These workshops focus on practical, concrete strategies for common teaching tasks, challenges, and opportunities.  These sessions draw on research-based best practices from the literature on teaching and learning and help participants consider ways to apply those best practices in their teaching.

Teaching Workshops are typically a mix of presentation, large group discussion, small group activities, and times for individual reflection.

Spring 2012 Teaching Workshops:

• Tell and Show: Why and How to Use Images in Presentations
  
• Teaching with Clickers
  
• Student Incivility
  
• Grading Effectively & Efficiently
  
• Getting Ready for Review
  
• Assessing Student Learning
  

Tell and Show: Why and How to Use Images in Presentations

Date & Time: Wednesday, January 25, 4:10-5:30
Facilitator: Derek Bruff, Director & Rhett McDaniel, Educational Technologist
Format: Teaching Workshop
Audience: Faculty, Graduate and Professional Students, Post-docs, and Staff

Be sure to bring your laptop or other portable computing device, as this workshop requires participants to browse the Internet.

Our brains are wired to rapidly make sense of and remember visual input.  How might we tap into our students’ ability to think visually when teaching?  What roles can photographs, illustrations, or graphics play in learning?  A well-designed visual image can yield a much more powerful and memorable learning experience than a mere verbal or textual description. This session touches on both the theory and practice of using images. First, we’ll explore how you can use visual images to help your students comprehend and remember key concepts, understand complex information and relationships, and see the “big picture” in your course. Then, we’ll share recommendations for sources where you can find images to use in your presentations and demonstrate ways you can manipulate them to fit your needs. You’ll also learn about the common image file types and the essentials around image size and resolution. After attending this session, you’ll be able to create more visually useful presentations and think about ways to use visual tools as part of your class.

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Teaching with Clickers

Date & Time: Thursday, February 2, 4:10-5:30
Facilitator: Dan Morrison, Graduate Teaching Fellow
Format: Teaching Workshop
Audience: Graduate Students and Post-docs

Classroom response systems (“clickers”) are technologies that enable teachers to rapidly collect and analyze student responses to multiple-choice (and sometimes free-response) questions during class.  With clickers, instructors can engage in many activities that promote active and collaborative learning in large and small classes, including lecture courses.  The session includes a hands-on demonstration of how clickers work with PowerPoint, and a discussion of the pedagogical opportunities and challenges associated with their use. The workshop will explore questions and activities that make the most of these systems, as well as solutions to common challenges involved in teaching with clickers. During a portion of the workshop, participants will share and discuss ideas for clicker questions and activities in discipline-based breakout groups, so if you’ve used clickers yourself, bring a few ideas to share with your colleagues.

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Student Incivility

Date & Time: Monday, February 6, 4:10-5:30
Facilitator: William Hardin, CFT Graduate Teaching Fellow
Format: Teaching Workshop
Audience: Graduate Students and Post-Docs

This session will explore how instructors can manage incivilities in the classroom-distracting behaviors such as “grade-grubbing,” cheating, rudeness, inattention due to laptops and other media, and “hot moments” of contention or discomfort. We will consider current research, including the impact of incivilities on students and faculty, and suggest strategies for returning the focus to learning.

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Grading Effectively & Efficiently

Date & Time: Wednesday, February 22, 4:10-5:30
Facilitator: Leanna Fuller, Graduate Teaching Fellow
Format: Teaching Workshop
Audience: Graduate Students and Post-docs

Grading can be a source of stress for instructors.  How do you know if you’re being fair in your assessment of student work?  What do you do when a student questions a grade?  How will you find the time to read all of those student essays or grade those problem sets?  In a format combining presentation and small-group activities, this workshop will cover a wide range of grading issues including: establishing grading criteria and rubrics, providing written feedback to students, and making grading more time efficient.  For graduate students who would like to make grading less stressful!

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Getting Ready for Review

Date & Time: Tuesday, February 28, 4:10-5:30
Facilitator: Joe Bandy, Assistant Director
Format: Teaching Workshop
Audience: Faculty Only

As you consider documenting your teaching for review or promotion, join us for a hands-on workshop. We will begin with a brief overview of ways to reflect on and document your teaching experiences, audiences and purposes for such reflections, and strategies for creating and refining teaching documents throughout your career. Following this overview, you will have time to work individually or in small groups to refine pieces of writing, such as statements of teaching endeavors for upcoming reviews, that will enable you to make sense of the year and plan for the future. CFT senior consultants will be on hand to offer feedback and resources, as desired. Bring your laptops, your student evaluations, syllabi, student work, or whatever may be helpful.  While all faculty are welcome, this session will be especially focused on teaching reflections and documents related to preparing for promotion and tenure reviews.

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Assessing Student Learning

Date & Time: Tuesday, March 20, 4:10-5:30
Facilitator: Nancy Chick, Assistant Director
Format: Teaching Workshop
Audience: Faculty, Graduate Students, and Post-docs

This session will equip participants with strategies to better understand what and how their students are learning—or not learning.  Assessments can reveal misconceptions, help students assess their own learning, save time in your teaching, and collect evidence to document an effective classroom.  Such assessment techniques will help make visible students’ thinking and learning, including the significant and often rich moments in the learning process that occur before the final products of exams and essays.  These strategies can be used for formative or summative assessments and for documenting student learning in applications, dossiers, and scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) projects.

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