Lesson Design Using the ‘BOPPPS’ Model – Part 2: Intended Learning Outcomes

Hello SJSU Community!

It’s Dr. Rayna Friendly again. In a previous post, I introduced a model of lesson design that I learned during my graduate degree, that is taught in the Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW), which has been run in more than 100 academic institutions worldwide (Day, 2004)! To date, the ISW has been found to be an effective way to transform instructor’s teaching in the classroom such that ISW participants were found to reduce their teacher-focused thinking in comparison to controls, as well as increase the number of active learning strategies used in their classrooms (e.g., Dawson et al., 2014; Macpherson, 2011). ‘BOPPPS’ is actually an acronym, which stands for the 6 basic components that are important to consider including when you are designing a lesson or workshop:

  • Bridge into the lesson
  • Outcomes for the lesson (as in Intended Learning Outcomes)
  • Pre-assessment of learners’ existing knowledge of those outcomes
  • Participatory Activities (as in Active Learning Strategies)
  • Post-assessment of learners’ knowledge of the outcomes
  • Summary of the lesson content

In a previous blog post, I discussed the first component: the Bridge. Today, I would like to delve deeper into the second component: Intended Learning OUTCOMES for the lesson.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) outline what you hope the learning to learn at the end of your lesson, module, or program. There are many online resources for you to check out that explain how to write and utilize ILOs in your teaching. Here is a good one from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, but feel free to Google for other versions that work best for you. The ILOs are important to include so that learners know what you expect from them, and these also should should determine the types of activities and assessments you include in your lessons (more on this in my upcoming blog posts on pre/post assessments and participatory activities!). Let me show you an example of some ILOs for one of the lessons I teach, before explaining the components:

By the end of this class, students will be able to:

•Differentiate two types of metacognition
•Describe developmental trends in explicit and implicit metacognition
Reflect on how you use metacognition for schoolwork
Practice Active Listening, Meditation & “Mindfulness” to enhance your metacognitive abilities

In the example above, you should be able to note 3 important components of writing ILOS:

    1. First, specify the timeframe. When will the student be able to achieve the outcomes? By the end of the lesson, by the end of the module, by the end of the course, etc? I state the ILOs for each of my lectures, at the beginning of class, before we start discussing any course content. I also use these ILOs for my student’s study guides, making a checklist stating what they should be able to know/do by the end of each lecture!
    2. The knowledge/skills learners should be able to gain. In the above example, you can see how the learner is explicitly told what knowledge/skills are important to the instructor. Essentially, it should describe the types of learning that will be assessed later in formal and informal ways. In the example, for instance, this includes “two types of metacognition”, “developmental trends in explicit and implicit metacognition”, and so on.
    3. What the learners should be able to do with that knowledge (i.e., action verbs!). Here is, in my opinion, the most important and useful component of ILOs: the verbs. What should the learners be able to do with the knowledge they’re learning? In the above example, you can see these verbs, such as “differentiate”, “describe”, “reflect”, and “practice”. These verbs relate back to Boom’s Taxonomy (1956), revised in (2001) of types of actions we can do with knowledge. They range from the least effort needed (e.g., simply remembering information) and advance with subsequent complexity up to being able to evaluate or create something new. There are MANY versions of this taxonomy online, I recommend doing a Google Image search for a diagram of the taxonomy that works best for you!  These verbs should then align with the teaching and testing methods you used (e.g., if you say that learners should be able to create something, how can you evaluate this creation?)

Look out for my following blog posts to learn more about the rest of the components of the BOPPPS Model. Next I will go into the pre/post assessments and how to align them with your ILOs!

 

(Note that these BOPPPS posts might be interspersed with content updates from the Teaching Community of Practice (TCoP), which I facilitate.) What is the TCoP, you ask?

  • The Teaching Community of Practice (TCoP) is a group for part- and full-time SJSU faculty (of all levels, across all departments), who are interested in enhancing their respective teaching practices. The TCoP will meet regularly, according to members’ schedules, to exchange strategies, tips and resources that have led to successful (and sometimes, less-than-successful) teaching experiences. Please fill out this form if you are interested in joining this community and you will be added to the groups’ mailing list. For inquires about the TCoP, please contact me at rayna.friendly@sjsu.edu.

 

 

REFERENCES:

Day, R., & the ISW International Advisory Committee. (2004). Instructional Skills Workshop: From grassroots initiative to international perspectives. Paper presented at the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Retrieved from http://iswnetwork.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Hand5_ICED.pdf

Dawson, D., Borin, P., Meadows, K., Britnell, J., Olsen, K. & McIntryre, G. (2014). The Impact of the Instructional Skills Workshop on Faculty Approaches to Teaching. Toronto ON: Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario

Macpherson, A. (2011). The Instructional Skills Workshop as a transformative learning process. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC.

