Category Archives: Pedagogy

Don’t Worry, it’s a Standards Feature

Congratulations, you’ve been selected to teach ABC-461 this coming quarter!  The department thinks you’re the perfect expert to update the course and a copy of the last professor’s syllabus has appeared in your inbox. Now retired, Dr. Otto Heare left you some of his notes and course materials, but seems you’re going to have to do some serious work.

Script of the word "standards"During your meeting with your instructional designer, you state that you have full freedom to modify the syllabus but note there are some pesky standards that must be included. Dr. Heare didn’t really give you much guidance on what they mean and your department chair told you there was documentation somewhere but they can’t find it right now.

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Change Agent Training: Part 2

In my previous post, I wrote about how a recent moving experience prompted me to rethink the parts of my job where I encourage colleagues to consider new or different teaching methods. Since I’m a “yes, let’s always turn over a new leaf!” person by nature, moving helped me gain some empathy for those who might not be as enthusiastic about change as I am.

Two key findings emerged for me: The first was that I needed to practice asking for help myself, something I’m loathe to do. Framing this behavioral adjustment as “practice” was especially helpful because practicing is low-stakes and friendly. On a recent Home Depot trip, I practiced asking for help finding something right away, and once again, that request paid big dividends in time not spent wandering aisles.

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Increasing Instructor Presence with Weekly Video Updates

How present are you in your classes? If you teach face-to-face or hybrid sections, you may have an easier time responding to this question than if you teach fully online. When physically present in the classroom, it’s easy to take it for granted that students are able to see you, hear you, and respond to you. But in a fully online environment, especially one that doesn’t hold real-time sessions, it can be a challenge to establish your presence as the professor. 

Enter the weekly video update. The authors of a widely cited article published in The Internet and Higher Education report that asynchronous video “made their instructors seem more real, present, and familiar… similar to face-to-face instruction.”  This finding should resonate with instructors, who despite teaching online in increasing numbers still report feeling that online learning is less effective than face-to-face teaching.  

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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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