Continental Breakfast and Lunch Included (no lunch on Thursday so that participants can attend the Fac/Staff Picnic)Promoting Higher Level Thinking and the Use of Developmental Models
Mike Pavelich, Ph.D., Colorado School of Mines
Description
A goal of most faculty is to help their students become effective analytical thinkers and real-world problem solvers. In this workshop we will investigate how we can more deliberately and consistently achieve this within our normal courses. Blosser's Taxonomy defines these as Convergent and Evaluative Thinking. We will work with the taxonomy to identify traits of each type of thinking and develop questions of each type for use in our specific courses. We will discuss the problem of giving our students such "tricky" questions and work out possible solutions. The Perry and Reflective Judgment models of intellectual development will then be presented as a tool to understanding student perceptions on Evaluative Thinking. Experience and data show that students, even seniors, do not view real-world open-ended problems as complexly as desired. Their abilities for such higher-level thinking need thoughtful development. Participants will evaluate student work in view of these models. We will then discuss how our teaching using open-ended problems can be adjusted to more explicitly foster such intellectual development. Participants will leave with new insights into student thinking, with questions they can use in their courses to inspire higher-level thinking and with strategies for working with students to maximize student buy-in.
Details
Date: Tuesday
Time: 9:30 - 12:00
Location: Taylor 306
Facilitator
Mike Pavelich, professor emeritus of Chemistry at the Colorado School of Mines, has been active in engineering education and chemical education circles for 35 years. He counts as mayor accomplishments the creation and continued success of the freshmen/sophomore design program at CSM (EPICS Program) and an inquiry formatted lab manual (Inquiries Into Chemistry) for freshmen chemistry that is used by schools across the country. He has over fifty publications in the college education literature focused primarily on applying intellectual development theories to the teaching and assessment of courses. He has presented numerous workshops on college teaching at campuses across the country and at ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education) and FIE (Frontiers in Education) Conferences. He was an ASEE-NSF Visiting Scholar in 2000-2001. He has held all offices in the ERM (Educational Research and Methods) Division of ASEE. He has been recognized with numerous teaching awards at CSM.