Lesson Design Using the ‘BOPPPS’ Model – Part 1: Bridge-In

Hello SJSU Community!

It’s Dr. Rayna Friendly again, here today to tell you about a model of lesson design that I learned and taught during my graduate/post graduate degree, which I use regularly to enhance my university teaching! In fact, this is the model taught to myself, and many others throughout more than 100 academic institutions worldwide during an intensive 3-day training event called the Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW) (Day, 2004). The formation and use of the ISW has been documented, yest more research needs to be done. To date, the ISW has been found to be an effective way to transform instructor’s teaching in the classroom such that ISW participants were found to reduce their teacher-focused thinking in comparison to controls, as well as increase the number of active learning strategies used in their classrooms (e.g., Dawson et al., 2014; Macpherson, 2011). I hope to run the ISW at SJSU some day soon, but meanwhile let me tell you more about the BOPPPS model of lesson design!

‘BOPPPS’ is actually an acronym, which stands for the 6 basic components that are important to consider including when you are designing a lesson or workshop:

  • Bridge into the lesson
  • Outcomes for the lesson (as in Intended Learning Outcomes)
  • Pre-assessment of learners’ existing knowledge of those outcomes
  • Participatory Activities (as in Active Learning Strategies)
  • Post-assessment of learners’ knowledge of the outcomes
  • Summary of the lesson content

Note that these components can be used across the lesson once, or even multiple times if your lesson is divided-up into a few modules. Throughout my blog posts, I plan to describe the components of this model in more detail. For today, let’s delve deeper into the first component: The Bridge!

The Bridge-In component of the BOPPPS model reminds the instructor to include a segway into the content they plan to cover. Rather than jump right in, this encourages us to remember what it is like to be a novice, learning the material for the first time. (I don’t know about you, but I always found it so frustrating when my professors would forget to connect their lecture content to previously-discussed content or to real life in some way. I remember thinking “Why is he/she telling us this? Why is it important or relevant?“). Thus, including a bridge can help learners understand how the upcoming lesson content connects to their lives and/or to previous course content, in meaningful ways!

Some Bridge Ideas:

    • Start off with a DEMO that relates the lesson content to a real-life example
      • (e.g., I use the idea of proving the theory “Santa Clause true/real” vs “Santa Clause is false” when bridging into the topic of falsification in the Scientific Method)
    • Start off by telling learners an ANECDOTE or STORY about a past experience that relate back to the lesson content
    • Start off by SUMMARIZING where you left off last class before going into today’s lesson content
    • Start off by asking learners QUESTIONS or asking them to REFLECT on their personal experiences that relate to the course content

Look out for my following blog posts to learn more about the rest of the components of the BOPPPS Model!

 

(Note that these BOPPPS posts might be interspersed with content updates from the Teaching Community of Practice (TCoP), which I facilitate.) What is the TCoP, you ask?

  • The Teaching Community of Practice (TCoP) is a group for part- and full-time SJSU faculty (of all levels, across all departments), who are interested in enhancing their respective teaching practices. The TCoP will meet regularly, according to members’ schedules, to exchange strategies, tips and resources that have led to successful (and sometimes, less-than-successful) teaching experiences. Please fill out this form if you are interested in joining this community and you will be added to the groups’ mailing list. For inquires about the TCoP, please contact me at rayna.friendly@sjsu.edu.

 

 

REFERENCES:

Day, R., & the ISW International Advisory Committee. (2004). Instructional Skills Workshop: From grassroots initiative to international perspectives. Paper presented at the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Retrieved from http://iswnetwork.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Hand5_ICED.pdf

Dawson, D., Borin, P., Meadows, K., Britnell, J., Olsen, K. & McIntryre, G. (2014). The Impact of the Instructional Skills Workshop on Faculty Approaches to Teaching. Toronto ON: Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario

Macpherson, A. (2011). The Instructional Skills Workshop as a transformative learning process. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC.

Generous Thinking: Farewell Semester – Hello Summer Reading!

On the heels of my last post about Open Digital Pedagogy & FERPA and in line with a previous post, Live-Tweeting as Public Engagement, I would like to conclude my semester of guest-blogging for eCampus with a turn towards a summer read:

Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University by Kathleen Fitzpatrick (@kfitz on Twitter).

