Welcome

Welcome to the blog of the UW-Stout Teaching and Learning Center. The goal of this blog is to share stories of successful learning in the classroom. At the TLC we encourage the focus on learning as the essential ingredient of courses. If you would like to share your story, and especially if you have a story about learning via technology, we encourage you to post it here.

Just to start here is a question, and a story. The question is this: What does "improved learning" mean? We often justify our changes in pedagogy by claiming that such a change will result in improved learning. Does that mean students remember more? can discuss context more incisecively? can synthesize independently? score higher on standardized exams?

A brief story. This fall I decided that I should teach my course based on the one thing I wanted them to know. The course was English 101. The one thing was that writing fulfills expectations. I spent the entire semester on this idea--in research papers, in readings, in daily postings. I used laptop technology extensively. By the end of the semester students had developed a macro sense of fulfilling--they would list the contents of the paper in the introduction and then organize based on the list. But they also develop a micro sense--they began to give much better and pointed examples. At the very end of the course I began to work on style and the way words and phrases work to fulfill expectations. Students were receptive but we ran out of time.