Fall 2016 Workshops

In this workshop, participants learn how to be more transparent to our students about our goals and expectations for their learning. Participants look at examples of assignments that had been redesigned to be more transparent to students and then engaged in peer review of each others’ assignments. The goal for participants is to gain practical strategies for creating transparent assignments and ideas for implementation.

Classroom discussions can help students develop critical thinking, perspective-taking, and discourse skills. But, how can we do so with rigor without censoring dissenting voices? The goal of this workshop is to help participants gain practical strategies for facilitating classroom discussions, especially on difficult topics, by learning how to work with students to establish conditions for these discussions and how to navigate common issues that can arise.

Link to PowerPoint slide (courtesy of Vijay Pendakur): http://bit.ly/samplenorms (click on “Download” button)

Collaborative learning (sometimes referred to as group work or cooperative learning) involves coordinating groups of students to work on a common task. It can be a great strategy to boost student motivation and engagement in critical thinking, problem-solving, and perspective taking. In this workshop, participants learn about the benefits of collaborative learning and some common structures for setting it up. They also gain effective strategies for planning, implementing, and assessing group work and dealing with common issues that arise when students work in groups

Spring 2017 Workshops

Do you assign papers, presentations, and other projects that you find challenging to grade? Whether you already use rubrics or not, this workshop is designed to help faculty create useful rubrics that will benefit both you and your students. Participants learn how to create more descriptive rubrics that assess the things that you care about, and how to use to use rubrics to help students improve their work and enhance their learning. Our goal was for participants to walk out of the workshop with at least one new or improved rubric that they can use in their classes.

The Harkness Method is way of orchestrating discussion in class that encourages equitable and meaningful participation from all students with minimal participation of the instructor.  The goal of the workshop is for participants to gain more strategies for increasing student engagement and autonomy in discussion-based courses, even if they don’t choose to adopt the Harkness Method.

Like it or not, copyright laws and fair use exemptions are important considerations in many aspects of faculty work, such as choosing readings for a class, curating student work for public presentation, or producing their own scholarly and artistic works. This session covers the basics of fair use and copyright in all of these settings and how to model ethical and responsible behavior for our students.

Workshop Materials: Slides & Handouts

Fake news is now in the news. How do we help students discern between reliable and unreliable information? And, how do we do so in a way that connects to our discipline-specific teaching? During this workshop, participants gain tools to address the critical evaluation of news and journalism with their students in a way that equips them to evaluate all information, in and outside the classroom.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a set of principles that help instructors design their courses to better meet the needs of diverse groups of students, while simultaneously reducing the need for adaptations to overcome barriers for individual students. In this workshop, participants learned how to apply UDL principles to create courses and assignments that allow students multiple ways to acquire information, demonstrate what they know, and/or engage with the course material.