âInnovation.â What flashes through your mind when you hear that word? Maybe you think of technology mastermind Steve Jobs; maybe electric or driverless cars, or Amazon drones delivering purchases.
At șù«ÍȚÊÓÆ”, innovation extends beyond shiny new technologies. Sure, faculty embrace those, and use them for studentsâ benefit. But more importantly, they constantly pursue new teaching methods to give students a holistic education. Margaret Diddams, SPUâs assistant provost and professor of industrial and organizational psychology, calls it
âdeep learningâ â and itâs at the heart of the Universityâs strategic plan.
In 1990, Margaret Diddams explains, Ernest Boyer — president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching — directed educatorsâ focus to the study of teaching.
âThat scholarship was all about âwho I am as an instructorâ and âhow I manage a course,ââ she says. âBut in the last 15 years, that focus has shifted toward a scholarship of teaching and learning.â
The scholarship of teaching and learning, says Diddams, âis about asking âWhat do we expect from students?ââ
As innovations in scholarship of teaching and learning are put to work at SPU, classes become less about passing tests and more about collaborative connections. Faculty and their learning assistants are âflippingâ classrooms, tailoring courses toward interactive engagement as well as captivating lectures. They integrate field research and practice with study. Theyâre embracing community-oriented online education. And theyâre emphasizing a discipline central to teaching, learning, and the Christian faith: reflection.
âReflective students make connections, not just within their classrooms but across disciplines,â says Diddams. âAnd that is the definition of creativity: making connections where others have not. Deep learning happens when we make connections.â
These innovations are driven, in part, by standards of accreditation, which require programs to demonstrate that students are actually learning. But itâs also part of SPUâs mission to ensure that graduates are articulate and able to critique and apply information they learn. At Seattle Pacific, Diddams says, courses are increasingly designed to integrate student learning with their stories and vocations, equipping students for service to God and others.
âFor us, innovation isnât about being on the cutting edge. Itâs really about solidifying our core,â she says. âAnd as a Christian institution, SPU has always sought to transform.â
âThereâs a buzz through the music program,â about SPUâs new Nickerson Studios, the music programâs first-ever campus performance space, says Zachary Meyers â17. âThis building will get so much use.â
On a quick walk-through, youâll find choral and recital space, which seats around 100 listeners for small group performances. Curtains adjust acoustics so the roomâs inconspicuous 24-channel recording system captures every note. (Before, SPUâs faculty and students often used a performance space near campus, at First Free Methodist Church.) A small, thickly insulated studio nearby houses a shiny new drum kit.
âNickerson Studios has the potential to be one of Seattleâs best recording studios,â says Brian Chin, associate professor of music. âItâs going to be transformative for our students, and I predict big interest from the larger community wanting to use that space.â
The buzz seems justified. But greater innovations are taking place in methods of teaching and learning music at the University.
Learning assistants — which have rarely been employed in disciplines outside of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields — give Chinâs nine-unit, two-year aural skills sequence an advantage over other music programs. LAs are students trained by professors to help other students in a large class learn more by working in small groups.
With 14 LAs leading small groups, students get individual practice time and assessment every day, instead of the standard two or three times per quarter. Whatâs more, they have time to form small group ensembles, take piano exams, and practice conducting. Chin plans to share the nine LA learning modules on an open-content platform, so that Seattle Pacific can begin to âsteer the conversation nationallyâ in teaching these skills. And thatâs not all he plans to share. Incoming students sometimes have knowledge gaps that can slow class learning down, he says.
To address this, Chin is working with SPUâs office of to produce instructional videos on particular skills; students learn quickly, he says, when they have a visual guide.
Chin will make the videos available online, along with an open-source music theory textbook, at a new online Center for Talent and Creative Music. Twenty students will help Chin research the topic in a new class: âTalent and the Professional Musician.â
Meyers, a music composition major, was initially skeptical of Chinâs ambitions to involve him and his classmates in âthe national conversationâ on talent and music. âBut by the second class, I realized — heâs serious! Weâre going to be on the forefront of this research.â
For Chin, the goal of new facilities and learning innovations is clear: âWeâre developing a community of practitioners. At a traditional music school, you spend a lot of time in a practice room by yourself. It can feel lonely and intimidating. But the Center for Talent and Creative Music is a way that we can be together on our separate journeys with music.â
Kata Krueger â15 (left) talks with TC3 resident Lantz Rowland (center) and another student.
