UP Teaching & Learning Community Blog

Karen Eifler

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Managing Your OWN Stress as an Instructor

“The UP Way” of being here for our students is unparalleled. Done with our whole minds, hearts and souls, it can also take quite a toll on us. As we head into the amazing perk of Christmas Break, the Tweet version of this teaching tip is TAKE THE BREAK! The longer version is available in this brief article from the American Psychological Association. You’ve been told countless times on airplanes to put on your own oxygen mask before trying to help others. That goes for college instructors too! These are the 10 tips suggested by the APA:

  1. Eliminate stressors as possible–and it’s almost always possible to stay away from campus for a few days, go email-free for hours at a time.
  2. Cultivate social support–swap meals with a friend so you each get a night off from cooking. Say yes to an invitation or two to enjoy a cup of coffee or happy hour.
  3. Seek good nutrition–no particular diet is required here; just aim for a rainbow of colors on your plate. Maybe the long break gives you a chance to try new recipes or restaurants your can’t in the bustle of the semester.
  4. Relax your muscles–through stretches, a warm bath, a massage when the rest of the world is working.
  5. Meditate, pray, be mindful of a given moment–light a candle and allow yourself to be taken into its bright flame.
  6. Flex your muscles–a brisk walk to enjoy the lights in your neighborhood, perhaps? The research on the link between moderate enjoyable physical movement and de-stressing is unambiguous.
  7. Protect your sleep–just do it.
  8. Get out in nature–this one combines several other suggestions on this list, and we live in a part of the world where we are spoiled for choice on nature to enjoy.
  9. Choose your own pleasurable activities and do them— singalong to holiday songs while driving, binge-watch The Crown, savor a novel, paint some pottery.
  10. Reframe your thinking–If you feel yourself spiraling into imagining worst-case scenarios, stop and put your mind elsewhere. Set realistic expectations for yourself. Strive for acceptance of situations outside of your control. Here’s a novel way to disrupt harmful mental loops: alphabetize your favorite books or spice rack in your head.

 

You know this! None of these are rocket surgery, and it’s likely you dispense similar advice to your students when they are anxious. Take your own sage advice; you are every bit important as those worthy young souls you tend so conscientiously!

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Tips for Untethered Lecture Capture Rookies

Tips for Untethered Lecture Capture Rookies

At a recent TLC brownbag session, 4 faculty members from 4 disciplines shared tips for getting started with “Untethered Lecture Capture,” a tool for using an iPad or tablet to show slides and annotate them in real time during class, while moving around the room. They offered these tips to anyone considering adopting ULC, which also allows a teacher to upload a lecture for students to review after absences or simply for multiple exposures to critical content.

  • Don’t overdo it as you get started. It’s not the best tool for a whole course or for some sessions of a given course .
  • Fancy graphics on slides aren’t necessary. You’ll be adding to your slides as you teach the session, and often simpler text and graphic combos are more fertile grounds for that.
  • ULC is great to capture group work, possibly replacing posters and markers. Small groups of students can work on a regular piece of paper (eg in a notebook), and you can take a photo of that and upload it in real time to the room’s projector for reporting out and debriefing.
  • An untethered teacher keeps students off balance in a good way. There’s no more back row that has little contact with the professor if you are able to move around the room, so fewer digressions into social media.
  • ULC technology is not perfect, and making mistakes together with the tool, or being thwarted by the occasional bad connection helps build community, trust and empathy.
  • ULC can help professors keep the class moving when they are away from campus for professional travel; it’s also a way for athletes or other travelling students to have access to the professor’s content and the discussions that occur in class in their absence.
  • There are 52 professors on campus using ULC (so far). Chances are that peer wisdom lurks in your own hallway!
  • ULC is effective in helping students create and observe visual models of complex or unseen processes. A picture really can be better than a thousand eloquent words.
  • Student tutors can use the tool to capture explanations in a tutoring session and share on the Moodle page of the relevant class. Sometimes students grasp the vocabulary of another student when the more polished words of a professor still feel a bit foggy.
  • ULC is one tool, not THE tool, for being an effective teacher.

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When Students Stop Showing Up

What do you do–what CAN you do–when a student stops showing up to class? the Teaching and Learning Collaborative hosted a brownbag conversation about that question and got concrete, specific insights from the Shepard Academic Resource Center, the Care Team and once another. Big takeaways: follow through on attendance policies in your syllabus (changing them out of sympathy does NO ONE any favors); let students know, in word or email, that you noticed they were gone and that you’d like to help them get back on track; don’t shy away from alerting the Care Team (via Early Alert) after a student misses a week of class without explanation. There were several other strategies and insights that are compiled in this 2-page document.

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Bookmarking Bonanza of Readings on Teaching and Learning

With some extended breaks coming up in the next two months, you may have more time to do some professional reading than the usual academic schedule allows. There’s a boatload of scholarship on effective teaching strategies for college teachers of every discipline, with more on the way all the time. One of UP’s Rock Star librarians, Heidi Senior, compiled this very helpful list of extended resources, helpfully clustered by type of medium: website, news service, book, table of content subscription service. Click here for a list that manages to be both succinct and comprehensive. Then pour yourself a cup of coffee and do some exploring.

Photo by Dan Kiefer on Unsplash