Skills Beyond Content

Following up on my previous post on problem-solving skills related to course content, what other skills should we be teaching students so they will be successful beyond the classroom? Today’s post is on Chapters 10 (“Professional skills”) and 11 (“Teamwork skills”) from Felder & Brent’s Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide.

 

The five skills that Felder & Brent pick out are:

·      communication

·      creative thinking (finding innovative solutions to problems when existing approaches prove inadequate)

·      critical thinking (making and supporting evidence-based judgments and decisions)

·      self-directed learning (taking the initiative to identify one’s learning needs, finding the resources needed to meet the needs, and doing the learning)

·      teamwork

 

How are these skills developed? (I try to get students to see this process in my resident expert activity.) Felder & Brent provide the following pithy statements:

1.     You did something that required the skill for the first time. It probably didn’t go well.

2.     You reflected on the experience, perhaps got feedback from someone else, and tried again.

3.     The more cycles you went through, the more skillful you became.

 

I readily admit that as instructor, these have not been a bedrock part of most of my “standard” courses such as G-Chem and P-Chem. They sporadically appear usually when I have them in mind for specific but isolated activities. We do emphasize these to varying extents in my department’s Research Methods course, and I also include some of it (albeit a lesser amount) when I teach a special topics elective course. Felder & Brent provide multiple examples of how to incorporate these skills into courses. It reminded me that I should think both strategically and tactically how to build them into G-Chem and P-Chem.

 

Here are my smattering of thoughts.

 

I do call on students regularly in class to provide verbal explanations, often after a quick Think-Pair-Share activity. But I haven’t done much with having them write these out in a broader sense beyond quizzes (low-stakes) and exams (high-stakes). Suggestions from the book include asking students to write a 150-word memo “explaining your calculations and results to your project team leader (who gets upset by poor writing)” or explaining (perhaps verbally through a video assignment) “in terms that an average high school senior could understand”.

 

I could do more is to ask students to suggest why there might be discrepancies might take place in a measurement or a calculation. In G-Chem 1, we discuss this in stoichiometry, but not anywhere else thus far. In G-Chem 2, I have several thinking-discussion exercises where students consider physical and chemical factors that affect fuel efficiency, or the balance between thermodynamic and kinetic factors in an industrial high-throughput reaction. These have mostly been popcorn-style open-class discussions rather than having students work in a focused way in groups – something I should consider. I haven’t done much in the lecture asking students to create or improve an experimental design. (We do so in lab.)

 

Reading these chapters reminded me that getting things wrong is part of learning. I say this in class when the occasion arises, but likely don’t emphasize it enough. I’ve now added this to my “advice for success” page on my course websites. One thing I’ve done sporadically is introduce occasional errors and then ask students what I did wrong. On one occasion or two, I’ve provided several student answers of varying quality and ask students to rank them and justify their rankings. I should do these more; I think students found them helpful. I think the problem is that I’m not strategic about building this into my course as an important skill. Maybe this is the one activity I should strategically build into G-Chem. I’ve put this in bold font so that I remember! (I use my blog as a memory offload.)

 

Throughout their book, Felder & Brent advise instructors to only focus on one or two changes at most and not try to imagine a complete overhaul – which can be overwhelming. Okay, what’s the one thing I can strategically build into P-Chem? I’m going to pick teamwork in problem-solving. Because the new semester is upon me and I need time to be strategic about this. Felder & Brent suggest that a problem set have both individual and group parts. I could introduce one or two problems in each set that require a group solution. This means I should cut out some of the individual problems and design some actual good group problems. I’ve been telling students for years that learning P-Chem is a team-sport. I’ve introduced (low-stakes) generating mock-exam-question assignments, but I think the quality should be improved. Maybe I can even combine these two ideas so that generating questions is one of the group assignments.

 

I have not done much formally in the area of promoting self-directed learning skills other than my “advice for success” pages. I do have individual discussions with students in my office when they want to know how they can improve (usually after not doing so well on a midterm exam). I think I’ve often assumed that students have baseline skills in figuring out how to diagnose less-than-optimal strategies, but that’s not always the case. While I’ve occasionally implemented a one-off assignment idea, once again I haven’t been strategic about this. The more I think about all the things I don’t do that I could be doing, the more overwhelming it feels. I need to focus on improving one thing at a time and being strategic about it.

 

Felder & Brent anticipate the challenges an instructor might face when trying to introduce skills beyond content. They’ve got some memorable vignettes featuring student discussions outside of class about such assignments. They also emphasize two things that students need to “progress along the intellectual development spectrum: challenge and support. Students are unlikely to change the beliefs that characterize their current levels if those beliefs are not challenged… [When challenged they] are likely to feel threatened and often remain at current levels or retreat to lower ones. To avoid those outcomes, support must accompany challenge.” Much of Felder & Brent’s book is on this theme. Faculty members are characterized as needing to play two contrasting roles: “gatekeeper and coach”. I know I’m good at the first; but I’m still learning how to be better at the second role. Both are needed to help students truly learn.