News for and about University of Portland faculty and staff.
In the IGNITE-funded video found at this link, Terry Favero (biology) offers 7 minutes’ worth of ideas for figuring out whether and how well your students are learning, while there is still time for switching things up or remediation (if necessary). It’s also possible things are going great; Terry’s helpful tips on formative assessment can help you confirm that too.
For more information contact Karen Eifler, Garaventa Center, at eifler@up.edu.
Thanks to an IGNITE grant, the Teaching and Learning Collaborative created 10 short videos that will roll out over the next 10 weeks. Taught by accomplished teachers from all over campus, each is 7-10 minutes long and addresses a topic identified by colleagues as high-value in anyone’s teaching repertoire. This week we are pleased to debut Molly Hiro, English, who also serves as director of the Integrated Writing Center. She will discuss “How To Teaching Writing in ANY Discipline.”
UP has a stupendously talented and generous faculty, with lots to teach one another about effective, engaging teaching. Over the summer, the Teaching& Learning website (up.edu/tl) was overhauled to be more user-friendly. This week’s TLC teaching tip is to point us all to the amazing treasure trove of Teaching Tips of the Week from the past four years of upbeat, gathered for the first time into one place, at this link. Enjoy a cup of your favorite beverage as you scroll through 64 titles covering everything from the upside of failure to making groupwork work. Each title is linked to a brief (1-2 pages, tops) practical article or video shared by faculty all over campus.
For more information contact Karen Eifler, Garaventa Center, at eifler@up.edu.
UP aims to cultivate world-citizenship in its students; are faculty up to the task? In this week’s Teaching & Learning submission, Lars Larson reviews the book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things are Better Than you Think that can help orient our global imaginations more accurately.
For more information contact Larson at larson@up.edu.
The Teaching & Learning Collaborative will host one more peer-led workshop from noon to 1 p.m. on Wednesday, April 3, in the Murphy Room of Franz Hall. Come hear Carolyn James, mathematics; Jeffrey White, Learning Commons; Rebecca Smith, education; and Lorretta Krautscheid, nursing, offer tips and pitfalls of the newly popular approach to teaching content-heavy courses, dubbed “untethered lecture capture.” Bring your lunch and find out why this strategy has captured so many teachers’ attention and what users wish they had known before they started with ULC.
For more information contact Karen Eifler, Garaventa Center, at eifler@up.edu.
As part of an ongoing series of short essays on the Teaching & Learning Community Blog, two new pieces are ready to satisfy your core curriculum curiosity. Steve Mayer, chemistry, writes about the many ways chemistry classes contribute to the broader goals of a liberal arts education (while also fulfilling those pesky science requirements), and Heather Carpenter, environmental studies, writes about ways in which classes such as “Science of the Sustainable Gourmet” do the same.
If you have any questions about the series or want to make a contribution, feel free to contact Andrew Guest, psychological sciences, or Lars Larsen, English.
What do you do (or what CAN you do) when a student stops showing up to class? From a recent brownbag conversation on the topic, the Teaching and Learning Collaborative compiled concrete, specific suggestions from the Shepard Academic Resource Center, the Care Team and faculty colleagues.
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 and 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) when a student misses a week of class without explanation. A lucky list of thirteen strategies and insights from that brownbag session are gathered in this 2-page document.
Think-Pair-Share is a classic way to improve equity and engagement in the classroom, according to Carolyn James, mathematics. Students think about a prompt individually, discuss their ideas in pairs, and the instructor leads a discussion as student share their ideas with the whole class. Think-Pair-Share can easily be extended; consider having students write during think time (even in a STEM class) or using technology (like polling software) to share ideas more equitably. In particular, Dr. Derek Bruff recommends Think-Pair-Share-Analyze, in which students make sense of, compare, and evaluate the ideas shared by their classmates. Read more about Think-Pair-Share in Dr. Bruff’s blog, Agile Learning.
When you add a link on your Moodle course page to an article in a library database or to a streaming video, how can you tell if the link will work for students connecting from off-campus? Most library databases offer the option to obtain a persistent or stable URL for individual articles or videos, and many of those persistent URLs are automatically set up to connect through the library’s off-campus access system. However, there are exceptions to every rule, and unfortunately not all library resources provide an easy, off-campus-friendly URL for specific items. Check out the library’s Linking to Online Resources from Moodle web page for tips on finding persistent links to content within your favorite library resources, and for indications of which resources offer grab-and-go friendly links ready to be added to Moodle, and which links need a quick-and-easy edit (with instructions provided) to work from off-campus.
If you have questions about linking to library content from Moodle, or other library-related matters, contact Stephanie Michel at michel@up.edu or x7418.
With some extended breaks coming up in the next two months, faculty may have more time to do 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, and 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.