Promoting Critical Reading with Double-Entry Notes: A Pilot Study
Lindsey Ives, PhD, Taylor Joy Mitchell, PhD, and Helena Hübl, MA, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Suggested Citation
Ives, L., Mitchell, T. J., & Hübl, H. (2020). Promoting critical reading with double-entry notes: A pilot study. InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, 15, 13-32. https://doi.org/10.46504/15202001iv
Recognizing a need to promote critical reading among students at our STEM university, the authors implemented an active reading strategy called double-entry notes across four general education writing and humanities courses. We hypothesized that the tool would help engage students in the critical reading strategies they tended to lack. The tool aimed to encourage students to think critically about assigned readings by analyzing texts, applying assigned readings to the world outside the text, synthesizing multiple texts, and the like. After assigning the tool, we assessed its effectiveness through a survey of students’ perceptions and coded artifacts (N=182) for six markers of critical thinking. Results suggest that the tool succeeded in helping students to think critically about texts but that some markers of critical thinking were more consistent than others. Also, students’ perceptions of the double-entry notes’ benefits did not align with our findings based on analysis of their texts. Because results revealed critical engagement in reading, we plan to continue the study, adjusting the tool to address more specific critical thinking strategies.
The Use of Feature Film for Teaching Undergraduate Bioethics: Course Format and Assessment through Student Narratives
H. Russell Searight, PhD, Alyssa Burnash, Molly Campbell, Megan Chmielewski, Morgan Edmonds, Heather Gregg, Lyndsey Ren Johnson, Ellie Lytle, Katelyn Mills, Natalie Nowak, Camdyn Odykirk, Kaycie Rachels, Mikayla Schrotenboer, Sierra Strutz, Teresa VanDyke, Sydney Zuke, and Michael Zurek, Lake Superior State University
Suggested Citation
Searight, H. R., Burnash, A., Campbell, M., Chmielewski, M., Edmonds, M., Gregg, H., Johnson, L. R., Lytle, E., Mills, K., Nowak, N., Odykirk, C., Rachels, K., Schrotenboer, M., Strutz, S., VanDyke, T, Zuke, S., & Zurek, M. (2020). The use of feature film for teaching undergraduate bioethics: Course format and assessment through student narratives. InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, 15, 33-51. https://doi.org/10.46504/15202002se
Film is a form of engaging narrative being employed with greater frequency in undergraduate and graduate education. To optimize their pedagogical impact, it is important to carefully select films that address core course objectives. Additionally, viewing should be structured with written guidelines to direct the audience to consider the relevant dimensions associated with the instructional goals of the film. A course, “Medical Ethics and Film” is described to illustrate cinemeducation. In order to assess the impact of this recently developed course, students kept ongoing diaries in which they regularly wrote about their reactions to each film. Analysis of the diaries revealed that students routinely addressed the moral dilemmas portrayed and often applied specific ethical theories. While ethical theory is typically presented as a series of cognitive frameworks, students often expressed strong emotional reactions and frequently linked the dilemmas portrayed to their own life.
Using a Professional Learning Community Framework to Assist Early Field Experience Students as They Move from Teacher Candidate to Teacher
Curtis P. Nielsen, EdD, and Amy K. Lockhart, EdD, University of Northern Iowa
Suggested Citation
Nielsen, C. P., & Lockhart, A. K. (2020). Using a professional learning community framework to assist early field experience students as they move from teacher candidate to teacher. InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, 15, 52-66. https://doi.org/10.46504/15202003ni
Collaboration is rapidly becoming sacrosanct in today’s K-12 schools. A basis for these collaborative school experiences is the ability to share one’s observations of classroom activities. The Professional Learning Community (PLC) framework described here is a pedagogically based process that provides opportunities for Early Field Experience students to share their field involvements. The discussions are born from the teacher candidates’ experiential learning as they take part in a 25-hour field placement. Providing teacher candidates with weekly PLC opportunities for sharing, simultaneously, has assisted teacher candidates’ dispositional and pedagogical decision making as they make the transition from student to teacher.
Language Teachers’ Intercultural Learning: A Sociocultural Perspective
Ekaterina Arshavskaya, PhD, Utah State University
Suggested Citation
Arshavskaya, E. (2020). Language teachers’ intercultural learning: A sociocultural perspective. InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, 15, 67-82. https://doi.org/10.46504/15202004ar
Responding to the call to build teacher interculturality in more dynamic ways, this paper analyzes developmental trajectories of three pre-service teachers enrolled in a course on language and culture in a master’s in second language teaching program at a U.S. university. From a sociocultural theory perspective, the article illustrates the various ways in which the pre-service teachers incorporated (or not) the mediational means available to them. The article findings support the claim about the sociocultural nature of human learning, while the analysis informed by a sociocultural perspective on learning explicates why intercultural learning can be more enriching for some participating pre-service teachers than for others. In line with the sociocultural perspective on human learning, the article highlights the importance of the affective dimension and activity for promoting teacher learning and argues for the need to better understand the process of teachers’ application of new understandings into their practice. Besides, the article demonstrates the value of teacher educators’ reflection on their work. It ends with pedagogical implications for language teacher educators.
