12th Annual Teaching Effectiveness Symposium
HELD: Monday, August 16, 2004
Room 241, Umphrey Lee
8:00 a.m.
8:00 |
Continental breakfast |
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8:30 |
Welcoming remarks. Ron Wetherington, Director, Center for Teaching Excellence |
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8:55 |
Overview: "Beyond the Lecture: Successful Strategies for Engaging Students" |
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9:00 |
Breakout Session I, See list below |
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10:00 |
Break - Resource & Technology Rooms Open |
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10:30 |
Breakout Session II, See list below |
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11:30 |
Break |
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11:40 |
Re-convene to discuss results of breakout sessions (Room 241) |
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12:40 |
Lunch: University Rms. 1, 2 & 3; Golden Moment: Personal recollections of rewarding teaching experiences. |
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2:00 |
Guided Library Tours (Optional: Your choice upon sign-up. See registration page.) |
BREAKOUT SESSIONS I & II (choose one for each)
Beyond the Lecture: Successful Strategies for Engaging Students: Few of us view the ideal classroom experience as a one-way channel for information, or as a monolithic approach to learning. We seek ways to engage our students in the serious business of becoming transformed, and we seek ways to confirm that transformation has, indeed, occurred. We search, in other words, for ways “beyond the lecture” to bring our students and ourselves into a new and mutually rewarding dimension of shared learning. Exploring several of the facets of this goal in individual breakout sessions, we will re-convene to synthesize and discuss our ideas.
A. Making Expectations Clear.
Pamela Patton, Art History, & Dennis Simon, Political Science.
What is your vision of student success in your course? How well do you communicate this? How can you know whether students understand it? Poorly understood course goals, lecture objectives, or performance expectations can make an otherwise good course a pedagogic disaster. This session will help you avoid this.
B. Facilitating Research Assignments.
Melissa Dowling, History, Margaret H. Dunham, Computer Science & Engineering, & Rebecca Graff, User Education & Outreach Librarian.
Many students think research should be as easy as Google. Faculty and librarians can work together to design assignments that help students learn more about the challenges and rewards of the research process, become more information literate, and write better papers. This session will investigate tools and techniques for research, tips to pass on to students concerning research papers, and techniques that faculty can use to reduce plagiarism.
C. Encouraging Community Standards: Civility in the Classroom.
Bill Bridge, Law, & Vanessa Beasley, Corp. Communications & Public Affairs.
Students share faculty concerns about disruptive classroom behaviors. "Sssshhh. We're Taking Notes Here", a recent article in the Chronicle, recommends enlisting students in the effort to establish and maintain community standards in the classroom.
D. Measuring Success: Meaningful Testing, Grading, and Evaluating.
Don Vandewalle, Management & Organizations, & Rhonda Blair, Theatre.
Testing and other performance evaluations should help the student discover, apply, and synthesize knowledge is ways often not possible in class participation and assignments. How effective this “testing-as-learning” can be depends on careful construction, on how we grade, and on validating the results. We will also discuss potential problems with and solutions for the issue of the perceived fairness of the evaluation process.
E. Enlivening the Classroom.
Randall Griffin, Art History, & Billy Abraham, Theology.
Student enthusiasm is a key to successful and enjoyable classroom interaction. How do we generate it? How do we sustain it? How does it relate to our own enthusiasm? In this session we will explore some specific strategies for fostering enthusiasm for the subject you teach.