Bravo! What a service you provide to your students and your collegial audience! Folks who care about continual improvement in their teaching crave this kind of content. Thank you for taking the time to create it.
Jessica, to my mind, this is precisely the kind of learning experience that helps students apply course material while building the skills the work world is looking for. Simulating the uncertainty and open-ended nature of solving 'real' problems and navigating the realities of team dynamics is good stuff!
Aww thanks Jay! It turns out I really like experiencing the uncertainty right along side them. It's exciting, because even I don't know how it's going to turn out, nor can I always predict which students are going to easily shine or which are going to grow the most. It is really fun!
Jessica, I *love* the way you describe coaching students through the consulting project. Trying to move students beyond a 'tell me what to do exactly so I know exactly how to get an A' toward a mindset that requires them to operationalize their learning in a team setting... it is difficult, and time consuming, and absolutely what we need to be doing much more of. Would be fascinating to see this same group of students tackle a second project to see how their approach matured after one go. (In an ideal world we'd have students doing capstones *every* year... these are hard skills to develop and need repeated practice.)
Aww, thanks David! I love doing these kinds of projects. I've done it in my experimental economics class three times now. We even published the results from one class experiment! I actually did have one student take two of those project based experimental classes in adjacent years, and it was great fun to see how he developed. He was definitely more of a leader the second time around, in a calm and collected way that was neat to watch. These kinds of projects can be chaotic and because he had experience with the ambiguity the first time around, he was better able to guide the group the second time around.
Overall, I don't think projects like these are that much extra time for me, because I eliminated the time I would have spent writing, proctoring, and grading a final exam. I really wonder how a person might do it in a bigger class though. I have the advantage of teaching this as an elective at a liberal arts college, so my project based classes are usually 8-16 students. That's very different from a section of 60. Have you done things like this at Purdue?
I haven’t personally because my classes tend to be around 40+ students but we run some undergrad courses that do. More at the masters level. The corollary challenge…how do you run really valuable experiences like this at scale?
Bravo! What a service you provide to your students and your collegial audience! Folks who care about continual improvement in their teaching crave this kind of content. Thank you for taking the time to create it.
Thank you Jill! I really appreciate your readership and encouragement!
Jessica, to my mind, this is precisely the kind of learning experience that helps students apply course material while building the skills the work world is looking for. Simulating the uncertainty and open-ended nature of solving 'real' problems and navigating the realities of team dynamics is good stuff!
Aww thanks Jay! It turns out I really like experiencing the uncertainty right along side them. It's exciting, because even I don't know how it's going to turn out, nor can I always predict which students are going to easily shine or which are going to grow the most. It is really fun!
Jessica, I *love* the way you describe coaching students through the consulting project. Trying to move students beyond a 'tell me what to do exactly so I know exactly how to get an A' toward a mindset that requires them to operationalize their learning in a team setting... it is difficult, and time consuming, and absolutely what we need to be doing much more of. Would be fascinating to see this same group of students tackle a second project to see how their approach matured after one go. (In an ideal world we'd have students doing capstones *every* year... these are hard skills to develop and need repeated practice.)
Aww, thanks David! I love doing these kinds of projects. I've done it in my experimental economics class three times now. We even published the results from one class experiment! I actually did have one student take two of those project based experimental classes in adjacent years, and it was great fun to see how he developed. He was definitely more of a leader the second time around, in a calm and collected way that was neat to watch. These kinds of projects can be chaotic and because he had experience with the ambiguity the first time around, he was better able to guide the group the second time around.
Overall, I don't think projects like these are that much extra time for me, because I eliminated the time I would have spent writing, proctoring, and grading a final exam. I really wonder how a person might do it in a bigger class though. I have the advantage of teaching this as an elective at a liberal arts college, so my project based classes are usually 8-16 students. That's very different from a section of 60. Have you done things like this at Purdue?
I haven’t personally because my classes tend to be around 40+ students but we run some undergrad courses that do. More at the masters level. The corollary challenge…how do you run really valuable experiences like this at scale?