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martes, 15 de julio de 2014
10 Best Teaching Practices I've Observed
This article is intended to share best teaching practices that great teachers display in the classroom. The author conducted over 150 classroom observations during a five year period.
Lessons Learned Can Lead to Great Teaching
As a former Dean and VP of Academic Affairs I made it a habit to go into classrooms to observe faculty with the goal of improving both teaching and learning. I think I completed over 150 classroom observations over a 5-year period and I learned a lot about the teaching strategies that effective teachers use to motivate students.
Now that I’m a full-time professor I try to integrate many of these practices into my own teaching. I owe much of my teaching success to what I learned from my class observation visits. The intent is to share these practices with current and future college instructors to enhance the teaching and learning experience in our classrooms. Although I observed many more outstanding teaching practices, I've only included 10 in this article.
The Instructor Provides a Road Map for the Student
The instructor provides an overview of what the class will cover through the class learning objectives. Learning objectives let students know the skills and knowledge that will be taught in a particular class. Think of them as a road map to follow. This is typically accomplished by the instructor distributing a clearly written syllabus to students. A well written course syllabus is a very effective learning tool, that helps students prepare for the class, locate the resources that are available to them, understand the goals of the class, and the philosophy of the instructor (Parkes and Harris, 2002).
The Instructional Activities Support the Learning Objectives
The instructor links instructional activities to course learning objectives. This practice helps make the lectures appear logical and well-organized. Even the handouts result in a teachable moment. Whether the instructor uses a film, invites a guest lecturer to speak, requires group presentations, or facilitates a class discussion, students can observe how each particular instructional activity supports a specific course learning objective. As a result they are more likely to retain such information, (Slattery and Carlson, 2005).
The Instructor Uses the Entire Classroom Space
The instructor circulates in the classroom to check all students' performances. This prevents students from internet surfing or talking in the back of the room. It helps keep students engaged and when combined with discussion questions, it helps to create an interactive learning environment as opposed to a passive one.
There is nothing that motivates students more than knowing that the instructor is actively participating in the lesson. Lack of interest or enthusiasm on part of the instructor can easily lead to lack of interest on the part of the students. Furthermore, by moving around, instructors make themselves more approachable, and less intimidating as they occupy the same physical spaces as their students, rather than always maintaining a distance by standing at the podium or the front of the class.
The Instructor Makes The Material Relevant
The instructor provides relevant examples, including real-world experiences and demonstrations to illustrate concepts and skills. S/he intentionally makes a connection between the content and the student's life. Critical pedagogue and noted scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995), while analyzing classroom practices of successful teachers, notes that successful teachers utilize students' own cultural practices as a learning tool. One teacher used rap music to teach poetry and helped students understand literal and figurative meanings with the kind of music they were interested in. Great teachers always find a way to make the material relevant.
Instructor Helps Students Develop Superior Learning Skills
The instructor uses instructional strategies that encourage the development of critical thinking, problem solving, and performance skills. The teacher asks questions that require students to synthesize, analyze, and evaluate information. Great teachers question students about their ideas, and the reason why they think a certain way in order to make them evaluate their own beliefs and the extent to which their ideas are a product of thorough research about something or unfounded beliefs passed on by family and friends. Hynd (1999) suggests using multiple instead of single texts, to teach history for instance, in order to allow space for multiple narratives.
Students Learn to be Responsible for Their Own Learning
The instructor encourages students to be engaged in and responsible for their own learning. S/he challenges and motivates students to achieve at higher levels. The teacher communicates to all students their progress so they know where they stand grade-wise at any moment in the semester. When there is a guest speaker the instructor requires students to develop questions in advance. S/he has students go to the white board to demonstrate their knowledge in math and accounting classes.
Students who are actively engaged in the material they are studying tend to learn more. One way of promoting interest and to get timely feedback from students is to encourage them to keep a journal about the class (Park, 2003). Such a tool can provide useful feedback for the instructor and help the student to improve and understand their own learning issues pertaining to the subject matter.
The Teacher Re-Teaches When Necessary
The instructor sums up the learning objectives and answers any lingering questions students may have. The teacher re-teaches when necessary. The instructor makes him/herself approachable so that the students can get the most out of the classroom experience. There are subtle cues by which students can get more comfortable in the classroom, such as receiving encouragement upon asking a question, not being chastised for a question that is too 'simplistic', being encouraged to inquire when they don't understand and the willingness of the teacher to repeat themselves often and upon request from the student.