Madelyn Hogue â15 first felt a drive to serve the homeless in 2011, when she welcomed residents of Tent City 3 at âthe warming stationâ â the off-duty crew shell â and served them coffee and tea as she listened to their stories.
That was Seattle Pacificâs first time hosting Tent City 3, one of several area encampments sheltering people who are homeless.
When Hogue heard that Tent City 3 was returning to campus in 2014, she got involved further, joining other sociology students to conduct research under the direction of Associate Professor Karen Snedker and Professor Jennifer McKinney. Snedker and McKinney wanted to study the problem of homelessness, focusing on tent cities. But they wouldnât send their student researchers in cold â they trained them first.
Students read about systemic social problems during Autumn Quarter with Snedker. Then they studied research methods with McKinney. Four weeks into Winter Quarter, after weeks of getting accustomed to the presence of Tent City 3 on campus, they began interviews.
âIt ingrained in me what I had been learning,â says senior Elisa Raney, a global development major. âI gained a greater appreciation for the research process.â
Students quickly realized just how many myths powerfully influence social views about homelessness â blaming a personâs health or a personâs âsinfulâ past for their homelessness is common, rather than blaming social forces outside an individualâs control.
Studying can be a challenge, but interviewing total strangers can be even more daunting, even for sociologists. âEveryone was nervous â OK, terrified â during week one,â Snedker laughs. âBy the quarterâs end, students were saying, âThis is one of the hardest things I did, but Iâm so glad I did it!ââ
With interviews in, data gathered, and a lot of writing ahead, Snedker and McKinney are slow-cooking a few academic papers about this research. Sociology done right, says McKinney, is slow and rigorous work. âIn sociology we like to say that weâre making visible the invisible,â says McKinney. âWith Tent City 3 physically in front of us, these students confronted that reality.â
As myths began to dissolve, barriers between researcher and subject began to disappear. Senior Elisa Raney found herself in a casual chat with a Tent City resident about the price of cell phones and how womenâs pockets are never deep enough. âIt was just a mundane, ordinary conversation,â she says. âThatâs when I realized that I wasnât a student and he wasnât a TC3 resident anymore â we were just two people talking about pockets.â
âIt was stunning,â says Snedker. âStudents brought in their parents, their roommates, their friends. This has broad reverberations.â One student found that her father was reading her assigned texts; now, his Pioneer Square company is starting an initiative for the homeless.
Students didnât stop at Tent City 3. They traveled to the Washington state capitol in Olympia to meet with legislators during the annual Homelessness and Housing Advocacy Day, where they attended meetings and advocated for affordable housing.
âWhen I think about my time at SPU,â Hogue reflects, âI think that my experience on the Tent City 3 research team was the most formative and educational, because it applied what I was learning in the classroom.â
In an early fall meeting with a former student, Kara Gray — interim director of the Integrated Studies Program and an assistant professor of physics at Seattle Pacific — listened closely to a young woman describe her struggle to understand the behavior of light. But Gray was not attempting to set the student straight. Instead, she was learning from her former student how to better teach a complex concept.
Grayâs conversation with her student highlights a particularly effective application of the learning assistant model Chin is using. This particular LA was drawing from her freshman experience to help Gray and the LAs clarify concepts for a new class.
âLAs are some of my best sources of information on how students are doing,â says Gray. âA professor can lose that sense of what it was like to learn. Our assistants have taken these classes so recently that they remember exactly what itâs like.â
The LA program is particularly effective in the SPU physics program because of the coursesâ small-group, topic-focused structure. LAs encourage and facilitate group discussion, helping students who get stuck, and encouraging everyone to go deeper.
