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January 2012 Preparing to Teach @ VCU Workshop Series

Tuesday, January 10 - Thursday, January 12

Greetings from the Center for Teaching Excellence at VCU!

The Preparing to Teach @ VCU workshop series is offered prior to the start of each semester, once in August and again in January. While many instructors prepare for their respective teaching assignments in the months leading up to the semester, the week before classes remains an important period of time for substantive adjustments to their courses and syllabi in anticipation of the first day. Following the workshop series held in the Fall 2011, the vast majority of workshop participants reported that they were planning to make adjustments to their courses at some point during the 2011-2012 academic year. Honoring those observations, the January workshop series is designed, in part, to meet the needs of a wide range of faculty.

Faculty members and graduate students who are new to teaching or new to VCU would benefit greatly from taking as many of the workshops as possible, especially Tuesday's sessions, which are designed to provide an introduction to some of the more salient issues pertaining to teaching and learning in higher education. More experienced faculty members and graduate students who are are faced with new kinds of teaching assignments may find the greatest value in the workshops scheduled for Wednesday: the morning's workshops are intended to provide faculty with helpful advice and practical techniques for teaching large classes at VCU, and the afternoon's workshops focus on teaching in small to mid-sized classes. Seasoned VCU faculty and those preparing for promotion and tenure might find the greatest value in Thursday's workshops about teaching to specific learning outcomes or skills sets (e.g., critical thinking, interpersonal skills, and collaborative work) and engaging in "scholarly teaching". To supplement this three-day series, the CTE offers a variety of additional workshops to assist faculty members and graduate students interested in incorporating learning technologies into their courses more effectively (e.g., Getting Started with Blackboard).

Depending on your prior background with teaching at other institutions or at VCU, please feel free to design a path through the PTT@VCU workshop offerings which suits your particular needs. If you will be teaching in the college classroom for the first time, you may want to plan to attend the Teaching and Learning @ VCU session prior to selecting the set of workshops which could be appropriate to teaching in your discipline.

Sincerely,
Zachary G. Goodell and Jeffrey Nugent
Co-Directors, Center for Teaching Excellence
Virginia Commonwealth University
(804) 827-0838 | cte@vcu.edu | www.vcu.edu/cte/

Click on any of the titles below for detailed descriptions and to register.

