11 April 2008
Conference Update that Dr. Berg Sent to His Students
Following are the highlights of what I learned today at the conference I am attending.
The morning began with breakfast where I was able to chat with colleagues from around the state. Then, we went to the keynote presentation on “Changing Demographics of College Students: Implications for Our Field.” The presentation was given by Dr. Russ Hodges. I wrote to you yesterday about Dr. Hodges because I attended a session he facilitated. Today’s presentation was filled with too many statistics to summarize here. But I can share them with you if you are interested.
During the first concurrent session, I presented “Show Me the Learning: Posters and Public Presentations as Teaching Tools.” I have attached the two handouts I used during this presentation. I also took 10 student designed posters with me. I had been asked to do this presentation on Monday as a fill in for a last minute cancellation.
As you know, I like to incorporate campus events into my classes. This philosophy was seen in today’s presentation because I based the first activity around the presentation Dr. Hodges gave this morning. Also, I revised a section of my presentation to incorporate some materials that were discussed in yesterday’s section.
In my session, I had two math teachers. I had expected my topic to only interest liberal arts faculty and had not prepared any math related examples. However, because I know my topic so well, I was able to come up with specific ideas as to how the math people could implement posters and displays in their classes.
At lunch, I was able to sit between Dr. Hodges and Dr. Deborah Daiek, Schoolcraft College’s Dean of Learning Support Services. We had a lively conversation at our table.
This afternoon, I attended Dr. Rick Bailey’s “Counting What Counts: Primary Traits in Developmental Writing.” Dr. Bailey is a professor at Henry Ford Community College. He showed how we could use quantitative data in the writing classroom.
In order to incorporate materials developed by Dr. Julia A. Berg (who happens to be my mother) which just became available the week before Winter classes began, I have been planning to do a significant revision in my ENG 101 class for Fall semester. I am sure that I will be able to incorporate some of Dr. Bailey’s methods into that class. But, more importantly, Dr. Bailey gave me some good ideas about how to better teach summarization in my ENG 102 and history classes. The technique he showed is very simple—yet should be extremely effective.
I ended the day by attending the first part of Annette Scheid’s “Stretch Beyond Extreme Learning.” Ms. Scheid is the Director of the Teaching and Learning Center at Southwestern Michigan College. At one point, she was explaining how students become anxious when they are just given a list of rules without any explanation. I thought about this in terms about some of the rules I implement concerning research papers (e.g. You fail if you spell my name wrong or use the wrong format.) The difference between my approach and the approach Ms. Scheid was describing is that I explain why the rules are there. Also, I provide an opportunity for students to re-do their work if they make “fatal” errors the first time they submit their manuscripts.
When I was younger, simply going to a conference was fun. Now, if I am going to take the time to travel to a conference, I don’t want my time wasted. The MDEC Conference was a very worthwhile experience.
Steve Berg
Photographs from MDEC Conference
http://www.student/stevenlberg.info/gallery/2008-04-11/index.html
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