Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Brought to you by the Teaching Resource Center

As you prepare for the Spring semester, make plans to attend the January Teaching Workshop. This half-day workshop is a great forum to discuss innovative ways to approach common teaching concerns and to connect with colleagues throughout the University.

The TRC celebrates its long tradition of rich collaborations with other offices around Grounds at this year’s JTW. Several sessions showcase a few of the TRC’s more recent collaborations: Panelists include recent winners of Learning Assessment Grants (co-sponsored by the Office of Institutional Assessment and Studies) and Academic Community Engagement Faculty Fellows Grants (the Office for Community Partnerships). Featured this year is a new collaboration with the International Studies Office, which provides support for two sessions as well as boxed lunches for pre-registrants.

8:30-9:00      CHECK-IN AND ON-SITE REGISTRATION

9:00-10:00    PLENARY SESSION

Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom
Dan Willingham, Professor, Department of Psychology
Monroe Hall, Room 130

Every student is unique, of course. But what should that fact mean for schooling? Should professors try to tune their teaching for individual students? Or change lectures, discussions, and assignments so that they appeal to the broadest number of students? This session will present the scientific data behind multiple intelligences, learning styles, and other ways of characterizing how students think and learn differently, and will include concrete suggestions on how to tune your teaching to students’ minds.

10:15-11:15  CONCURRENT SESSIONS

Innovative Methods for Assessing Student Learning
Panelists: Ed Berger, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, School of Engineering & Applied Sciences
                Emily Scida, Associate Professor, Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese
                Selina Noramly, Assistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Genetics
Moderator: Yitna Firdyiwek, TRC Faculty Consultant, Instructional Technology
Monroe Hall, Room 124

We know that gauging how well and how much students are learning in our courses proves more complex than just looking at the grade book. How can we navigate that complexity to gain meaningful information about student learning? Panelists will discuss a variety of innovative and effective methods they’ve used to measure student learning, from mash-ups and portfolios to developing sophisticated rubrics and exam questions. Join the discussion to find out what’s worked and what hasn’t, and what these faculty members from a variety of disciplines learned about student learning in the process.

Learning Through Experience - Challenges and Strategies        
Panelists: Tanya Denckla-Cobb, Associate Director, Institute for Environmental Negotiation, Architecture
                Dana Elzey, Associate Professor, Materials Science & Engineering
                Janet Horne, Associate Professor of French and History
Moderator: Dorothe Bach, Associate Professor and TRC Assistant Director; German
Monroe Hall, Room 116

Most teachers understand the important role experience plays in the learning process. But, integrating experiential learning into the traditional classroom setting can seem difficult at times. Courses that actively engage students in real world experience, such as academic community engagement (ACE) courses or study abroad programs, introduce their own set of challenges. This panel will explore such questions as: How can we effectively integrate experiential learning into an existing course? How can teachers make sure that students actually learn from experience what they want them to learn? What type of interventions help students process community experiences in a constructive way? How can we support individual students in making the most of their personal experience?

11:30-1:00  CONCURRENT SESSIONS

Can We Talk? Methods and Principles for Interactive Lectures
Kirk Martini, Associate Professor, School of Architecture
Monroe Hall, Room 130

This workshop focuses on specific methods and guiding principles to encourage students’ interaction and develop their critical thinking skills in a lecture setting. Using these methods, teachers can create an environment where students feel safe venturing a possibly incorrect answer and students can learn to formulate and test reasonable hypotheses while interacting with their peers. Participants will see these methods in action, discuss them, and have opportunities to share their experiences. Sample problems are drawn from structural engineering and address a range of topics from quantitative questions of fundamental physics to qualitative issues of design and esthetics.
 

the other side of the box: fostering creativity in—and out of—the college classroom Michael Palmer, Associate Professor and TRC Assistant Director; Chemistry Monroe Hall, Room 124
	Edward de Bono wrote: Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at life in a different way. Think of the word ‘life’ as a placeholder, a fill-in-the-blank.  Now, imagine that ‘life’ changes to ‘biology’; 'biology’ becomes ‘sociology’ becomes ‘philosophy’…  What established patterns might be worth breaking in your discipline?  How might you help your students look at your field in new and unexpected ways?  In this session, we’ll explore ways to foster creativity in your students and to help them become creators, inventors and discoverers of knowledge, in any number of disciplines.

Student-Centered Study Abroad: What Students Are Learning, What They’re Not, and What We Can Do About It
Michael Vande Berg, Vice President for Academic Affairs, Chief Academic Officer, CIEE: Council on International Educational Exchange
Monroe Hall, Room 116

Study abroad participants are presumably given opportunities to learn and develop in significant ways while they are abroad. However, recent studies show that all too often undergraduates return home without having made the sort of progress, linguistically or interculturally, that most of us assume they should make. Several of these studies indicate that if most students are to develop interculturally, educators need to intervene in the students’ learning while they are abroad. During this workshop participants will:

• briefly review key findings from the Georgetown Consortium and other studies
• learn about the developmental model and learning goals that inform most intercultural training today
• participate in an experiential learning activity they can use to help their students begin to meet those goals.

Mr. Vande Berg has generously given us permission to post his slides online. Click here to see his PowerPoint presentation.

This session is sponsored by the International Studies Office.

1:00 – 2:00    LUNCH DISCUSSIONS
Lunches this year are provided to pre-registered participants through generous support from the International Studies Office. Pick up a boxed lunch in the lobby and join colleagues to discuss the following topics:

Teaching Efficiently
Ira Bashkow, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
Monroe Hall, Room 124

How can we improve the quality of our courses while making our own lives easier in preparing for them? Share principles and practical techniques for enriching student learning in lecture courses and seminars, while actually reducing the time and effort we devote to them.

Learning Styles
Dan Willingham, Professor, Department of Psychology
Monroe Hall, Room 120

Join a lunch discussion following up on the morning plenary to consider how you might incorporate specific ideas from the session into your own teaching.

Student-Centered Learning Abroad
Michael Vande Berg, Vice President for Academic Affairs, Chief Academic Officer, CIEE: Council on International Educational Exchange
Monroe Hall, Room 116

As a part of the concurrent session, participants will complete an activity that will allow them to further explore issues in intercultural learning.