Fitzpatrick’s previous book, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the Future of the Academy, was built on her earlier blog of the same name, a blog that established not only a public representation of her work, but also a community of early academic bloggers who were struggling with the same ideas. With Generous Thinking, Fitzpatrick implores academia to expand outwards, to work in public, to work with the Public. And, for us, that means modeling this for our students in addition to bringing them along for the ride through our research, teaching them through active learning engagement, and articulating the value of education as more than a vocation.

Fitzpatrick queries:

“So it’s important for us to ask ourselves: Do we understand the people who are not on campus to be an audience–a passive group that merely takes in information that the university provides? Do we understand them to be a public, a self-activated and actualized group capable not only of participating in multidirectional exchanges both with the university and among its members, but also of acting on its own behalf? Or even more, do we consider them to be a complex collection of communities–not just groups who interact with one another and with us, but groups of which we are in fact a part? How can we shape this understanding in a way that might begin to create a richer, more interactive, more generous sense not just of ‘them’ but of the larger ‘us’ that we together form?” (8)

As we embark upon graduation season and watch many of our students ascend the stage, shake hands with various truly proud and enthusiastic representatives of SJSU, look out into the wide crowd of cheers, accept that marker of their success, and proceed out into the world —  have we given them the intellectual understandings to do the very thing that Fitzpatrick is asking of us in academia?

Those of you who have been participating in the eCampus professional development seminars, sessions, and lunch n’learn over the past year are taking up this challenge to teach through active learning strategies in such a way that students become life-long learners and the leaders within this larger community of “us” that Fitzpatrick implores us to embrace.

All of this community building is situated within values — what do we value in a master’s granting public university? What do you value?

I’ve learned a lot about my colleagues and shared values over my career here at SJSU, but what I didn’t realize is that we don’t all need to share the same values. We do, however, need to work towards respecting each other’s values. That point came clearly from Dr. Beronda Montgomery (“Mapping a Mentoring Roadmap and Developing a Supportive Network Strategic Career Advancement”), who I met at the HumetricsHSS workshop back in October 2017. Dr. Montgomery’s plant metaphors (see “From Deficits to Possibilities: Mentoring Lessons from Plants on Cultivating Individual Growth through Environmental Assessment and Optimization“) articulated the way in which I’ve been governing my career. At that workshop, groups were tasked with creating a set of values for “measuring” Humanities work. My group took Dr. Montgomery’s mentoring analogies to heart and created a plant that grows with the sun:

We struggled to articulate this messy non-linear visualization of values, but in the end, determined that they were all intertwined and propelled by “public good” — the very value that is the foundation of our state-funded, public university.

With all of the recent outcries about education failing our next generations, I counter with the recognition that on Monday mornings, people are busy searching the Internet to discuss plot development, character assassination, CGI dragons, Medieval tortures, monarchies, wartime strategies, and an 8-year long epic drama. Or, the excitement over the most recent solar eclipse witnessed with special glasses here in San Jose. Or the ethical dilemma with uses of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Or, the study of California’s devastating wild fires. All of this is discussed and studied here, on our campus. We are creating these conversations among faculty, among students, among the Public by the very virtue of being a public university graduating under-served communities, first-generation college students, among several other valuable and valued communities.

I’m a little far afield from digital pedagogy today in this final post. But, our pedagogical strategies rely upon our values and our passion in continuing to teach at this public institution. Digital pedagogy, flipped classrooms, active learning, high impact practices all allow for an inquisitive fascination with the evolution of the world.

“By finding ways to connect with readers and writers beyond our usual circles of experts, in a range of different registers, and in ways that move beyond enabling them to listen to us to instead allow for meaningful dialogue and collaboration, we can create the possibilities for far more substantial public participations in and engagement with a wide range of kinds of academic work” (135).

As we work publicly through all of these pedagogical practices, we model for our students how to engender this “larger ‘us’ that we together form.” Join me in congratulating them this week for their successful navigation of higher education and their continuing journey as that “larger ‘us.'”

Open Digital Pedagogy & FERPA

In these posts this semester, I’ve covered some big, sweeping topics — and continued that conversation in the Digital Pedagogy Workshop last month. As the semester begins to wrap up, there’s one or two final elements to using Digital Pedagogy that we haven’t covered. As we ask students to engage with High Impact Practices, participate in our RSCA activities, represent the public face of SJSU, we also need to consider the boundaries of openness.

What follows are a series of responses that the 3 authors of the introduction to Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities have discussed or experienced in our long journey towards completing this project.

