sábado, 30 de setembro de 2017

SOAR



Making the Most of Your Writing Feedback

Giving high-quality feedback on student writing can be a challenge, but these strategies help maximize its impact on your students.
A teacher discusses writing feedback with two students.

Providing feedback on student writing is one of the most important, most challenging aspects of a teacher’s job. It’s important because feedback is critical to student learning; it’s challenging because of time constraints and the number of students at varying levels in our classes.

Making sure your feedback is specific, ongoing, action-oriented, and reasonable—the SOAR method, a strategy I developed—helps maximize its impact on your students.

Specific

Feedback is often lost on students because it’s too vague. Comments like “great job,” “good writing,” or even “needs better organization” fall flat with students because they’re not tied to specific words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs in writing.

Feedback falls into two categories: the what and the how. The what of writing deals with content. Specific feedback here includes guiding students if they need more evidence, stronger claims, or further analysis. If they’re writing fiction, you might suggest adding more dialogue for character development or further detail to establish setting.

The how is the writing itself. Specific feedback here can include comments concerning the organization of the information, rhetorical strategies, style, voice, and conventions.

Teachers who teach writing across the curriculum and feel uncomfortable assessing the how can focus their feedback on the what since that is the part of the writing they’ll feel most comfortable assessing.


Ongoing

Fortunately, teachers are slowly breaking away from grading final products only and are offering feedback throughout the different stages of writing. The biggest hindrance to ongoing feedback is time, but narrowing the focus of the feedback can help you meet this challenge.

For example, a science teacher may choose to focus on one particular section of a lab report each time; an English language arts teacher may choose to focus on one particular stage of writing, shifting from one stage to another throughout the course of the year.

Students can take the lead by asking for feedback on a Google doc throughout the writing process. Kaizena allows teachers to leave voice notes on a student paper, making it easy to check in and comment on work during different stages in the process.

Stations with self-guiding questions for reflection can be a great way to allow students to move through the writing process at their own pace, and the teacher can rotate through the stations, addressing small groups of students instead of the whole class.


Action-Oriented

Many teachers fall into the trap of editing student writing by focusing on marking grammar mistakes instead of offering feedback to move students forward in their writing. Helping students take specific steps is key in building a growth mindset in writing—students must see that the action taken can benefit their future writing and not just correct a mistake in the current paper.

Conferring is key when offering action-oriented feedback. I recently sat in the hall conferring with students about college essays. This allowed me time to say things like, “Notice in this paragraph how you begin seven sentences with ‘I’ followed by an action verb. How can you vary some of these sentences so they don’t all sound the same? The content is good, but let’s work on sentence variety.” The student would then offer a suggestion on how to start a sentence differently, and we would further discuss it. The student not only improves this piece but will be more likely to carry these ideas to future writing because the feedback results in an action step.

Teachers are not the only ones who can provide action-oriented feedback—peer editing with specific action-oriented writing suggestions can also move your writers forward.

Reasonable

When a student receives a paper with markings all over it, they can become overwhelmed and discouraged, which often prevents them from taking proper steps for revision or for growth as a writer in general. This can be remedied in several ways.

Select a focus for feedback with each assignment. Sometimes I’ll tell students, “I’ll be offering feedback on transitions in this paper,” or “The focus of feedback for this writing is on the amount of evidence.” I try to give feedback on both the what and the how of writing. This is especially strategic if I’ve given a mini-lesson on an area that I want students to focus on in their writing.

Another successful strategy is giving a Glow and a Grow comment highlighting a specific area that a student did particularly well on and one that needs improvement. Glow and Grow comments both celebrate and challenge student writing. Students refer to past Grow and Glow comments and goals before writing future assignments so they can be reminded of where they are strong, in order to continue doing these things well, and to be aware of areas for growth, in order to push themselves in these areas.

Feedback is more than a grade and should be one of the driving factors in helping students set learning goals and take charge of their own writing and learning. Help students SOAR to success in learning with quality feedback.

Hospital of the Future



The hospital of the future will find you

 Illustration: nicescene, Getty Images

Digital disruption is the new normal. We use video conferencing in global business meetings, summon car rides through our phones using GPS, and snap or tweet our lives to friends and followers.