The Instructor Gives Every Student a Chance to Excel
The instructor treats all students in a fair and equitable manner. S/he tries to involve the whole class; doesn't just call on any particular group of students based on gender, race or ethnicity, and offers both shy and extroverted students opportunities to excel in the classroom. Maintaining an equitable, fluid and fair teaching relationship with all students is a key practice to discourage any unnecessary competition in the classroom (Ladson-Billings, 1995). This sometimes involves switching the teacher-student role.
A diverse classroom means different ways of learning, and in order to encourage everyone to be engaged in the classroom, great teachers are flexible in accepting different modes of participation. Not every student will be a good public speaker, but that doesn't mean that they might not have good ideas to share. For those who might be too shy to speak up in class, there can be alternative ways to express their opinions and still be part of the class discussion, such as through an online discussion forum.
Instructor Provides Timely Feedback to Help the Student Grow Academically
The instructor provides supporting feedback after an incorrect response by probing, repeating the question, giving a clue, or allowing more time. S/he asks higher order thinking questions and allows appropriate wait time after the question is posed. Great teachers set aside time for students who are still struggling with a concept to get the assistance they need to understand it. This practice allows the instructor to collect student feedback on a regular basis to determine what was learned and what might have been confusing.
Students need to be challenged academically and they should be expected to meet high standards, because unless the teacher expects a high quality of work from them, they may not produce a high quality of work. Part of that process requires the teacher to provide excellent feedback, and give very specific comments so that students can improve their work.
The Instructor Keeps Students Engaged and Interested
The instructor uses observable techniques to gain and maintain student interest and attention. The best technique I observed was instructors simply displaying plain-old enthusiasm for teaching. That's contagious and it keeps students interested. Other techniques worth noting include demonstrating good rapport, using students' names, maintaining good eye contact, and maintaining a good voice volume. These are things that any instructor can emulate.
Research suggests that student interest has a positive relationship with learning. When students are interested in the material they tend to understand it better. Shcraw et al. (2001) stresses the importance of well-organized texts to peak students interest. Getting feedback from students and incorporating their ideas into the material is another way great teachers promote and maintain student interest in the course material.
Conclusion
Good teaching practices help produce students who excel academically as well as who can engage critically with the world around them; and who are not merely able to reproduce what their text books tell them, but to develop a critical sociopolitical understanding of their world.
The above practices are aimed at providing a framework for achieving the most out of a classroom experience and for creating a safe environment that promotes opportunities for mutual understanding and learning across students of diverse backgrounds. I hope you found them helpful
References
Hynd, C. R. (1999). Teaching students to think critically using multiple texts in history. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 42(6), 428-436.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). But that's just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory into Practice, 34(3), 159-165. Retrieved from http://edt2.educ.msu.edu/DWong/Te150S10/CourseReader/LadsonBillingsButThatsJustGoodTeaching.pdf
Park, C. (2003). Engaging students in the learning process: the learning journal. Journal of
Geography in Higher Education, 27(2), 183-199. Retrieved from http://www.lancs.ac.uk/people/gyaccp/cjgh_27_2_05lores.pdf
Parks, J., & Harris, M. B. (2002). The purposes of a syllbus. College Teaching, 50(2), 55-61. Retrieved from http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~coesyl-p/syllabus_cline_article_2.pdf
Schraw, G., Flowerday, T., & Lehman, S. (2001). Increasing situational interest in the classroom. Educational Psychology Review, 13(3), 211-224. Retrieved from https://www.msu.edu/~dwong/CEP991/CEP991Resources/Schraw-SituationalInterest.pdf
Slattery, J. M., & Carlson, J. F. (2005). Preparing an effective syllabus: current best practices. College Teaching, 53(4), 159-164. Retrieved from http://learn.quinnipiac.edu/quonline/cdd/development/Slattery_2005.pdf
6 Tips for Using Big Data to Hunt Cyberthreats
Ask 10 different people what big data is, and you may get 10 different answers. For the sake of this article, big data refers to the mining of usable information from the large amounts of data being created around the world every day. While companies look to take advantage of all this data to improve operations, increase sales, and lower costs, many are discovering that it can also be used for security by offering a broader view of risk and vulnerabilities.
Big data offers the ability to analyze massive numbers of potential security events and make connections between them to create a prioritized list of threats. With big data, disparate data can be connected, which allows cyber security professionals to take a proactive approach that prevents attacks.
In today’s complex network environments, Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) and other cyberthreat eradication may be accomplished by leveraging intelligence from data providers who invest time and materials into searching for, finding, and identifying where threats are coming from and to which IPs and URLs they are talking to.
To use this approach against cyberthreats, appliances should be monitoring threat feeds from trusted providers for indicators of compromise (IOCs), including big data feeds like domain name systems (DNS) feeds, command and control (C2) feeds, and black/white lists, in order to correlate and hunt threats in a data set.
