Seeing Student Thinking and Building a Space for Collaborative Faculty Curriculum Development

Whitney Schlegel is an Associate Professor of Biology and Director of Human Biology at Indiana University Bloomington.  She has been extremely interested in collaborative student learning and exploring how students learn in teams.  She also is passionate about pedagogies, such as case-based teaching, that engage students and allow for uncertainty to be a part of the science classroom.  As a Carnegie Scholar (2003-2004), she carefully documented evidence of student learning in a team-based and case-based human physiology course she teaches to senior, pre-professional biology students.

As the Director of the integrative, multi-disciplinary Human Biology Program under construction on the Bloomington Campus she also facilitates collaborative curriculum development and is interested in making this process visible as well.

Seeing Student Learning

As explained, Dr. Schlegel is very keen to “see” how students learn and thinks that it’s important for them to see it themselves.  In order to “see” how student teams learned and for them to witness their own learning as well as that of other teams, she asked students to document their team learning using the KEEP Toolkit.  She carefully instructed the student assignments, requiring each team to contribute physiology content and reflections on the learning process.  She then collected URLs for each team’s snapshot and posted them on course snapshot, which was made part of a course-website so that all students could look at the work of their peers.

“Students made visible to me what they're thinking and how they're working.   The snapshots also opened up opportunity for dialogue about the process and the content students were struggling with or excelling in.”

The documentation/assignment using the KEEP Toolkit was fashioned after the patient medical history and called ‘The Team History’.  Students were required to maintain a team portfolio that described their team and documented their learning process and physiology content knowledge during the semester.  They received a detailed assignment at the beginning of the semester, with the syllabus. “With this assignment, I have been trying to get students to think about different ways to represent their learning.  Creating a snapshot has allowed me to help them think about the different layers of their learning."

View the Assignment (.pdf)

The online courseware site provided a central link for a semester snapshot that provided links for all the team snapshots.  This made the learning visible for everyone and helped to foster a learning environment with a partnership focus.  This was of particular concern for Dr. Schlegel as this group of students tended to be very competitive and individually focused, so much so that although they are all senior biology students and have been in the same classes for four years they did not know one another’s names.

Once each snapshot was complete, students send to Dr. Schlegel links to their electronic posters.  These links were then shared with the entire class in a portal Snapshot, encouraging students to read and review the work of their peers.  "The portal page is linked to my courseware.  They can click on this and see what all the other teams are doing, making visible what all the teams are doing and learning at all times.  This creates a strong community in my classroom.  Before, everything was left till the end of the semester and there wasn't much dialogue between teams during the semester."

Facilitating Faculty Collaboration

Dr. Schlegel liked the result of students seeing what others were thinking and proposed that the KEEP Toolkit be used to help faculty share their thinking on curriculum development.  She thus suggested that her faculty colleagues use the tool to document their work in the Human Biology Core-curriculum Development Project.

The group of Biology faculty members working on this new curriculum agreed and began organizing their collective thinking around curriculum.  They built snapshots in order to share materials, making visible to them and to others the generative nature of curriculum development.

The faculty gathered in May 2005 and worked through an Affinity Map, which provided the basic framework for the four-course sequence.  The mapping process involved large notes, which were digitally photographed and placed on a shared snapshot.  The goals of the curriculum were thus captured and easily accessed by the team of faculty members.  Also included in this overview snapshot were links to snapshots of the development of the four courses and an overview of the curriculum.

The courses were updated by faculty in different locations, allowing all to check on how well the courses were linked to one another.  For example, four faculty working on the Sophomore year course described their course, its learning objectives, and ideas for the course with different members of the team submitting their suggestions of various aspects and units of the course.  While this was going on, those working on first year course saw what was happening and tried to maintain the integrated nature of the courses.

"This has been a great way to facilitate this integration among faculty who are scattered around the world at various times.  One of the faculty members was in New Zealand when were building the courses."

Dr. Schlegel also has made the site public, sharing it with her Dean so he can see the positive work of the faculty.