This document provides an overview of strategies for improving teaching and learning in higher education. It begins by quoting scholars who warn about the dangers of standardized testing and the financialization of education. It then outlines three key goals: (1) recentering teaching and learning by emphasizing scholarly and critically reflective practice, (2) reclaiming assessment by empowering individual units to define outcomes and embrace multiple iterations of assessment, and (3) owning our praxis by linking theoretical stances to practical work with students. Specific strategies are proposed, such as small teaching techniques, empowering students as learners, and creating inclusive and dialogical learning environments. The overall message is that critically reflective teaching can help counteract standardization and inequality in

1. Good, Honest, and Brave Discussions about
Purpose, Strategy, and Pedagogy
Kevin Gannon Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning,
Grand View University

3. Nectafy.com

7. “Left unchecked, instrumental rationality parading as educational
reform will homogenize all knowledge and meaning, as it becomes
a machine for proliferating forms of civic and social death,
deadening the spirit with the weight of dead time and a graveyard
of useless testing pedagogies.”
Henry Giroux (2014)

8. “Neoliberalization has meant, in short, the
financialization of everything.”
David Harvey (2007)

9. “Which things, tell me, are yours? Whence have you brought your goods into life?
You are like one occupying a place in a theater, who should prohibit others from
entering, treating that as his own which was designed for the common use of all.”
St. Basil of Caesarea, ca. 300s CE

12. (Re)Center Teaching and Learning
Reclaim Assessment
Own Our Praxis

13. Flickr user Abhay Kumar
(Re)Center Teaching and Learning
Scholarly, critically reflective practice must be at the heart of our work

14. More students per
class ▪ Fewer F/T
faculty means more
service and advising
obligations ▪ More
initiatives ▪ Task
forces aplenty ▪
Higher expectations
for teaching and
scholarship ▪ More
Grading ▪ More
underprepared
students ▪ Prep work
for a wider number of
classes ▪ Get more
grant funding ▪ Do
more public-facing
work ▪ Supervise
students and adjuncts
▪ Oh yeah…and teach, too.

15. It’s OK if you lecture for 2
straight hours, as long as
your class is small

16. Flickr user Davide D’Amico
“Teaching in a critically reflective way involves
teachers trying to discover, and research, the
assumptions that frame how they teach…[It] helps
surface the assumptions we hold about pedagogic
methods, techniques, and approaches and the
assumptions we make concerning the conditions
that best foster student learning.”
Stephen Brookfield (2002), p. 32

18. “Small teaching as a fully developed strategy draws from the deep well of
research on learning and higher education to create a deliberate,
structured, and incremental approach to changing our courses for the
better.” (Lang, 2016)
Flickr: Tom Magliery

19. Small Teaching
Strategies are:
• Research-
Based
• Effective
• Easily-
Implemented
Flickr: Moises Garza

21. Flickr user David Whalen
Good pedagogy can be scalable:
Peer Instruction (Mazur, 1996)
Team-Based Learning (Michaelsen, et al., 2004)

26. Flickr user Kyle Pearce
“Students who know about the different kinds of strategies for
learning, thinking, and problem solving will be more likely to use
them.”
Paul Pintrich (2002)

27. Flickr user Gianfranco Bulgareli
“[I]t is terribly important that in explicit and
concerted ways we make students aware of
themselves as learners. We must regularly ask, not
only ‘What are you learning?’ but ‘How are you
learning?’ We must confront them with the
effectiveness (more often ineffectiveness) of their
approaches. We must offer alternatives and then
challenge students to test the efficacy of those
approaches.”
Maryellen Weimer (2012)

28. Flickr user Jo Naylor
Reclaim Assessment
If we don’t tell our own stories, others will gladly tell them for us.

29. Flickr user Jerome Decq
Assessment is how we answer
the question, What are our
students learning? And how
are they learning it?

30. Flickr user Mobilus in Mobili

31. Flickr user Jan Fidler
Strategies for Effective Assessment:
Empower Individual Units
to articulate outcomes Stop looking solely
for “deliverables”
Multiple, varied
iterations = better data
See assessment as a
conversation, not a product
Know that often, the
process is the outcome
Embrace Not-Yetness

32. There are no finished products in higher education –
just progress reports.
Flickr user Drarcia

33. Flickr user Henry DeValence
Own our Praxis
Affirm and celebrate the theoretical stand that shapes our work with and
among our students.

34. Your
“politics”

36. The cutting edge of scientific reasoning gave us…this.
The deployment of scientific claims and “objectivity” is seldom a neutral act.

37. Ideology never says ‘I am ideological’.”
-Louis Althusser

38. “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”
-Rush, Free Will
MetalInjection.net

39. Flickr user Greg Grimes
Pedagogy is practice, and practice always derives from theory.

40. “If men are unable to perceive critically the themes of their time,
and thus to intervene actively in reality, they are carried along in
the wake of change…a society beginning to move from one epoch
to another requires the development of an especially flexible,
critical spirit.”
Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness

41. Flickr user ume-y
Structures of inequality will always reproduce themselves
until we intervene to stop that reproduction.

42. Flickr user Peter Shanks
For a truly critical pedagogy,
the language of critique must
be linked with the language of
possibility

43. Flickr user IdeasAlchemist
When students are able to exercise control over elements of the course, to
experience autonomy within the larger framework of the class, that activation of
positive emotions is the result -- leading to increased motivation, a better sense of
relevance and connection, and thus better retention of course material

44. Flickr user Tamaki Sono
Dialogical Learning Participatory Learning Horizontal Structures

45. Flickr user Casey Fleser
“learning doesn’t
happen in a vacuum
but in a course and
classroom context
where intellectual
pursuits interface
with socioemotional
issues…we have a
great deal of control
over the climate we
shape, and can
leverage climate in
the service of
learning.”
Ambrose, et al. (2010)

46. Flickr user ckmck
Teach Inclusively:
Students are our allies,
not our adversaries.

47. (Re)Center Teaching and Learning
Reclaim Assessment
Own Our Praxis

48. Flickr user Laszlo Ilyes
Teaching is a radical act of hope

49. References: http://cd.pl/tbj
(Google Doc)
email kgannon@grandview.edu if the link doesn’t work for you.