For its part, healthcare is breaking down traditional hospital walls, and it’s not just the developed world leading this disruption. Indeed, the healthcare model for billions of people in the developing world has always been different. Lacking the massive and complicated hospital infrastructure of other regions, medical care in many parts of the world travels to the patient in the form of a visit from a local doctor or a stop at a rural clinic.

This “last mile of care” – where the hospital finds the patient, not the other way around – is made possible as medical innovation across the globe becomes increasingly mobile, digital, personal and accessible.

Healthcare solutions are becoming more digitally connected, affordable and convenient for both the patient and caregiver. A Journal of Hospital Librarianship study found that 85 percent of health care providers were already using smartphones and/or tablets in their daily work. One-third of health information exchange data is already in the cloud, according to a white paper from Cisco.

Digital health, in other words, is here. Data from remote monitoring devices, such as smart scales and blood pressure cuffs, are being transmitted to doctors around the world to improve patient outcomes. In remote areas across Latin America, cloud technology allows doctors to share ultrasound images with their patients and distant colleagues with the simple click of a button. Similarly, pocket-sized ultrasound technology is helping midwives in Africa determine if expectant mothers can deliver babies safely or need to go to the nearest hospital.

Big data, analytics and artificial intelligence enable health care to be more personalized and precise – a fact with which patients appear increasingly comfortable. Virtual assistants on our phones or kitchen counters are dispensing medical advice from WebMD, and a recent global PwC survey across 12 countries showed that nearly 40 percent of people trusted AI and robotics to administer a heart rhythm test and then make clinical recommendations. That hypothetical is already becoming a reality. A new algorithm server is helping medical professionals read patients’ ECGs remotely and AI is helping doctors diagnose lung cancer in China.

In emergency rooms and operating rooms across the world, machines are generating millions of data points, but only a small fraction are harvested and saved in hospitals’ electronic medical record systems. Gathering, analyzing and acting on this deluge of data is the next step. For instance, clinicians can now use cloud-based, algorithm-powered apps to pull hundreds of data points directly from anesthesia machines with every patient breath. These apps unlock actionable insights that can help clinicians with clinical, operational and economic improvements.

Mobile digital health is revolutionizing not just how and what care people get, but where they can receive it. Already, 70 percent of U.S. employers offer telehealth services, and a World Health Organization survey found that 87 percent of countries worldwide had at least one massive mobile health program underway.

While most acute care will continue to take place inside brick-and-mortar medical facilities, future generations will likely receive care virtually, and participate in their own care to greater degrees. For instance, subtle stick-on monitors that look like digital Band-Aids are being developed right now to help doctors remotely monitor key vital signs, from heart rate and blood pressure to sweat and oxygen levels.

Disruption is indeed the new normal for healthcare. By pairing new thinking with new technology in new clinical areas, we can make sure that future healthcare solutions are at once more personal, more digital and more globally connected. In a future where hospitals are everywhere and nowhere, and data is ubiquitous, care must and will come to the patient.

Bad news



Profissionais de saúde devem falar de forma simples e demonstrar acolhimento

CBN Comunicação e Liderança – Leny Kyrillos


Médicos e enfermeiros devem usar linguagem simples com os pacientes. 
Foto: Reprodução/Pixabay


Principalmente na hora de dar más notícias, é importante olhar nos olhos, direcionar o tronco para o interlocutor, demonstrar paciência e usar tom de voz acolhedor.

quinta-feira, 28 de setembro de 2017

Resilience



How People Learn to Become Resilient

By




Perception is key to resilience: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as a chance to learn and grow?      Illustration by Gizem Vural




Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist and clinician at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. But one boy in particular stuck with him. He was nine years old, with an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Each day, he would arrive at school with the exact same sandwich: two slices of bread with nothing in between. At home, there was no other food available, and no one to make any. Even so, Garmezy would later recall, the boy wanted to make sure that “no one would feel pity for him and no one would know the ineptitude of his mother.” Each day, without fail, he would walk in with a smile on his face and a “bread sandwich” tucked into his bag.

