UW-La Crosse
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Founding Director of the Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning at the University of UW- Lacrosse
Wisconsin Teaching Fellow, 1986-87
Co-Director, Wisconsin Teaching Fellows & Scholars, 1997-2000
If we don’t know how we learn, how on earth do we know how to teach?
L. Raphael Reif, President of MIT, March 23, 2017
Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the
student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.
Herbert Simon one of the founders of the field cognitive
science, Nobel Laureate, and University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University
Background. I am trained as a cognitive and educational psychologist. SoTL is the “field” where my academic background in the science of learning connects to my teaching practice and much of my professional work. I have been involved in SoTL for 35 years as a: 1) student of SoTL, 2) practitioner, 3) advocate, 4) program director, 5) trainer and consultant, 6) seminar leader and course instructor. The throughline that links these disparate SoTL experiences is my belief that understanding student learning is essential for deciding how to teach.
Before the scholarship of teaching. . . I was a Teaching Fellow in 1986, four years before Ernest Boyer introduced the concept of teaching as scholarly activity in Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. At that time, the program involved neophyte faculty members in a two-week residency where we read and discussed teaching and improvement of teaching. And we completed individual teaching projects during the year. I do not recall whether there were core principles to guide our discussions or work. We engaged in reflective practice but not the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Scholarship of Teaching. Boyer’s monograph published in 1990 received a lot of attention among higher education groups including the UW System Undergraduate Teaching Improvement Council (the forerunner of OPID). Initially, the scholarship of teaching was little more than a cool slogan and a fuzzy concept. We grappled with questions about similarities and differences among the scholarship of teaching, scholarly teaching, educational research, reflective practice, assessment of learning outcomes, and so on. Influenced by UTIC conversations I wrote a brief essay, Fostering a Culture of Teaching as Scholarship, published in The Teaching Professor, suggesting that for the scholarship of teaching to become accepted practice we needed: 1) compelling examples of this kind of work, 2) changes in the faculty reward structure to include this type of scholarship, 3) better methods for evaluating teaching and assessing learning, and 4) sustained faculty development. The essay was my beginner’s attempt to grasp the scholarship of teaching.
Learning-centered course portfolio. My first, original SoTL work involved inventing and developing a learning-centered course portfolio to document and evaluate my teaching and student learning in an undergraduate educational psychology course. A course portfolio is based on the premise that a single course embodies all the substance and complexity of teaching and learning – vision, design, interactions, outcomes and analysis. Briefly, a course portfolio includes 1) a teaching statement that describes one’s vision, intended learning outcomes, rationale for teaching practices and learning activities, 2) analyses of student work, 3) analyses of student feedback about their learning, and 4) a critique and summary of strengths and weaknesses in terms of student learning, reasons for learning gaps and possible changes to enhance student performance.
I developed a course portfolio concurrent with teaching my course; documenting and analyzing all manner of teaching and student work – informal and formal writing assignments, projects, class activities, small group discussions, exams, course evaluations, etc. I started with no hypotheses; instead, my goal was to identify patterns and processes of learning, strengths, gaps and anomalies. The portfolio was a panorama of many moving parts, a rich dataset, i.e., a complicated mess! But I cannot overestimate the effect on my thinking; engaging in the portfolio process helped me understand my teaching and student learning in a completely different way. I could zoom out and look at summative information, exam scores, course evaluations and zoom in to look at how students responded to discussion questions in one class period. I could track the progress of individual students through the course activities. Equally important, the portfolio revealed discrepancies and inconsistencies between my professed and actual practices. For instance, I claimed that the development of critical thinking was a top priority, but the way I evaluated students’ learning relied heavily on memorization. I found that despite a lot of rhetoric about the importance of collaborative learning, I still focused primarily on the individual work of students. Further, I discovered that I had several goals in my class that I did not address at all! The portfolio experience helped me clarify my basic assumptions and beliefs about teaching, reconcile those beliefs with my actual teaching practices, and identify flaws in the course that needed attention.
An added bonus was peer review. A colleague read my portfolio and gave me highly specific and contextualized feedback. The course portfolio was like a monograph; he knew what I was trying to do and why and how students responded to it. He pointed out aspects of student learning I had overlooked, offered alternative explanations of student work, and asked questions that had not occurred to me. It was insightful commentary, with specific, and useful recommendations, a form of feedback I’d never had in my teaching career. The course portfolio process was my first full-fledged SoTL activity.
