Category Archives: Pedagogy

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Review of the Best Free Quiz Games: Kahoot vs. Poll Everywhere Competitions

I’ve been using Kahoot for several years to create competitive quiz games like 21 blitz for my students. It’s a great tool for reviewing previously covered concepts and breaking up lectures with quick knowledge checks. So, when a colleague encouraged me to check out Poll Everywhere’s new Competitions feature, I was skeptical. I have students who literally cheer when I announce that it’s time for a Kahoot quiz. Even hard-to-impress faculty get caught up in the competition during workshops. They overthink their team names, agonize over answer choices, and trash talk their neighbors as points are tallied. I couldn’t possibly abandon Kahoot and run away with another quiz tool after everything we’ve been through, could I?

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Aligning Goals: Simple Structures for Student Transfer and Reviewer Clarity

Since we apply the Quality Matters (QM) rubric to the review of our courses, we typically view the interactions between the elements of the course as “alignment”—the idea that these pieces all flow through or stem from one another, allowing a reviewer and instructor to see the connection of these elements throughout the course. While we have various ways of demonstrating this alignment (numbering and sub-numbering, parenthetical reference, etc.), these tend to be used internally, mostly shared between the instructor, the instructional designer, and the review teams. Rarely do we share this full concept of alignment with students—but why? If we build for structure and scaffolding of the lessons throughout the course, wouldn’t it also be beneficial to students to see ways of connecting the various course objectives with the module objectives, readings, assessments, and other activities?

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Student-Centered Vs. Teacher-Centered Classrooms: Which and Why?

We have all seen the stereotypical version of what a lecture-based classroom looks like in television and movies. Whenever popular media wants to portray school as being dull, we are shown an unfashionable teacher standing at the front of a class speaking in a monotone voice about a dry topic. This (hopefully minus the dull, monotone, and dry parts) is what’s referred to as a teacher-centered classroom. In contrast, there are student-centered classrooms that encourage learning to be directed by the students. Assignments in this format typically involve small group collaboration and/or autonomy for the learner to choose how and what to learn. The student-centered arrangement has quickly been gaining popularity and is considered by many to be a more dynamic method of learning. However, both structures have their advantages, and I will discuss how each can be implemented in order to create an effective learning environment for all.

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Coordinating and Managing Meaning Across Cultures: Pearce for Global Learning Experiences

In a recent meeting for DePaul’s ongoing series of GLE (Global Learning Experience), professor of Italian Caterina Farina Mongiat suggested facilitators of GLE might gain valuable insights from the field of intercultural communication to prepare for coordinating cross-cultural interactions between student cohorts.

Though conceptualizing what to apply from an entire scholarly field is difficult to do when also planning the logistics and curriculum for a GLE course, we can try to start somewhere with an accessible application. As a student of TESOL studies and now intercultural communication at the Illinois Institute of Technology, I have started by looking at W. Barnett Pearce’s (2005) initial work on the coordinated management of meaning (CMM). The context for Pearce’s work, though now dated, parallels our present challenges in engaging meaningful intercultural discussions, even within an academic space: global nation-state relations, misunderstandings of the cultural and social other, conflicting faith-based and cultural values, among the many complexities that cannot all be accounted for here.  

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Change Agent Training: Part 1

We know binaries can be problematic. Even if our intention is to place something on a spectrum between two poles — introvert or extrovert; risk-averse or risk-embracing; early bird or night owl, etc., — we still frequently default to binaries. The binary I want to unpack here is the idea that some people love change (enjoying the newness of things, embracing something they haven’t tried before) and others prefer steadiness and consistency.

And while I’m sure it’s true that people have dispositional tendencies towards one of those ways of being, change happens to all of us, no matter where we fall on that continuum. So can someone who falls into the “consistency, please!” camp develop the dispositions of the change embracers?

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Thinking about Student Learning Holistically

We probably all have experience (either or own or hearing from a colleague) with frustration over our students’ seeming inability to apply what they learned in a previous class to our own classes. From a science teacher frustrated because they feel like they have to re-teach their students algebra or calculus skills they should have learned in a prerequisite class, to humanities teachers who feel like every new crop of students seemingly forgot their basic writing skills, to some of my own frustrations, this problem is prevalent.

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Allowing Students To Explore

pocket compassIn today’s colleges and universities there is an emphasis on developing students with critical thinking skills. This soft skill is less about memorizing a path and more about being able to adapt and apply knowledge in new situations. If this is true, why then do we continue to teach in ways that don’t allow students to explore? How have we gotten to a place where our students seem to be less and less comfortable in ambiguous situations?

If we go back years before we ever see these students walk through our doors, we observe that children in our society are often scheduled from what seems like birth. While the goal is to create smart, athletic super kids who seemingly have it all, the reality is that we are doing a disservice to our children.

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Knowing That They Know What You Think They Know

Illustration of areas of brain dedicated to types of memoryAfter students watch an online lecture, what do they know? What do they think they know? How do you know what they know?

Instructors just venturing into online learning often have the valid concern that they might not be able to tell if their students are “getting it.” Without being able to see students during the lecture, they won’t see the encouraging nods, the confused raised eyebrows, the glazed-over look of boredom. And when your students have so many potential distractions available on the Internet just a click away, it can be troubling to not know how much of their attention you have when they’re watching your lecture.

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Group Work: The Importance of a Great Team

Cycling Team Time TrialFor the first time in my working life, I am going to be out of the office for three consecutive weeks. Planning for this time away has not only forced me to be as efficient as possible in the time leading up to my vacation, but also has gotten me thinking about the importance of a great team.

Bear with me a minute for a quick sports analogy. In professional cycling, there’s an event called the team time trial where an entire team (in this year’s Tour de France, 8 riders) works together by “drafting” in the aerodynamic slipstream of the riders in front of them, each rider taking a turn at the front and then rotating out of the line. If the team works well together and has a plan, it’s a beautiful event to watch. The first rider in the line does the hard work while the riders behind are able to save a ton of energy, and the team is able to go much faster than any individual rider could go on his or her own.

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Pedagogy and Technology: Alignment for Pedagogy in Online Course Design

Jigsaw puzzle piecesAlignment is a core guiding principle in the Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric for hybrid, blended, and online courses. Designing a course that exhibits individual components and activities that align with module-level course learning objectives and course-level learning objectives helps students make connections between the things they do in a course and what they should be learning.

With the growing demand for diverse classroom environments—that is, blended, online, hybrid, and so forth— instructors may face the challenge of maintaining their pedagogies when moving from a physical to a virtual classroom. Pedagogy is difficult to maintain in a traditional physical classroom, and the challenge to convey pedagogy in an online environment resides in course design decisions.

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