Tuesday, January 10

Teaching and Learning @ VCU
9:00am – 9:50 am | Harris Hall, room 5182
People who teach at VCU arrive in the classroom with a variety of experiences: some are new faculty, either A.B.D. or newly-minted Ph.D.s; others have worked at VCU for years but might be entering the classroom for the first time; and still others may have taught at VCU for years but are looking for additional inspiration or ideas about how to enhance their teaching. Being experts in our subject matter does not naturally make us expert teachers. Given all of the content in our respective fields, how do we decide what to teach? How do we decide how we will teach it? How will we know whether our teaching is effective? This session presents a road-map for all of the subsequent PTT@VCU sessions, discussing how different aspects of interaction (student-student, student-instructor, student-content) align across three major themes: communication, collaboration, and assessment of student learning. Faculty members and graduate students who participate in this workshop will leave with a richer understanding of how to enhance student learning by having preliminary exposure to the conditions that are conducive to learning as well as how to best manage these conditions.
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How People Learn and Implications for Course and Syllabus Design
10:00am - 12:00pm | Harris Hall, room 5182
This session will provide the opportunity to explore beliefs participants hold about teaching and learning and how those beliefs align with current theories of how people learn. Instructors' beliefs about teaching and learning impact course design, teaching practice, and student learning, many of which are implicitly or explicitly reflected in a course syllabus. The course syllabus is often the first point of contact instructors have with their students, and this document can offer a framework for student learning throughout the semester. Participants will leave this session with: a better understanding of how you can align your teaching with the science of how people learn, while honoring the need for flexibility, innovation and creativity; alternatives for organizing and presenting the content of a syllabus; methods for developing, communicating, and negotiating instructor/student expectations; approaches for representing how learning objectives, learning activities, and assessments are linked together; and options for creating the conditions for community-building and engagement prior to (and during) the first week of class.
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Engaging Students in Their Learning
1:00pm – 2:25pm| Harris Hall, room 5182
The term active learning has been ballyhooed for some time now in higher education. It is often used as an umbrella term for a vast range of activities and techniques that endeavor to get students to do more in the classroom than just take notes and to do more outside of the classroom than just memorize their notes. This workshop is designed to provide participants with a research-based rationale for why active learning works, an introduction to a wide range of techniques that are suitable to various teaching contexts, and a better understanding of how to select active learning techniques based on one's instructional goals or learning outcomes. By the end of this session, participants will be able to: explain how active learning contributes to student learning; identify a range of techniques that are suitable to various teaching contexts; identify a range of techniques that are suitable to various learning outcomes; and develop an active learning technique that is grounded in one's own course.
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Assessing and Evaluating Student Learning
2:35pm – 4:00pm | Harris Hall, room 5182
Two major approaches for understanding what our students learn are (formative) assessment and (summative) evaluation. This workshop is designed to help participants find a balance between these two approaches which would be appropriate for their disciplines and teaching contexts. We will explore how to link assessment/evaluation mechanisms to course learning outcomes; how to integrate Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) into your courses; how to develop or adapt rubrics for assessment/evaluation; and strategies for providing more meaningful feedback on students' work. By the end of this session, participants will be able to: identify the defining qualities of formative and summative approaches to characterizing student learning; integrate assessment and evaluation more seamlessly into your teaching; and develop more meaningful opportunities for students to both give and receive feedback during your courses.
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Wednesday, January 11

Teaching Large Classes
9:00am – 10:25am | Harris Hall, room 5182
This workshop is designed to help prepare faculty for teaching a large enrollment class. Although definitions of what constitutes a large class can vary, this workshop will help anyone who needs to prepare to teach a class of 50 or more students, or more simply put, one that is larger than they are accustomed to teaching. We will cover a range of issues from logistical (i.e. attendance, classroom management, and testing/assessment) to pedagogical (interactive lecturing, active learning techniques, and group assignments).
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Making Student Thinking Visible: Teaching with Classroom Response Systems
10:35am - 12:00pm | Harris Hall, room 5182
Audience response systems (a.k.a. "clickers") are interactive polling technologies that allow instructors to question students in class, receive student responses and provide instant feedback displayed in a viewable chart. This workshop will focus on how student engagement, active learning, peer instruction, and the collection of formative assessment data can all be promoted through the use of this technology. Participants will explore the use of clickers through discipline-based vignettes intended to model effective instructional practice. By the end of this session, participants should be able to: identify a range of instructional goals to which audience response system technology can serve (e.g., quizzing, polling, interactive learning, formative assessment); make some initial decisions about how they can begin to integrate this technology into their teaching; and develop activities that are guided by asking the right questions.
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Facilitating Group Discussions
1:00pm - 2:25pm | Harris Hall, room 5182
Many students find courses which incorporate in-class discussions to be particularly rewarding and beneficial for developing their intellectual (as well as personal) interests in a discipline. What we mean when we talk about "discussion" in the classroom varies in terms of implementation, but several challenges remain for this style of teaching: students, particularly those who are unfamiliar with general expectations for college-level discourse, might initially be reluctant to contribute; participation patterns might be uneven across the students; sensitive, divisive, or difficult topics might be introduced; and students may struggle to extract relevant insights from these conversations. Participants in this workshop will leave being able to prepare and plan for types of questions that help foster effective discussion; to apply techniques for sustaining and redirecting the in-class dialogue; and to develop strategies for monitoring, tracking, and synthesizing students' contributions throughout the class.
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Working with Students One-on-One: Laboratory, Practicum, and Studio Settings
2:35pm - 4:00pm | Harris Hall, room 5128
Faculty members may find that their advanced courses, practica, or studios require a substantial degree of one-on-one interaction with students, and many graduate students' first teaching experiences at the college level take place in recitation or laboratory sections where these kinds of interactions occur frequently. The characteristics of these settings often vary--instructional responsibilities (e.g., grading, attending/delivering lectures, lesson planning) may be shared with colleagues; students' contributions and challenges might emerge from outside an instructor's current areas of expertise; and students may have differing capabilities, experiences, and motivations within the discipline. Participants will leave this this workshop being able to: develop a plan for establishing regular and open communication about their teaching roles/responsibilities with colleagues, including methods for getting feedback on their teaching; manage and adapt their teaching strategies to the laboratory/practicum/studio environment, particularly with regard to the first class meeting; and recognize and remedy common challenges which are often present in laboratory, practicum, and studio sections as they occur throughout the semester.
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Thursday, January 12

