as host at UWT Josh and Qi wrote their own portfolios Qi: Introduction to Computer Programming Josh: Software Engineering

8 Interaction Pattern Course portfolios were created incrementally as hypertext and posted on the Internet Met weekly throughout the 10 week term minutes – 2 hours per meeting During the sessions, two kinds of questions predominated: –Meta questions about the portfolio (who is the audience, what student work to include) –“Why” questions about teaching choices

9 WHY Questions Questions that brought us deeper into one another’s minds. Questions that highlight the disciplinary nature of teaching, even, or perhaps particularly, in the introductory levels. “Why do you teach flowcharting?” “Why do you use a guided demonstration to teach levels of nesting rather than have students work in small groups?”

10 Rationale: Teaching as a Design Activity Reifying answers to the “Why” question in the portfolio itself: the Design Rationale This rationale is what Kies Dorst (Understanding Design, 2003) calls “the story behind [the design]... It is the justification of the design, which explains why the design is constructed in just the way it is.”

11 Rationale: Folk Pedagogies The rationale reveals our “tacit theories of learning” (Schon, 1987) both in general and in the discipline. “our interactions with others are deeply affected by our everyday intuitive theories about how other minds work.... “Watch... any teacher... and you'll be struck by how much of what they do is steered by notions of ‘what the children's minds are like and how to help them learn,’ even though they may not be able to verbalize their pedagogical principles.” (Bruner, The Culture of Education, 1996) Constructing a course portfolio helps one to verbalize taken-for-granted beliefs about thinking and learning.

12 Qi’s Lessons about her course Not all students know basic learning skills, such as how to navigate the textbook and how to decompose complex problems into simpler ones. Not all of the pair programming works as well as anticipated. Much of the conceptual material needs to be initially presented in a simple fashion and scaffolded gradually to greater complexity.

13 Josh’s Lessons about his course Students dedicate significant effort to their term-length team project, and maintain group commitment throughout the term. But there is a wide range in the effectiveness with which the different groups work. Though students might engage in several of the professional software practices while in class session, there is little evidence that students will transfer these skills beyond the bounds of this course and into their other courses and their professional lives.

14 Lessons Learned about the “Disciplinary Commons” project This project helped us to become considerably more sensitive to the contextual constraints under which we each work. We gained increased respect and admiration for one another's skills and passion for student learning at our partner institutions. Writing a portfolio is considerably aided when done with at least one peer, particularly in revealing our tacit theories of learning Our pilot gave us confidence that the “Disciplinary Commons” project with a larger number of regional participants would be worth pursuing.