Teaching Strategies

Today was the final day of the teaching teaching spring class. We’ve been at it since January and have met 14 times. This means folks have devoted some serious time to coming together as a group to talk about their teaching and hopefully learn a few tricks. I started today talking about my design for the course, though of course, Roz designed too, and everyone who participated helped shape the course, either through conversations outside of the class or by their participation.

The design of this course was two fold:

1. To make the best use of the 14 hours we would have with everyone. (Aiming for active, meaningful classes.)
2. To not have any assignments or assessments. The goal here was to save time, since we were already taking so much, but also to help limit anxiety. Everyone starts things with the best of intentions, and several people mentioned that they wouldn’t mind assignments to help further their learning. However, knowing how semesters go, I didn’t want to put added pressure on anyone and I wanted to remove any barriers to attending class. This is because attendance was important for this particular course.
   1. This was because the design of the course required classroom participation. Everyone who teaches has something to say about teaching. I, as the one leading most of these sessions, was guiding the conversation through an instructional design lens. But everyone has something valuable to add and made the class richer. So, it was important to create an environment in which people would come, and limiting out-of-class work was a strategic decision to encourage attendance and participation.

The goals of the course were:

• To help create confidence
  • In the teaching we’re already doing.
  • For publishing in the SoTL; we’re doing really interesting and innovative work, and anyone teaching at ZSR has the ability to publish something in the SoTL. Hopefully this course helped give a framework and vocabulary for how to do so.
• To introduce some theory
  • Enough to be able to know why things the thing you’re already doing work (or don’t).
• To provide some tools
  • New strategies and ideas
  • Sharing information from different courses
• To let people know I’m here to help!
  • Really! If you want to chat about designing your course or class, or just adding in a few active learning exercises, I’d love to talk with you. If you have an idea for a professional development opportunity, I’d do that, too! And if you’ve heard enough from me, you know who is doing what from our course discussions, so you know who else on staff could help.

We also went through the list of topics covered in this course (which you can find in this blog) and discussed a few things people are interested in seeing in the future.

This “class” has been a fun one for me, and really rewarding. Thanks (again!) to everyone who participated and contributed to the program. I think we’ll see the benefits of our work over the next several semesters!

Today’s session was on the scholarship of teaching and learning. I really wanted to make sure to include it because this is something we’re all capable of doing right now and is nice to address after covering most of the content. I’m also saving the last class for wrap up and synthesis.

So, here are the slides:

If you have any questions, a lot of us have published and presented in this area. Feel free to ask for advice or collaboration!!

Announcements from the start of class:

• I’m planning to do a wrap up session for the swap and share. Don’t worry, you’ll still get to swap and share–I just want to make sure to have time to tie together all the threads we’ve started this semester. It’s gonna be a good class, please come if you can.
• Monday, May 11, at 10:00am we’ll have a session to share how we handle our lib100/20X classes. Each person will have time to talk about what they do, why they do it, and/or if it works. This will be a good chance to learn what others are doing, get ideas, and learn about how other people approach information literacy.
• Will have a workshop this summer on the practical application of what we’ve been discussing for course design. Watch for something from Giz or the PDC on this.
• Based on feedback, we’re looking at a model for next semester of a facilitated weekly discussion on the “nuts and bolts” of teaching. Of course, as with this semester, attendance isn’t required, but we want to make sure to provide this opportunity for the people who do want it. If this sounds good, we’ll start planning the logistics (schedule, how to get topics, how to get speakers, etc). At the end of the fall semester we can reevaluate and do whatever people would like (nothing, another teacher-led class, another facilitated discussion, etc).

Today’s powerpoint:

Notes from today:

• Formative assessment: clickers, end of class assignment, muddiest point, learning logs, weekly blog
• Summative assessment: EOG, big paper, annotated bibliography, final project, quizzes (depending on if graded and how used)
• Informal assessment measures performance, application, processes the students are going through
• Formal assessment measures performance against a benchmark, content mastery, ability to take a test, performance
• Objective assessment strengths include easy to grade, good for subjects with right answer (like math), good for skills-based work (like finding a book. Weaknesses include that it’s hard to create good questions, some things aren’t right or wrong.
• Subjective assessment strengths include the ability to see the big picture in the students’ work, easier to create assignments, open ended statements require students think of something to say. Weaknesses include grading time, consistency in grading, and can be hard for student to get started–it can be overwhelming. (Rubrics can help)

Questions? Leave them in the comments!!