UW-Milwaukee
Professor Emeritus of Communication
Wisconsin Teaching Fellow, 1995-1996
Wisconsin Teaching Fellows, 2002-2003
When I was a new professor, I suspect that I was an ineffective teacher for many of my students, in spite of the fact that I spent hours carefully preparing for each class. In retrospect, there were legitimate reasons for this state of affairs. I was fortunate to have had some fellowships in graduate school, which cut down my graduate teaching load, and most of that load was consumed with assignments to coach debate and forensics. My graduate school classroom teaching experience thus was limited to two basic courses (which I never taught again as a professor until I was probably fifteen years into my career doing a compressed summer session version of one of them). My one-year ABD job consisted of seven sessions of just one of those basic courses, public speaking, which is an animal unlike any other course and demands a skill set more similar to coaching than to teaching the large range of undergraduate and graduate classes that I would teach as a professor. So, I did not have a wide or deep range of teaching experience when I landed a tenure-track position. And, in the outstanding graduate programs that I attended in the 1980s, absolutely no one informally discussed, let alone taught about, how to teach; thinking in terms of learners and learning styles was definitely a bridge too far.
Thus, as a novice teacher I taught in the ways that I had been taught, a teaching style that luckily had suited my learning style: content-heavy with lectures and independent reading being the main delivery forms with learning assessed via exams and papers focused on demonstrating that one had absorbed that content but with little emphasis on application or creative expansion of it. For the students who also learned this way, my early courses were fine: logically organized and straightforward with structured lectures and detailed syllabi pointing students, I thought, to a clear path to a good grade. But the students who learned better by discussing or doing exercises or journaling or field studies or who were more visual learners or who had difficulty demonstrating their progress using exams struggled. Some let their feelings be known on teaching evaluations, but most could not explain what they needed or wanted, just that this was not it. So, I slowly experimented, by inches and without mentors or resources, trying to imagine and incorporate some small modifications, like developing a game of Jeopardy! to reinforce a foundational skill needed in my argumentation course, to see if they helped my students without getting us too far afield from the main course design. I had no idea that there was a whole body of literature on teaching and learning and still thought about things primarily as teaching challenges rather than conceiving of them as learning opportunities that might benefit all my students.
Getting involved with the SoTL people on my campus, attending the UW System’s Faculty College, and eventually becoming a Wisconsin Teaching Fellow and then a Wisconsin Teaching Scholar changed how I engaged with my students as learners with a variety of preferred learning styles, letting me better meet more of my students’ needs. As I grew, I gradually earned my regional professional association’s Outstanding New Teacher Award, my state professional association’s Outstanding College Educator Award, and the UW Regents Teaching Excellence Award. My SoTL research projects with UW-Milwaukee’s wonderful Center for Instructional and Professional Development and its assembled groups of Center Scholars offered opportunities to explore, discuss with other professionals who were also mindful of and excited about teaching and learning issues, experiment with, and evaluate the success of new approaches to helping my students (whether beginners, advanced undergraduates, or graduate students) learn and practice applying material that already excited me.
The course of this journey involved diverse projects. My earliest attempts still fell in the realm of “course improvement” or “teaching strategies” rather than systematic investigations, but even they yielded some insights, tips, and approaches that I could refine, write up, and share with other instructors across disciplines. For example, in one early problem-solving effort, I completely changed my approach to the first day of a once-a-week, two-and-a-half hour advanced undergraduate/Masters bridge course entitled “Communication and Social Order.” Instead of lecturing on the key ideas that we would be exploring throughout the semester, I revised the session to be much more bottom-up, active, and social, carefully re-structuring it with a sequence of short activities to lead us from students’ reflexive associations and personal experiences into the overarching themes and body of literature that the course would examine. To accomplish this development, we followed up their initial associations for core course concepts with large group discussion and analysis of patterns in those associations, directed short writes on their related personal experiences, and then small group discussions of those writings that abstracted and presented their common themes (and dissimilarities) to the class as a whole. This more concrete phase was followed by giving all students a few paragraphs of a handful of theoretical readings that were each accompanied by a question prompt. Next, small groups digested and presented their assigned reading’s highlights related to the course themes to the rest of the class. Finally, I gave a mini-lecture tying all phases of the process together and touring the students through the syllabus’s course plan and assignments to show how we would grapple with the central communication questions raised by our session. This incremental process actively involved students and helped them realize that we all have some experiential basis from which to engage and evaluate the adequacy of the theories that we would explore for shedding light on pressing communication issues that we regularly encounter. The revision was a definite improvement and set the stage for more successful semesters, yet it was still based in trial and error without much theoretical guidance.
As I progressed in my SoTL work, my projects became more grounded in relevant literature and less focused on just improving my and my students’ experiences, aiming to gather evidence that would more systematically inform my and others’ teaching and learning. For example, I experimented with including a variety of scaffolding and active learning strategies that successfully leveled the playing field between majors and non-majors in an upper-level General Education Requirement (GER) argumentation course and helped more students better master the material than had been the case in previous semesters when I had not incorporated those strategies. The evidence (both blind professional evaluation of performance on the pre- and post-measures and students’ self-analysis of their relative performances on those measures) showed that the vast majority of the students measurably improved their argument skills and could articulate why and which activities had most helped them. Even the few students who did not show improvement on the particular pre- and post-measures demonstrated in practice that they could successfully argue the point that, counter to this evidence, they had in fact improved their skills, showcasing their abilities to use reasons, evidence, and refutation.