The boy with the bread sandwich was part of a special group of children. He belonged to a cohort of kids—the first of many—whom Garmezy would go on to identify as succeeding, even excelling, despite incredibly difficult circumstances. These were the children who exhibited a trait Garmezy would later identify as “resilience.” (He is widely credited with being the first to study the concept in an experimental setting.) Over many years, Garmezy would visit schools across the country, focussing on those in economically depressed areas, and follow a standard protocol. He would set up meetings with the principal, along with a school social worker or nurse, and pose the same question: Were there any children whose backgrounds had initially raised red flags—kids who seemed likely to become problem kids—who had instead become, surprisingly, a source of pride? “What I was saying was, ‘Can you identify stressed children who are making it here in your school?’ ” Garmezy said, in a 1999 interview. “There would be a long pause after my inquiry before the answer came. If I had said, ‘Do you have kids in this school who seem to be troubled?,’ there wouldn’t have been a moment’s delay. But to be asked about children who were adaptive and good citizens in the school and making it even though they had come out of very disturbed backgrounds—that was a new sort of inquiry. That’s the way we began.”

Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds. If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won’t know how resilient you are. It’s only when you’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?

Environmental threats can come in various guises. Some are the result of low socioeconomic status and challenging home conditions. (Those are the threats studied in Garmezy’s work.) Often, such threats**—**parents with psychological or other problems; exposure to violence or poor treatment; being a child of problematic divorce—are chronic. Other threats are acute: experiencing or witnessing a traumatic violent encounter, for example, or being in an accident. What matters is the intensity and the duration of the stressor. In the case of acute stressors, the intensity is usually high. The stress resulting from chronic adversity, Garmezy wrote, might be lower—but it “exerts repeated and cumulative impact on resources and adaptation and persists for many months and typically considerably longer.”

Prior to Garmezy’s work on resilience, most research on trauma and negative life events had a reverse focus. Instead of looking at areas of strength, it looked at areas of vulnerability, investigating the experiences that make people susceptible to poor life outcomes (or that lead kids to be “troubled,” as Garmezy put it). Garmezy’s work opened the door to the study of protective factors: the elements of an individual’s background or personality that could enable success despite the challenges they faced. Garmezy retired from research before reaching any definitive conclusions—his career was cut short by early-onset Alzheimer’s—but his students and followers were able to identify elements that fell into two groups: individual, psychological factors and external, environmental factors, or disposition on the one hand and luck on the other.

In 1989 a developmental psychologist named Emmy Werner published the results of a thirty-two-year longitudinal project. She had followed a group of six hundred and ninety-eight children, in Kauai, Hawaii, from before birth through their third decade of life. Along the way, she’d monitored them for any exposure to stress: maternal stress in utero, poverty, problems in the family, and so on. Two-thirds of the children came from backgrounds that were, essentially, stable, successful, and happy; the other third qualified as “at risk.” Like Garmezy, she soon discovered that not all of the at-risk children reacted to stress in the same way. Two-thirds of them “developed serious learning or behavior problems by the age of ten, or had delinquency records, mental health problems, or teen-age pregnancies by the age of eighteen.” But the remaining third developed into “competent, confident, and caring young adults.” They had attained academic, domestic, and social success—and they were always ready to capitalize on new opportunities that arose.

What was it that set the resilient children apart? Because the individuals in her sample had been followed and tested consistently for three decades, Werner had a trove of data at her disposal. She found that several elements predicted resilience. Some elements had to do with luck: a resilient child might have a strong bond with a supportive caregiver, parent, teacher, or other mentor-like figure. But another, quite large set of elements was psychological, and had to do with how the children responded to the environment. From a young age, resilient children tended to “meet the world on their own terms.” They were autonomous and independent, would seek out new experiences, and had a “positive social orientation.” “Though not especially gifted, these children used whatever skills they had effectively,” Werner wrote. Perhaps most importantly, the resilient children had what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates. In fact, on a scale that measured locus of control, they scored more than two standard deviations away from the standardization group.

Werner also discovered that resilience could change over time. Some resilient children were especially unlucky: they experienced multiple strong stressors at vulnerable points and their resilience evaporated. Resilience, she explained, is like a constant calculation: Which side of the equation weighs more, the resilience or the stressors? The stressors can become so intense that resilience is overwhelmed. Most people, in short, have a breaking point. On the flip side, some people who weren’t resilient when they were little somehow learned the skills of resilience. They were able to overcome adversity later in life and went on to flourish as much as those who’d been resilient the whole way through. This, of course, raises the question of how resilience might be learned.