Choice in Learning: Differentiating Instruction in the College Classroom
Angela Danley, EdD, and Carla Williams, EdD, University of Central Missouri
Suggested Citation
Danley, A., & Williams, C. (2020). Choice in learning: Differentiating instruction in the college classroom. InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, 15, 83-104. https://doi.org/10.46504/15202005da
This article addresses the importance of differentiated instruction in the college classroom. Additionally, it focuses on the results of the students’ perceptions of differentiated instruction in the college classroom. Students in the college classroom were given choice boards to display their understanding on phonemic awareness, phonics, and morphology. The article discusses ideas for future direction based on the results from the action research project.
Donna M. Ehrlich, PhD, Jeff A. Ehrlich, EdD, Park University, and April Haberyan, PhD, Truman Medical Center
Suggested Citation
Ehrlich, D. M., Ehrlich, J. A., & Haberyan, A. (2020). Storytelling in a first-year seminar. InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, 15, 105-121. https://doi.org/10.46504/15202006eh
Historically, storytelling has been a way to pass knowledge between generations and to facilitate an understanding of beliefs. The aim of this current research was to explore the value of storytelling in the higher education classroom, to address the question “how can sharing stories assist students in constructing new knowledge in the classroom?” The purpose of the study was to see if teaching students how to tell a story and having them tell a story in a Freshman seminar class would enhance and enrich the quality of the knowledge they gained in discussions as students. The research utilized the lens of constructivism and a community of inquiry. Findings shed light on the perceptions of the students and the level of classroom engagement after experiencing guided storytelling. The results demonstrated an increase in engagement in the classroom. Students did not feel they needed story telling guidance, but they did feel storytelling was valuable to their overall experience.
Opening Up Hispanic Literature: An Open-Access Critical Edition Assignment
Julie Ann Ward, PhD, and Madison Doyle, University of Oklahoma
Suggested Citation
Ward, J. A., & Doyle, M. (2020). Opening up Hispanic literature: An open-access critical edition assignment. InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, 15, 122-141. https://doi.org/10.46504/15202007wa
Pedagogical research into cooperative learning and open educational resources supports an expectation for strong learning outcomes in both cases. This article is a guide to the implementation of a group assignment in a college introductory Hispanic literature course where students create critical editions of literary texts. The critical editions project described in this article focuses on team-building and training in group dynamics in addition to the skills of literary research. This project’s relationship to the Open Education movement is an important part of its success, in that it both uses Open Educational Resources (OER) through public domain literary texts as the objects of study in the course, and also asks students to produce OER through their critical editions of literary texts in the public domain. In this essay, we describe a group activity in which students in an introductory literature course research and create digital critical editions of literary texts, which are in turn collected and published online in an open-access anthology. Over the course of a semester, students are engaged in establishing and maintaining group dynamics, learning the basic skills of literary research, and presenting their research findings with the goal of creating a
public good.
Poetic License: Using Documentary Poetry to Teach International Law Students Paraphrase Skills
Robin Nilon, PhD, Temple University
Suggested Citation
Nilon, R. (2020). Poetic license: Using documentary poetry to teach international law students paraphrase skills. InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, 15, 142-156. https://doi.org/10.46504/15202008ni
In this article, I show how the study of the poems of Charles Reznikoff – a 20th century American lawyer – helps teach the critical art of paraphrase to International law students, lawyers from The Temple’s LLM Program. Scholars have acknowledged the difficulty of teaching paraphrase to students from civil law countries, acknowledging that it too often results in patchwriting or mere recitation, drained of any text-based policy analysis. Drawing on the fields of ESL, Composition, and Legal Writing, I show how the study of the poetry helps my student learn US-style legal writing. We use the poetry of Reznikoff, who, during the 20th century, wrote poems about reported cases in which race played a dominant role. The students summarize Reznikoff’s poems into prose form and reported cases into poetry. Moving from one genre to another enhances the students’ paraphrase skills, which they then apply to a modern search and seizure problem raising the issue of racial profiling. The students now demonstrate improved paraphrase skills and are more familiar with policy analysis – skills that will greatly enhance their ability to practice law. Students in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences – any field that values critical thinking and writing – will also benefit learning these skills.