In another SoTL project, I had the opportunity to test whether the significantly more intense exercise of a range of learning strategies produced transferable student understanding of general academic skills and observably better learning outcomes for new Masters students. In this case, I was teaching the introductory proseminar for all Communication Masters students, whether pursuing quantitative, qualitative, or critical methods and regardless of the Communication content area in which they hoped to specialize (e.g., Rhetoric, Interpersonal, Organizational, Intercultural/International). A department-level curricular revision changed this proseminar from a one-credit course to a three-credit one, and I taught both the last one-credit version and the first three-credit offering. With the support of the department’s graduate faculty, I devised a plan to cover approximately the same amount of “content,” but to do so using a much wider variety and number of different learning strategies to help prepare the students with more advanced critical thinking, critical reading, effective questioning, advanced study, and academic writing strategies to use in their graduate studies, regardless of content, than the standard one-credit course had involved. According to the evidence gathered, which included retrospective student focus groups as the students completed their programs three semesters later, the changes seemed to much better equip students for their diverse graduate studies with some finding them positively transformative.
One additional SoTL project, this one a group effort, collected and thematically analyzed 142 students’ metaphors for their effective and ineffective learning experiences. Three major themes emerged from the analysis: Connection/Disconnection, Empowerment/Disempowerment, and Engagement/Disengagement. The vividness and emotional charge of the students’ metaphors were palpable and a rebuke to anyone who assumes that students are invested only in the outcomes (e.g., a grade, a degree) but not also in the processes of their higher education. While this study did not involve outcome or performance-based measures, its clear lessons for instructors included the importance of listening to students’ own voices on how they experience teaching and learning and the importance of including multiple and varied types of teaching strategies and learning opportunities for each major goal of any course to maximize students’ chances of experiencing connection, empowerment, and engagement with the material and their learning community.
In reflecting on my career, I am so grateful for the growth opportunities and relationships provided by OPID’s Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars and Faculty College as well as by UW-Milwaukee’s Center for Professional and Instructional Development. They have enriched my thinking and my teaching in ways that hopefully have benefited my students and, with respect to the graduate students who adopted or improvised on some of the strategies that they experienced in my courses and carried them into their own classrooms, their students.
Biography:
Communication Professor Emeritus Kathryn M. Olson researches and taught in the areas of rhetorical criticism, argumentation, American public address from 1945-1989, televised presidential debates, Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, and rhetorical leadership. She spent 30 years of her tenured career at University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, where she developed and led the Rhetorical Leadership Graduate Certificate/Concentration Program for approximately 20 years. At various points, she also served as Chair, Graduate Director, and Undergraduate Director. She published dozens of essays and won numerous awards for research and teaching, including the UW Regents Teaching Excellence Award (2006). Olson was a Wisconsin Teaching Fellow (1995-1996), a Wisconsin Teaching Scholar (2002-2003), and twice a Fellow at UWM’s Center for Instructional and Professional Development (2001-2002, 2006-2007). Prior to her stint at UWM, Olson taught in tenured positions at University of Wisconsin – Madison and University of Alabama – Huntsville. Her undergraduate degree in Communication is from University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire, and her M.A. is from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned her PhD from Northwestern University.
Selected Teaching and Learning Scholarship:
Olson, K. M. (2009). Assessing student learning and perceptions in an upper-level General
Education Requirement argumentation course. International Journal for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 3. http://academics.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/v3n1/articles/PDFs/Article_Olson.pdf
Olson, K. M. (2009). Assessing student learning and perceptions in an upper-level General
Education Requirement (GER) argumentation course based on comparisons of performance and self-evaluations of Communication majors and non-majors. In C. M. Schroeder (Ed.) From speculation to evidence: Examining student learning and perceptions in General Education courses (pp. 33-46). University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee Center for Instructional and Professional Development.
Ferrante, K., Olson, K. M., Castor, T., Hoeft, M., Johnson, J. R., & Meyers, R. A. (2008).
Students’ metaphors as descriptors of effective and ineffective learning experiences. Practice and Evidence of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 3, 103-128.
Olson, K. M. (2007, November). Student perceptions of how and why an argumentation course fulfills its GER learning objectives. National Communication Association 2007 Convention, Chicago, IL, USA.
Castor, T., Ferrante, K., Hoeft, M., Johnson, J. R., Meyers, R. A., & Olson, K. M. (2007,
March). Metaphors for teaching and learning in the first year experience. UW System Office of Professional and Instructional Development 2007 Conference, Madison, WI, USA.
Olson, K. M. (2006, March 24). Designing for deeper understanding: Critical reflections on the value of participatory learning at the Master’s level. Teaching Forum. http://www.uwosh.edu/programs/teachingforum/public_html/?module=displaystory&story_id=683&format=html
Olson, K. M., Castor, T., Ferrante, K., Hoeft, M., & Johnson, J. R. (2005, November).
Investigating students’ positive and negative metaphors for teaching and learning. National Communication Association 2005 Convention, Boston, MA, USA.
Hoeft, M., Johnson, J., Olson, K. M., Castor, T., & Ferrante, K. (2005, October). Student metaphors for effective and ineffective learning. Second International Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Conference, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Olson, K. M. (2005). Using “investment writing” on the first day of class to enhance student involvement in learning. The Successful Professor, 4(4), 5-7.
Olson, K. M. (2005). This is Jeopardy!: Reinforcing basic categorization skills. The Successful Professor, 4(2), 6-8.
Olson, K. M. (2005, April). Active learning and practice at the Master’s level in Communication.
UW System Office of Professional and Instructional Development 2005 Conference, Madison, WI, USA.
Olson, K. M. (2003, November). Testing participatory learning strategies in M.A.
Communication proseminars: The students’ feedback. National Communication Association 2003 Convention, Miami, FL, USA.
Olson, K. M. (2003). Using comparative practice to test the veracity of learning theories designed
to promote “deep understanding”. In C. M. Schroeder & A. A. Ciccone (Eds.) Learning more about learning (pp. 39-49). University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee Center for Instructio