[from DRAFT “Introduction” of Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, authored by Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, and Katherine D. Harris. Reference to draft version of May 1, 2019 — due for final digital, open access completion in 2019 on a searchable & user-friendly digital platform]

Continue Reading…

Digital Pedagogy Workshop @ SJSU – Video + Slides

Thanks to Jennifer Redd, eCampus hosted a Digital Pedagogy Workshop on April 9 for ~25 engaged faculty from a variety of departments and disciplines all over San Jose State University. Because the attendees were guaranteed to hail from a variety ofDigital Pedagogy expertise levels, I ran the workshop with multiple points of intervention and input captured with Session Notes in Google Docs. The primary purpose of the workshop focused on theorizing Digital Pedagogy instead of teaching to the tools. We eventually get around to that, but first we spent a lot of time theorizing about the uses of Digital Pedagogy.

Much of the definitions on these slides come from the in-progress draft Introduction for Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities (currently openly available in GitHub in its post-peer review and pre-user-friendly digital platform phase). The project is scheduled to be finalized with a brand new digital platform that will allow for users to save pedagogical artifacts and keywords to a private account along with being able to search and utilize tags (e.g., beginner, intermediate, advanced levels of Digital Pedagogy; assignments; syllabi, etc.). The final platform, being built by our publisher, the Modern Language Association, is due to be finalized along with the entire project and the editors’ introduction during Summer 2019. With 4 editors, 84 curators, ~700 artifact creators, the project provides a wide array of pedagogical materials for use in many disciplines, even those outside of the Humanities.

Digital Pedagogy Workshop from eCampus on Vimeo.

The slides are available on Google Presention.

The Lunch n’Learn gatherings are a terrific way to 1) meet faculty from across campus; and 2) enjoy a delicious lunch provided by eCampus. For other videos of lectures and engaging articles, check out the eCampus Resources page.

Now that we’ve met, what would you like to read about in the remaining 2 blog posts on Digital Pedagogy this semester? Leave a comment or email me directly: katherine[dot]harris[at]sjsu[dot]edu


For those interested in more about Digital Pedagogy throughout the California State University system, consider attending the Student Success Conference being held at SJSU April 15, 2019 (registration required), especially these panels:

Session S1C: Using Technology to Improve Student Success Poster Session

Location: Room 3B – Jennifer Redd, Moderator – Presentations  

  • Comparing three strategies for providing feedback on a research assignment, Amy D’Andrade  
  • Exploring the impact of optional Canvas modules in course design, Michael Vallerga  
  • Integrating Canvas in student teaching: A strategy for coherence and support, Dean Sexton  
  • Digital Storytelling in Asian American History, Apryl Berney and Soma de Bourbon

Session S3C: Flipping as a Pedagogy in STEM Classes

Location: Room 3B – Poster Session – Ravisha Mathur, Moderator – Presentations:  

  • How flipped learning meets the diverse learning need in a first programming class, ChrisTseng  
  • Flipping a General Physics class using Mastering Physics, Ranko Heindl  
  • Defining Student Performance Expectations for Engineering Mechanics of Materials, Kurt McMullin  
  • Observations from a Flipped Section of CE 95 – Statics, Steven Vukavich  
  • On the Road to Flipping, Raji Lukkor

Session S4C: eCampus Student Success Programs

Poster Session – Location: Room 3B – Jennifer Redd, Moderator – Presentations  

  • Exploring the impact of a flipped course redesign, Krissy Connell  
  • Incorporating a point-of-care instrument into existing laboratory exercises to expand and diversify exposure to laboratory tools, John Geing  
  • Investigating interventions to determine if stress levels among students can be reduced, Pamela Wells  
  • Beyond SOTEs: Exploring formative and summative assessment in a GE college classroom, Mei-Yan Lu  
  • Evaluating undergraduate nursing students confidence and anxiety speaking with patients. Sheri Rickman Patrick  
  • Including robots in class to increase student-instructor interaction and provide hands-on experiences, Wencen Wu  
  • Student engagement: A key to success in the classroom, Linda Mitchell and Amber Sylva  
  • Providing hands-on field/laboratory experiences using drones, Kimberly Blisniuk, Emmanuel Gabet, and Hollianne McClure

Session S5B: Innovations in Teaching

Poster Presentations – Location: Room 3A – Mark Van Selst, Moderator – Presentations  

  • Epidemiology in Action: Applied Research in the Classroom, Miranda Worthen  
  • Leveraging Technology and Design Thinking in Social Entrepreneurship: Course Re-design Project in BUS4 188, Yu Chen  
  • How can Business Simulation Games Enhance Student Learning in Revenue Management? Yinghua Huang  
  • Promising Results from massive FYE course model and Intrusive Student Success Interventions, Michael Randle

5:00 pm Flipped Workshop

Location: Room 4A – This is a ticketed event and is limited to 200 attendees