Promoting Critical Thinking in Your Classroom
9:00a.m. - 10:25a.m. | Harris Hall, room 5182
This workshop is designed to help faculty promote and assess critical thinking in their courses. A primary objective of the workshop is to define and illustrate critical thinking as an instructional objective from the various perspectives of the disciplines represented by the faculty in attendance. In addition to reviewing a variety of techniques that are suitable to different contexts, participants will begin to develop activities that can both promote and assess the level of critical thinking in your students. By the end of this session, participants should be able to: articulate what critical thinking means in your own discipline; develop learning objective(s) that demonstrate critical thinking; and develop activities that can both promote and assess critical thinking.
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The Affective Domain: The Role of Emotions in Teaching and Learning
10:35a.m. - 12:00p.m. | Harris Hall, room 5182
What role does human affect play in teaching and learning? This question has historically been ignored or dismissed as not relevant to faculty in higher education--after all, we're teachers not therapists! Participants in this workshop will explore the role of emotions, attitudes, and motivation in teaching and learning and how to better manage them to facilitate deeper learning. In addition, we will explore the role of the affective field (the space around us and between us) and the extent to which we can manage it to better support teaching and learning. By the end of this session, participants should be able to: identify the components of human affect that pertain to teaching and learning; utilize a variety of techniques for assessing and managing human affect in our teaching and our students' learning; and assist students in their own self-discovery of the role of affect in their learning.
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Motivating and Supporting Students in Collaborative Work
1:00p.m. - 2:25p.m. | Harris Hall, room 5182
Instructors may have students work in small groups during class sessions or throughout the semester in order to help students better engage with course materials, complete projects for which the required work exceeds any individual student's capabilities, provide opportunities for students to develop skills as collaborators, or to save time during the assessment of student work. Student reluctance to work in groups with their peers can be the result of misconceptions about group work as something other than a means to reach specific learning outcomes. Participants in this workshop will be able to leave with a preliminary plan for how their students can expect to work together throughout the semester, strategies for identifying and addressing typical challenges related to periodic or sustained periods of group work, and alternative forms of assessment (e.g., peer review, reflective writing, learning contracts) targeted at the processes and products emerging from students' collective work.
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Scholarly Teaching: A Model for Evidence-Based Decision Making for Teachers
2:35p.m. - 4:00p.m. | Harris Hall, room 5182
Scholarly teaching is a powerful concept that defines and guides the practice of some of the most successful faculty in the profession. In essence, the scholarly teacher takes a research-based approach to decision making with respect to instructional design, delivery and assessment. They identify a problem or opportunity in the context of a course, they review the literature and/or discuss with colleagues in order to learn more about the issue, they make an informed decision about how to best address the issue, they implement and assess the change, and then they revise based on feedback. Participants in this workshop will be able to identify the skills and strategies necessary for becoming a scholarly teacher. In addition, participants will explore and entertain a variety of ways for demonstrating one's scholarly approach to teaching for the purpose of annual review, promotion and tenure, or entering the job market.
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Location and directions: Harris Hall