'Redesigning How We Learn': University Of Portland Receives $300,000 Grant To Educate Its Educators

PORTLAND, OR — Stephanie Salomone, chair of the math department at the University of Portland, said she's learned more from her students over her 12 years with the school than she'd ever expected. She said she's learned from her students through active engagement with them — by listening to their ideas, by watching them solve problems in ways she might not have considered, and even by experimenting together to find solutions that may never have been discovered through a simple lecture.

The value of active academic engagement, Salomone told Patch on Tuesday, should not be underestimated by students or educators. That's why the $300,000 grant recently awarded to the university by the National Science Foundation (NSF) is so important to Salomone; it could radically change the way both educators and students approach teaching, learning, and understanding science, technology, engineering, and mathematic (STEM) concepts not only at the University of Portland (UP) but across all U.S. academic institutions — and maybe, eventually, the world.

The grant will fund a three-year project put on by UP STEM faculty, Salomone said. At it's most fundamental level, the project — called Redesigning Education For Learning through Evidence and Collaborative Teaching (REFLECT) — will study the efficacy of active learning versus lectures in classrooms by asking 25 faculty members from the school's biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering, and computer science departments to develop and implement curriculums that pull teachers from the front of their classrooms and give students a chance at learning through doing rather than through just listening.

"Our whole goal is student engagement; we want students to be interested and experienced," Salomone said, noting her own educational experience came with many, if not all, lectured classes. "If they're only taught by people who lecture, they won't learn those other skills… It worked for me, though I was the kind of student for whom that worked, but I was never as engaged as I could have been."

For students to be successful beyond academia, in the working world where active engagement is no longer a choice but a requirement, active learning strategies are imperative, she said.

"I'm the expert (at the front of the classroom), but that doesn't help my students," Salomone explained. "There's more we're hoping people take from a university education than content. So how do we engage students? It has to start with people, really."

The project will be broken into two cohorts made up entirely by faculty. No students will be involved in the three-year REFLECT study, Salomone said. For now, the project is designed to observe teacher dispositions by putting the 25 participating members into teams of two to three faculty "which will engage in a reflective process of regular peer observation and in structured conversations about teaching and learning," according to UP spokeswoman Beth Sorenson.

"Faculty participants will be trained in formative assessment and in process-oriented protocols for evaluating teaching," she said in a statement. "The peer support will also help ensure the long-term sustainability of the instructional changes."

Salomone said she'd like to see this study make its way into other fields, like writing, nursing, business, and philosophy. All teachers, she said, could benefit from this project.

"Any teacher will tell you they need more time to talk about their teaching," Salomone said, noting the feedback she's heard from many educators regarding the significance of bouncing ideas off each other and taking critiques through peer review. "In any given teacher's day there isn't time for that. (But) we need to make time for that … with the ultimate goal of serving our students better.

"All of the onus in lecture-style teaching is on the teacher, but the teacher is not the one learning," she continued. "By engaging students in the process of discovering the information, we are fostering their curiosity and creating an innovative mindset, one that is focused on problem-solving, not memorization."

Larger universities, such as the University of British Columbia and Boise State University, have conducted similar studies, Salomone said, adding that UP's will be a bit more compressed due to the dramatic size differences between the schools — UP being smaller, of course.

One of the experimental methods being used by faculty is to give the students their homework (such as it is) before the actual classroom education is provided so students will have more time to develop an understanding of what they don't understand (if that makes sense) so they can return to the next class with questions that will help them form their own better understanding of the material being taught.

This method gives students a different sense of accountability, Salomone explained. Rather than regurgitate something they read over and over again in a book in the interest of simply passing a class, the students are now actively engaged in learning the material, not only giving the material more value but also making the educational experience more memorable.

"We want people to stop and think about what they're doing — reflect on their teaching and find ways to improve, make it more interactive," she said. "It's part of the excitement of being a teacher — learning as you go … (So) how can we think more about the human component of education?"

Top Image: Dr. Jordan Farina and students in the University of Portland engineering lab. Photo by Steve Hambuchen, courtesy of the University of Portland.