George Bonanno is a clinical psychologist at Columbia University’s Teachers College; he heads the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab and has been studying resilience for nearly twenty-five years. Garmezy, Werner, and others have shown that some people are far better than others at dealing with adversity; Bonanno has been trying to figure out where that variation might come from. Bonanno’s theory of resilience starts with an observation: all of us possess the same fundamental stress-response system, which has evolved over millions of years and which we share with other animals. The vast majority of people are pretty good at using that system to deal with stress. When it comes to resilience, the question is: Why do some people use the system so much more frequently or effectively than others?

One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,” Bonanno told me, in December. “To call something a ‘traumatic event’ belies that fact.” He has coined a different term: PTE, or potentially traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate. The theory is straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it. (Bonanno focusses on acute negative events, where we may be seriously harmed; others who study resilience, including Garmezy and Werner, look more broadly.) Take something as terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad, but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with meaning—perhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the community**—**then it may not be seen as a trauma. (Indeed, Werner found that resilient individuals were far more likely to report having sources of spiritual and religious support than those who weren’t.) The experience isn’t inherent in the event; it resides in the event’s psychological construal.

It’s for this reason, Bonanno told me, that “stressful” or “traumatic” events in and of themselves don’t have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. “The prospective epidemiological data shows that exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning,” he said. “It’s only predictive if there’s a negative response.” In other words, living through adversity, be it endemic to your environment or an acute negative event, doesn’t guarantee that you’ll suffer going forward. What matters is whether that adversity becomes traumatizing.

The good news is that positive construal can be taught. “We can make ourselves more or less vulnerable by how we think about things,” Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of stimuli in different ways—to reframe them in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally “hot”—changes how they experience and react to the stimulus. You can train people to better regulate their emotions, and the training seems to have lasting effects.

Similar work has been done with explanatory styles—the techniques we use to explain events. I’ve written before about the research of Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist who pioneered much of the field of positive psychology: Seligman found that training people to change their explanatory styles from internal to external (“Bad events aren’t my fault”), from global to specific (“This is one narrow thing rather than a massive indication that something is wrong with my life”), and from permanent to impermanent (“I can change the situation, rather than assuming it’s fixed”) made them more psychologically successful and less prone to depression. The same goes for locus of control: not only is a more internal locus tied to perceiving less stress and performing better but changing your locus from external to internal leads to positive changes in both psychological well-being and objective work performance. The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none.

Unfortunately, the opposite may also be true. “We can become less resilient, or less likely to be resilient,” Bonanno says. “We can create or exaggerate stressors very easily in our own minds. That’s the danger of the human condition.” Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened. In a sense, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow. Focus on it, frame it as a threat, and a potentially traumatic event becomes an enduring problem; you become more inflexible, and more likely to be negatively affected.

In December the New York Times Magazine published an essay called “The Profound Emptiness of ‘Resilience.’ ” It pointed out that the word is now used everywhere, often in ways that drain it of meaning and link it to vague concepts like “character.” But resilience doesn’t have to be an empty or vague concept. In fact, decades of research have revealed a lot about how it works. This research shows that resilience is, ultimately, a set of skills that can be taught. In recent years, we’ve taken to using the term sloppily—but our sloppy usage doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been usefully and precisely defined. It’s time we invest the time and energy to understand what “resilience” really means.

domingo, 17 de setembro de 2017

Publicações Científicas



Curso de Escrita e Publicação de Artigos Científicos

A Comissão Nacional de Energia Nuclear (CNEN) disponibliza em seu site um ótimo material do Curso de Escrita e Publicação de Artigos Científicos, desenvolvido por Fabiane Braga, Maria Betânia Lambert, Sheila Vianna, Lílian Bueno e Diogo Pereira.






Clique aqui para acessar o .pdf do curso.


Learning to teach


How to Make our Conversations about Teaching More Productive



Professors chatting in library.