Research on LAs in STEM fields and other programs shows that this teaching model increases deep learning. Stamatis Vokos, professor of physics at SPU and chair of the National Task Force on Teacher Education in Physics, highlights another result: âLearning assistants learn the topic theyâre helping to teach much better. And theyâre getting professional training in getting into other peopleâs heads and figuring out how to help a group learn.â
Now a graduate student in the University of Rochesterâs physics department, Hannah Sabo â15 says that her LA experience at Seattle Pacific had a lot to do with listening to, and learning from, other students. âI have heard creative metaphors and been floored by the connections that students draw,â she says, and she now sees teachers and students as âequals who share in the learning process.â
Learning assistants are paid student workers who are appointed either by application or recruitment. They must also enroll in a weekly seminar on pedagogy for as long as they work in the program. LAs are different from undergraduate teaching assistants, Gray says: Theyâre in constant conversation with professors, always discussing better ways to teach and learn.
While the LA model is just catching on in departments around campus, SPUâs Physics Department has been using them for a decade, almost since the idea pioneered at the University of Colorado-Boulder. The idea should be a hit at Seattle Pacific, Gray says.
âSPU is committed to helping students, and it has support from the administration to try new things and to be innovative,â she says. âAlso, we have students at SPU who are interested in helping each other.â
Associate Professor of Education David Wicks uses Google Hangouts to teach Digital Education Leadership classes. Here, he talks with Ann Hayes-Bell, a student in the 2015 DEL cohort.
While Issaquah humanities teacher Annie Tremonteâs seventh-grade students were getting a lesson in digital citizenship last year, Tremonte learned some lessons of her own, thanks to SPUâs Digital Education Leadership (DEL) masterâs program.
Tremonteâs students partnered with a northern Virginia classroom to produce infographics and videos comparing the two school districts and surrounding communities, learning cultural and communication lessons through cross country collaboration.
Tremonte and her D.C. teaching partner were pleasantly surprised by their studentsâ progress in the âFour Csâ of 21st century learning: creativity, communication, critical thinking, and collaboration.
And Tremonte drew encouragement and insight through the process from her Seattle Pacific community under the guidance of David Wicks, associate professor of curriculum and instruction. He helped her think about ways to integrate technology in her classroom and creatively meet student learning standards.
âI was fortunate to be able to troubleshoot and problem-solve with my cohort and instructors in the SPU community,â says Tremonte, âand to work things out with students in real time.â
Teaching teachers in ways they can apply in their current positions — thatâs one of the goals of the DEL program as Wicks has envisioned it.
Much about online learning has changed since Seattle Pacific first offered online classes in 1999, but online courses still typically stick to readings, recorded lectures, and asynchronous discussion boards with a large number of students.
Wicks has met students who got masterâs degrees online without ever meeting other students or the instructors.
SPU, on the other hand, bypasses the massive open online course model to offer something different: a small, community-based program, capped at 15 students.
âOther institutions are actually going for âHow many possible people can we get in the same course?â Weâre looking at âWhatâs the right number of people to sustain a community?ââ Wicks says.
Wicks commits to meeting each student for coffee or a teaching observation. He occasionally visits classrooms virtually, through a Google Hangout, and uses the same technology to make sure students meet each other.
Tremonte feels close to the rest of her cohort. The students are all local, so they meet up in person along with virtual hangout meetings, she says.
Tech can get pricey, so Wicks is careful to think of strapped budgets by using simple, free tools like Google Classroom. âSimplicity makes them accessible,â says Wicks. âI want it to be easy for teachers to participate.â
This, he says, is consistent with SPUâs Christian vision. âAs Christians, weâre called to care about âthe widows and orphans.â In our world, those are the digital have-nots. Weâre addressing it by using open resources.â
Because of SPUâs innovation, Tremonte herself has become an innovator. Sheâs been appointed to a lead role with educational technology and has started a professional development program for teachers. She also uses a âbring your own deviceâ approach to classroom technology, which Wicks says works well.
âStudents in the DEL program want to be leaders in digital education,â says Wicks. âThey want to see the pedagogical use of technology and participate in it. So, wherever possible, weâre modeling that at SPU.â
Tremonte plans to have her next class of seventh-graders collaborate with students in India. And as her classâs global understanding and community expands, so will hers.