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Ernest Boyer had coined the term, “scholarship of teaching” in 1990. In 1998 the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching launched SoTL as their major higher education initiative. Lee Shulman, president of CFAT, along with Pat Hutchings, Mary Huber, and an army of Carnegie Scholars built the scholarship of teaching and learning into a field of inquiry through national programs that produced and promoted SoTL among faculty members, institutions, and disciplines.
I was a direct beneficiary of the Carnegie initiative in 1998-99 as a participant in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL), a year-long immersive SoTL experience with a group of 15 colleagues from across the US. We read, wrote, discussed, debated, investigated teaching and learning, and presented our work in a variety of venues. Our CASTL projects were used as examples of SoTL in presentations and publications. My project focused on how students learn in a problem-based learning (PBL) context. This was my second, original SoTL work. Similar to the course portfolio, I documented and analyzed student learning throughout the course, focusing on how students developed understanding of the course concepts through problem solving. I was able to identify several learning episodes from the course and treat them like small scale experiments. Later I developed case studies based on these episodes that I used extensively in SoTL workshops. My Carnegie project was probably the first time I had a sense that I actually possessed SoTL expertise.
I learned something important about myself from my course portfolio and PBL experiences. As a teacher, I tended to adopt “innovative practices” assuming that these can automagically produce robust learning. More generally, I believed that effective teaching consisted of developing a repertoire of best practices. My SoTL experiences disabused me of these beliefs. For example, I used the best PBL recipe according to the PBL experts and still there were serious gaps in student learning. Observing the shortcomings of best practices helped me step out of the best practice mindset and shift focus to the idea that any teaching method can be “better” or more effective if teachers understand how students experience their teaching method, identify what facilitates and impedes their learning, and adapt their teaching accordingly.
The Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars Program. As a result of the Carnegie experience, I felt like I had a handle on how I could do SoTL in my own classes, and confident that I could talk sensibly to colleagues about SoTL. More specifically, it gave me the confidence to propose that the Teaching Fellows Program could and should be based on SoTL. Along with Tony Ciccone (the preeminent and longtime director of the Teaching Fellows Program), I co-directed the Teaching Fellows Program during the transition to the Teaching Fellows and Scholars Program. We redesigned the program based on the SoTL framework— different goals, readings, activities, expectations, projects. This was not a trivial undertaking; SoTL was still a new idea and there wasn’t a well-developed SoTL instruction manual. Surely the program has undergone many changes in the past 25 years, but the initial SoTL foundation was established in 1998-2000.
As SoTL became a systemwide initiative I had the opportunity to advocate for SoTL on my campus. In a rare moment of serendipity—being in the right place at the right time–I was on a committee that decided to use faculty development funds for small grants for scholarship of teaching and learning projects. I wrote the grant guidelines and did numerous information sessions with prospective applicants to explain and promote SoTL. These grants have supported hundreds of UW-La Crosse faculty members to engage in SoTL. After 25 years, the grants are still available at UWL.
Lesson Study: learning how students learn one lesson at a time. In 2001 I learned about a teaching improvement approach called “lesson study” practiced by K-12 teachers in Asia. In a nutshell, a lesson study involves a small group of teachers who identify a learning problem, goal or challenge among their students. The group then co-designs a lesson to address the problem. One member of the group then teaches the lesson in class while other group members attend to observe and collect “data” on students’ learning. After the lesson the group meets to analyze and discuss their findings. They revise the lesson and then do another iteration of the study (teach-observe-analyze-revise). The culmination of the lesson study is a report which describes how, when and why to teach the lesson, what to expect from students and how to facilitate their learning. These are distributed widely across the country. Japanese teachers know about and learn from one another’s work from their lesson studies.
Lesson study is a brilliant model of SoTL and I believed it could be adapted to higher education. With a grant from OPID in 2003, 16 UWL faculty members in economics, biology, psychology and English carried out lesson studies in our respective courses during the year. This was a proof-of-concept project to demonstrate that college teachers could engage in lesson study as SoTL. All the faculty participants wanted to continue doing lesson study, and most did. Subsequently, OPID adopted lesson study as an initiative and funded UWS faculty to engage in lesson study. As project director I was involved in training and supporting participants. During 2003-2011 I did lesson study training workshops for faculty on every 4-year campus and several 2-year campuses. In addition, Stout, Whitewater, the Colleges, and Green Bay developed their own campus-based lesson study initiatives. More than 500 UWS faculty members in 36 disciplines engaged in lesson study during that time. Unfortunately, when OPID lost grant funding, lesson study involvement dropped. At UWL we were able to continue supporting lesson study grants and 2024 is the 21st year of the Lesson Study Project. In 2011, I published a book about lesson study in higher education. The Lesson Study Project is my third, original SoTL work.
