By Lisa R. Baldi
Dr. Ike Shibley has been on a mission for almost two decades: to make learning more efficient. “When a business executive talks about making a process efficient, the shareholders applaud,” says Shibley. “Yet somehow when a college professor talks about making learning more efficient, critics often respond with jeers.” The assumption seems to be that humans are much more complex than any business process. Yet, counters Shibley, when a scholar examines learning, there is always some concern that studying pedagogy is not really worth the effort.
“The epistemological questions about what constitutes knowledge are becoming clearer,” he explains. “We are starting to understand that learning can be improved dramatically.” He points to three books released in 2014 that have raised many questions for him as an educator: How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why It Happens by Benedict Carey; Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel; and The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin.
Shibley, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Program Coordinator for the Science degree at Penn State Berks, is convinced that understanding the brain can lead to insights about teaching and learning. He knows that the best way to learn is to teach so he and Dr. Maureen Dunbar, Associate Professor of Biology and Program Coordinator for the Biology degree, created a Neurobiology Learning Community. Shibley focuses on the adult neurobiology while Dunbar focuses on the development of the nervous system. The duo also teaches a senior-level course on cellular signaling and one of the topics is neuronal signaling.
Although Shibley is not a neuroscientist by training, he believes that improvement in learning will emerge from educators who better understand neurobiology. He began his career in the hard sciences as a “bench scientist” studying the development of Protein Kinase C in chicken embryos treated with ethanol as a model for Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. He has moved into what many call a “soft” science: education research. But Shibley thinks the distinctions between “hard” and “soft” science are artificial and he states that he is working just as hard in his educational research as he did in his bench science.
Most recently, he has published peer-reviewed articles in using technology to improve course design. He worked with a fellow professor, Dr. Katie Amaral, and a team of course designers to revamp the college’s General Chemistry I course. (See related article on pg. 5.)
“Higher education has historically been about ‘telling,’ ” says Shibley. “Professors organize material, show students how to solve problems, and explain theories but the best professors know a better strategy: They lead students to create their own understanding through well written questions. The very act of answering a question changes the neuronal architecture and thus improves learning.” The idea that teachers “show and tell” has been shown in study after study to be inefficient, he goes on to explain. The illusion of learning comforts the learner but then exam scores are dismal. Instead, according to Shibley, students need to answer questions starting with easier ones and progressing to the most challenging.
Shibley recently attended the Teaching Professor Technology Conference. He is the adviser for the conference and is active with the planning. He also presented a talk at the Penn State Berks TEDx Conference titled “How Loving Your Students Might Mean Seeing Them Less.” His presentation asserted that teachers can meet with students less often while seeing higher grades because technology is altering how we think and how we learn.
The rapid pace of technological change is a curse and a blessing, according to Shibley. He believes that although there are a few downsides to technology, for the most part technology is improving the way we think.
He comments that after 19 years of teaching at the college level, all of them at Penn State Berks, he is still excited every single day about teaching. “I seem to never get bored,” he says, “and that is partly because I have yet to teach the same course the same way. Technology keeps improving and so does my pedagogical use of that technology. I’m always changing something about my course design and that’s really exciting.”
Asked what he thinks higher education will look like in another decade, he says that all students will be taking a mixture of face-to-face and online courses. More blended courses and more blended curriculum will emerge. “The reality is that students will soon be demanding access to information 24/7 and those teachers who
cannot provide the resources will be the ones who find their classes under-enrolled.”
The metaphor Shibley chooses is a wave: “There are large waves crashing on the shores of higher education. You either get on top of them or you get washed over. I’m trying to stay on the surfboard.”