Where do your new ideas about teaching and learning come from? Perhaps some come from Faculty Focus and this blog? We certainly hope so! But most college teachers don’t get instructional ideas from the literature. They get them from other teachers, usually in face-to-face or electronic exchanges. Interesting, isn’t it, how much pedagogical information is passed on and around in these very informal ways.



If we’re learning to teach and growing instructionally through conversations with each other, that makes it appropriate to ask: What are we learning from each other? Techniques? Good strategies? Solutions to problems? Shortcuts and quick fixes? Is that all we could be learning from these conversations? Asked a different way, what would make these conversations better? What could help them promote, motivate, and sustain our growth as teachers?

Over the years, I’ve tended to be pretty critical of how we talk about teaching. Here’s a quick rundown of what I think compromises the quality of those conversations:

  • They’re often too ad hoc. They occur without planning. Two faculty members meet at the departmental coffee pot and start talking about excused and unexcused absences. They haven’t prepared for the conversation. They share what they think and advocate for the way they handle the issue.
  • The talk focuses on anecdotes and experiences. Like students who come to class not having done the reading, conversations about teaching are about what’s going on in our individual teaching worlds: “Guess what happened in my classroom and here’s what I did about it.” Granted, there’s wisdom that derives from practice and others can learn from it, but that’s not an automatic outcome and it shouldn’t be what we usually talk about.
  • The quality of pedagogical opinions is uneven. All teachers have opinions and all opinions merit a respectful listen, but not all opinions are good, correct, appropriate, or universally applicable. Moreover, many pedagogical opinions are presented with more conviction than evidence.

Here are some changes that I believe would make our teaching conversations better and more productive: 

  • Questions should play a central role in our conversations about teaching. We should bring more questions than answers to the conversations. They may be the questions we are asking ourselves, the ones we can’t answer, or the questions for which we’d love to have a collection of potential answers. Questions drive learning! They make us look at what we know and uncover what we don’t know. They cause us to seek out what others know and lead us to the next (and often) better questions. Our conversations would improve if we asked more and answered less.
  • Our conversations need to move beyond techniques. In the beginning, the what-to-do and how-to-do-it focus is essential, and teachers should always be on the lookout for good techniques. But by mid-career, it’s time to explore why—why are we using that policy, why does that activity work in some courses but not others, why won’t students accept the responsibility for learning, why doesn’t our feedback make the next paper better. Our conversations need substance—stuff we can think about, chew on, view from multiple perspectives, and then dig a bit deeper.
  • Good talk about teaching stretches out from experience to evidence. At this point, there’s not much new under the pedagogical sun. Somebody else has already thought about it and often been there gathering evidence. In the dynamic milieu of the classroom, few things are known definitively, but something is known about most things. There needs to be a commitment to find out and learn in conversations.
  • Arriving at a discussion prepared improves the quality of the exchange. Ideas need to have been thought about and questions framed. A good article, read beforehand, can give the discussion both structure and content. What makes a good article for discussion? It raises more questions than it answers. It presents a position that can be seen from different perspectives. It challenges conventional thinking. It doesn’t even need to be an article–a pithy quotation can take thinking to new and different places. This blog regularly highlights articles that have made me think. In Faculty Focus Premium, we are launching a new feature where we identify a good article for discussion and provide a set of questions readers can use to launch a productive exchange with colleagues or for personal reflections. Preview Reflections on Learning: Giving Students Assignments They Hate »
  • And the most fundamental tenet for good conversations about teaching: let the discourse be civil, agree to disagree, work to convince each other, debate, argue, but always grant others the freedom to decide for themselves.

segunda-feira, 11 de setembro de 2017

Gerontologia



II SIMPÓSIO INTERNACIONAL DE GERONTOLOGIA
V SIMPÓSIO MARINGAENSE DE GERONTOLOGIA
III SIMPÓSIO PARANAENSE DE GERONTOLOGIA, 

 
Será realizado nos dias 04,05 e 06 de outubro de 2017 em Maringá-PR na Universidade Estadual de Maringá, campus sede.
 
 
 

Informações importantes...