Translating the science of learning. In 2009 I became founding director of the UWL Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning (CATL). We adopted SoTL as a major emphasis of CATL, offering training sessions and grants to support faculty to engage in both SoTL and Lesson Study. In keeping with the SoTL idea of making teaching public, grant recipients present posters of their projects at the annual UWL Conference on Teaching and Learning. Many of those instructors have also published their work.
As Director of CATL I had the opportunity to establish my own SoTL niche doing translational research in the science of learning. Cognitive science has produced a robust body of knowledge about how students learn, what facilitates and impedes their learning, and how to support learning. Busy college teachers have little time and inclination to delve into research studies outside their disciplines.
My work focused on translating cognitive research to help teachers explore how students learn and how teachers can best support their learning. This included a science of learning seminar series, consultation on science of learning projects, and creating science of learning resources for teachers and students. The Science of Learning Initiative is my fourth, original SoTL work.
Worth noting is that work with faculty is no less challenging than working with undergraduates–in some ways it is more challenging. Teachers develop their own mental models of teaching and learning, often very different from the way cognitive scientists construe teaching and learning. Moreover, disciplinary differences in subject matter, learning goals, preferred pedagogies, and departmental norms create additional layers of complexity for translational research.
In retirement, I continue to do translational research in the application of cognitive research to improvement of teaching and learning. I author a website, Taking Learning Seriously, which provides extensive resources for teachers and students. I have created self-directed online courses and modules, e.g., the Cognitive Challenges of Lectures (teachers), How to Study More Effectively (students). I work with instructors to incorporate science of learning strategies in courses, e.g., recently in Introductory Biology and Organic Chemistry. Since 2022 I have helped facilitate a Science of Learning Summer Institute at UW La Crosse, where participants explore cognitive research and adapt relevant strategies in their teaching.
The idea that connects all these SoTL activities is that effective teaching depends on understanding how people learn and how to use that knowledge to inform teaching and improve learning. Admittedly, the throughline I have described is not very straight as my roles vis ‘a vis SoTL fluctuated over the years. I have been an SoTL consumer, learner, producer, administrator, advocate, trainer, consultant, and teacher.
My experiences with SoTL have influenced my understanding of and engagement with students in my classes and with the hundreds of faculty members I have worked with, consulted with, learned from, worked alongside, and taught in faculty seminars and training sessions. The SoTL orientation, especially the focus on learning has brought me closer to understanding what people experience when they try to learn something new. I call this “cognitive empathy,” being able to take the cognitive perspective of the learner (whether student or colleague), and to experience what it is like to be a novice and not understand the topic or task at hand. This perspective taking is essential for effective teaching and learning. We need deep knowledge of how students learn, what supports and interferes with learning as a basis for deciding how to optimize whatever teaching methods we use.
Biography:
William Cerbin, PhD. is Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Founding Director of the Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse. He is trained as an educational psychologist with an emphasis in language and cognition (PhD. The University of Chicago). In addition to teaching, he held positions as University Assessment Coordinator, Assistant to the Provost, and Founding Director of the UWL Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning. He was Co-director of the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars Program 1997-2000. In 1998-99 and 2003-2004, he was a Carnegie Scholar with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. His primary research interest is the cognitive basis of effective teaching and learning and translating cognitive research for teachers and students. He authors the website, Taking Learning Seriously, with extensive resources for teachers and students on how to improve learning. He also directs The College Lesson Study Project in which teachers improve their practice by jointly developing, studying and refining class lessons.
Selected SoTL Work:
Book:
Cerbin, W. (2011). Lesson study: Using classroom inquiry to improve teaching and learning in higher education. Routledge.
Websites:
Taking Learning Seriously – The science of learning for teachers and students
Lesson Study Project- Learning how students learn one lesson at a time
Lesson Study Archive – Access to 83 lesson studies completed by UWS faculty, 2011-2022.
Articles:
Haindfield, C., Cerbin, W., Baumann, D., & Schenck, H. (2024). Flipping the script in organic reaction mechanism instruction: Using generative pedagogies instead of lecture to improve learning outcomes. Chemistry Education Research and Practice. 25, 1311 – 1325.
Marshik, T., & Cerbin, W. (2023). Learning styles & cognition. In S. Hupp and R. Wiseman (Eds.) Investigating Pop Psychology Pseudoscience, Fringe Science, and Controversies: Improving Critical Thinking Skills. Routledge.