Here are six tips for using big data to help wipe out cyberthreats in your organization. You can start with these six data feeds:
DNS feed
DNS data feed can provide lists of newly registered domains, domains commonly used for spamming, and newly created domains. All of these lists can be incorporated into black and white lists, and all of them should be null routed and logged for further analysis.
DNS data feed can provide lists of newly registered domains, domains commonly used for spamming, and newly created domains. All of these lists can be incorporated into black and white lists, and all of them should be null routed and logged for further analysis.
Using the networks own DNS servers to check outgoing queries would yield domains that are not resolving. The fact that any of this is occurring could mean you have discovered a domain generation algorithm (DGA). All of this information can be readily used in the fight to defend your company’s network. One other gem here is that the incident response team members would have the data they need to track down the suspect machine -- the LAN data. Here’s yet another reason to log all of the LAN traffic possible.
C2 systems
Incorporating C2 data will provide black lists of IP addresses and domains, and there are plenty of these lists out there. Under no circumstances should network traffic be reaching out to known C2 systems from a corporate network. Should the network have an incident response team with time to investigate cybercrime, this would be a good place to relocate an infection over to one of the network honeypot machines.
Incorporating C2 data will provide black lists of IP addresses and domains, and there are plenty of these lists out there. Under no circumstances should network traffic be reaching out to known C2 systems from a corporate network. Should the network have an incident response team with time to investigate cybercrime, this would be a good place to relocate an infection over to one of the network honeypot machines.
Threat intelligence
There are IP address and domain reputation feeds that may be used to help determine if an address is likely safe or not. Some feed providers return a binary answer. For example, a "go" or "no go." Some more modern feed vendors are beginning to reply with threat-level indicators.
There are IP address and domain reputation feeds that may be used to help determine if an address is likely safe or not. Some feed providers return a binary answer. For example, a "go" or "no go." Some more modern feed vendors are beginning to reply with threat-level indicators.
For example, an IP address may be evaluated and the answer would contain a "threat rating" instead of a binary response. The individual appliance managers could then decide what level of risk they were willing to accept on their networks based on the threat rating and scale being used.
Network traffic logs
There are plenty of vendors out there that offer appliances that will log all of the networks traffic or even just parts of it. When using big data to hunt threats, it is very easy to get lost in the noise and the day-to-day work cycles. However, to hunt threats effectively and validate the work being done, a log of the network traffic, in some fashion, would be a basic requirement. This log would also aid in analysis of a data breach.
There are plenty of vendors out there that offer appliances that will log all of the networks traffic or even just parts of it. When using big data to hunt threats, it is very easy to get lost in the noise and the day-to-day work cycles. However, to hunt threats effectively and validate the work being done, a log of the network traffic, in some fashion, would be a basic requirement. This log would also aid in analysis of a data breach.
At least one honeypot
Honeypots can be effective in identifying malware targeting a particular network. The implications here are tremendous. Additionally, the payloads dropped could have signatures made for them and then be hunted on other LAN machines, and monitor the LAN for similar network traffic.
Honeypots can be effective in identifying malware targeting a particular network. The implications here are tremendous. Additionally, the payloads dropped could have signatures made for them and then be hunted on other LAN machines, and monitor the LAN for similar network traffic.
This information is priceless in the case of a targeted attack that may not have been detected by any of the antivirus (AV) vendors. This means your AV software and appliances would not yet know of this attack vector. If they are unable to identify it themselves, there is no protection for the LAN.
Data quality matters
Finally, it is important to call attention to the data feed itself. There are lots of vendors selling data. The quality and precision of this data must be of the utmost concern. For this reason, it is critical that organizations develop in-house data evaluation teams that can effectively raise questions from a mile-high perspective about vendor data quality. For example:
Finally, it is important to call attention to the data feed itself. There are lots of vendors selling data. The quality and precision of this data must be of the utmost concern. For this reason, it is critical that organizations develop in-house data evaluation teams that can effectively raise questions from a mile-high perspective about vendor data quality. For example:
- How recently was the most recent data added?
- Are significant sample sets available during evaluations?
- How many new entries are added daily?
- Is all or part of this data available freely?
- How long has the vendor been collecting this data?
- How large is its team?
- Can we see a sample contract? (The terms should be no more than a year at a time.)
Undoubtedly, security breaches and fraud incidents will continue to make headlines. Even though organizations are taking steps to address APTs and other attacks, the fact remains that traditional security technologies lack the sophisticated capabilities necessary to detect and protect against such attacks. By utilizing big data, organizations can create more robust threat and risk detection programs -- and prevent malicious activity on a wider and deeper scale.
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