PRAZOS
30/09 - Inscrição no evento
15/09 - Inscrição de trabalhos (PRORROGADO)

VALORES
Alunos da UNATI, graduação e pós-graduação - R$ 100,00 
Profissionais e docentes - R$ 150,00

SUBMISSÃO DE TRABALHOS
- Serão aceitas submissões de trabalhos científicos que tenham foco no envelhecimento e que tratem de resultados parciais ou finais de pesquisas científicas ou relatos de experiências. Não serão aceitos trabalhos originados de projetos não iniciados;
- Será aceito apenas um trabalho, por Relator e não há limite para trabalhos em coautoria. Serão permitidos, no máximo 06 (seis) autores por trabalho.
- O relator, obrigatoriamente, deve realizar sua inscrição no evento.
- O trabalho científico deverá ser redigido no formato de resumo expandido, contendo de 3 a 5 laudas Sessões: resumo, palavras-chave, introdução, objetivo, materiais e métodos, resultados e discussão, e considerações finais.
- Os trabalhos devem ser enviados para o e-mail simposiogeronto@gmail.com. Junto ao envio do trabalho encaminhar, em arquivo separado, uma cópia digitalizada do comprovante de pagamento da inscrição.
- As apresentações de trabalhos serão certificadas e os trabalhos publicados nos anais do evento.
- Em caso de dúvidas entre em contato pelo e-mail simposiogeronto@gmail.com.

Informações no site: http://www.unati.uem.br/index.php/11-noticias/39-ii-simposio-internacional-de-gerontologia

Gostaríamos imensamente de contar com sua presença para engrandecer este encontro! 
Quaisquer dúvidas estaremos à disposição para lhe ajudar.
Atenciosamente,

A Comissão Organizadora.
 
 
 
 

domingo, 10 de setembro de 2017

Faculty inertia

 

‘Fear of Looking Stupid’


Anthropologist offers explanation for why faculty members hesitate to adopt innovative teaching methods.


An anthropologist who had the unenviable task of sitting through academics’ meetings and reading their email chains to find out why they fail to change their teaching styles has come to a surprising conclusion: they are simply too afraid of looking stupid in front of their students to try something new.

Lauren Herckis was brought in to Carnegie Mellon University to understand why, despite producing leading research into how students learn best, the institution had largely failed to adopt its own findings.

For example, one of the university’s online courses in statistics, which has been shown to be “incredibly effective at teaching students in half the time,” was not adapted by the statistics department for use on campus, said Richard Scheines, dean of the department of humanities and social sciences. “This is a source of real frustration,” he told the Global Learning Council Summit 2017 in Berlin last month.

Herckis observed academic bureaucracy up close in meetings and through emails for more than a year, and tested lecturers’ attitudes through surveys and interviews.

She followed the progress of four projects to improve teaching -- such as the introduction of a test to assess students’ strengths and weaknesses before starting their courses -- two of which failed.

One of the stumbling blocks, she found, was that ”a desire to get good [student] evaluations posed a risk to their willingness to innovate.”

But an even stronger source of inertia was the need to hang on to their “personal identity affirmation” -- in other words, to avoid appearing stupid in the lecture hall. One academic interviewed by Herckis said that faculty members’ “No. 1 challenge” was to make sure that they were “not an embarrassment to [themselves] in front of … students.”

Herckis also found that many academics clung to a “very strong” idea of what constituted good teaching that they had often inherited from their former professors or even parents, even if other evidence was available. One interviewee told her that, above all, he wanted to emulate an inspiring lecturer he had been taught by in 1975.

“When our gut tells us to do one thing and an article tells us another,” Herckis told delegates, it is very difficult to change behavior. Another issue was that faculty were much more likely to be more enthusiastic about making a change that they had come up with by themselves, rather than adopting something tried and tested by others.

With universities in many countries under pressure to improve their teaching quality, the project could be of interest to other institutions seeking to overturn ineffective teaching methods. Scheines argued that higher education needs to invest far more in similar anthropological projects to work out how change actually happens. “We need ears and eyes telling us what’s happening on the adoption,” he said.

About 20 years ago, clinical medicine created an entire field of “implementation science” to check whether doctors were adopting best practices, and higher education now needs to do the same, he argued.

In line with the project results, Carnegie Mellon lecturers would be showered with “love” and told not to “worry if students hate you for a semester” if they experimented with new ways of teaching, he said.