Cerbin, W. (2022, May). Cognitive challenges of effective teaching, Psychology Teacher Network Newsletter. https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/psychology-teacher-network/introductory-psychology/challenges-to-teaching
Chew, S. L., & Cerbin, W. J. (2021). The cognitive challenges of effective teaching. The Journal of Economic Education, 52(1), 17-40.
Cerbin, B. (2018). Classroom observation: Exploring how students learn. In N. Chick, (ed.). SoTL in Action: Illuminating Critical Moments of Practice. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.
Cerbin, W. (2018). Improving student learning from lectures. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 4(3), 151-163. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/stl0000113
Chew, S. L., & Cerbin, W. J. (2017). Teaching and learning: Lost in a buzzword wasteland. Inside Higher Education, December 5.
Marshik, T., Kortenkamp, K. V. Cerbin, W., & Dixon, R. (2015). Students’ understanding of how beliefs and context influence motivation for learning: A lesson study approach. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 1(4), 298-311. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/stl0000033.
Cerbin, B. (2013). Emphasizing learning in the scholarship of teaching and learning. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 7(1), 5.
Cerbin, B. (2007, March). A note from the guest editor: What is a lesson study? University of Wisconsin Teaching Forum: A Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (Special issue: Using Lesson Study to Advance Teaching and Learning).
Cerbin, B., Wilson, C., Cary, M., & Dixon, R. (March 2007). A lesson study of bystander intervention: Explaining behavior in terms of multiple variables. Teaching Forum. Madison, WI: UW System.
Cerbin, W. & Kopp. B. (2006). Lesson study as a model for building pedagogical knowledge and improving teaching. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 18(3), 250-257. http://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/pdf/IJTLHE110.pdf
Cooper, S., Hanmer, D., & Cerbin, W. (2006). Problem solving modules in large introductory biology lectures enhance student understanding. The American Biology Teacher, 68(9), 578-583.
Cerbin, W. (2002). Investigating student learning in a problem-based psychology course. PBL Insight 5(2).
Cerbin, W. (2001). The course portfolio. American Psychological Society Observer, 14(4).
Cerbin, W. (2000). Using PBL to teach for understanding of disciplinary knowledge. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 11, 191-202.
Cerbin, W. (2000). Investigating student learning in a problem-based psychology course. In Pat Hutchings (Ed.). Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 11-21.
Cerbin, W., Pointer, D., Hatch, T. & Iiyoshi, T. (2000). The development of student understanding in a problem-based learning educational psychology course. Carnegie Foundation Knowledge Media Laboratory.
Cerbin, W. (1996). Inventing a new genre: The course portfolio at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. In Pat Hutchings (Ed.), Making Teaching Community Property: A Menu for Peer Collaboration and Peer Review, Washington DC: American Association for Higher Education.
Cerbin, W. (1996). “Paul Arnold” A Case Study on Teaching and Learning. In Rita Silverman and William Welty (Eds.), Case Studies for Faculty Development, Center for Case Studies in Education, Pace University.
Cerbin, W. (1995). Connecting assessment of learning to improvement of teaching through the course portfolio. Assessment Update, 7(1), 4-6.
Cerbin, W. (1994). The course portfolio as a tool for continuous improvement of teaching and learning. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 5(1), 95-105.
Cerbin, W. (1993). Promoting a culture of teaching as scholarship The Teaching Professor, 7(3), 1-2.
Cerbin, W. (1993). Course portfolio: CQI teaching and learning tool. TQM in Higher Education. September, 2(9).
Tyser, R.W. & Cerbin, W. (1991). Evaluating scientific information in the popular media: Critical thinking exercises for introductory biology courses. Bioscience, 41(1), 41-46
Recent SoTL Presentations:
Cerbin, W. (2023). The cognitive challenges of lectures, Instructional Development Institute, Center for the Advancement of Teaching & Learning, University of Wisconsin—Green Bay
Chew, S.L. & Cerbin, W. (2023, January). The cognitive challenges of effective teaching, Instructional Development Institute, Center for the Advancement of Teaching & Learning, University of Wisconsin—Green Bay
Chew, S.L., Cerbin, W.J., & Beers, M. L. (August, 2022). The cognitive challenges of effective teaching, American Psychological Association Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, MN.
Cerbin, W, (2020, January). Designing Strategies to Promote Robust Learning, Workshop presented at the National Institute for Teaching of Psychology
Cerbin, W. (2020). Sixteen years of university lesson study: Sustaining a faculty learning model. Implementing Lesson Study for Professional Development in Higher Education. American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting.