Teaching & Learning Collaborative
TLC from the TLC: Internationalization
This week from the Teaching and Learning Collaborative: As one area of focus in the Strategic Plan Vision 2020 (D), international integration in the university will provide opportunities for students to engage in intercultural and interfaith dialogue and practices. Using a variety of approaches, a course might introduce one assignment or an entire module structured around global learning outcomes. This week’s link provides the framework for thinking about internationalizing a course and broad examples of implementation. Coming next, the TLC will provide a variety of examples of internationalized course design being implemented around campus.
The linked sites have many documents that support ways to conceptualize internationalized course design. See them here and here.
TLC from the TLC: The Excitement of Academic Learning
This week’s Teaching & Learning Collaborative tip is an article by Jeffrey White, international languages and cultures, who serves as administrator of the Shepard Academic Resource Center’s Learning Commons. His article, “The Excitement of Academic Learning,” details how last year a total of 1,180 UP students worked together with peer assistants in the Learning Commons to support and improve their learning for a total of nearly 4,600 visits. “Wouldn’t it be great if even more students came early and often to the Learning Commons to support their thinking, learning, and the application of new concepts in the classes we teach?” he asks. “Imagine students engaging even more in our classes with more authentic questions, presenting course material with greater depth, and more actively working together in groups on projects after visiting one or more of the following programs in the Learning Commons in Buckley Center 163.” You can see the article in it entirety at this link.
TLC Teaching Tip of the Week: A Brief Tour of Our Campus’s Handbook to Writing
Improving the writing skills of our students across their four years is a cross-campus shared responsibility. Fortunately, both faculty and students have an enlightened resource – a common campus handbook – to help foster a shared vocabulary, writing strategies, and documentation expertise. The most recent update of this blazingly necessary resource offers faculty the chance to (re)familiarize ourselves with its holdings. Kirszner & Mandell’s Pocket Cengage Handbook, 7th ed. offers a buzzing hive of resources: click here for a quick overview. For information contact Lars Erik Larson, English, at larson@up.edu.
TLC Teaching Tip of the Week: Music in the Classroom
Faculty who have considered using music in the classroom can find a good deal of information on that subject in the book Music and Learning by Chris Brewer (1995), according to Jose Velazco, library. In this article, Brewer describes simple ways music can be used to positively affect learning in the classroom. Readers can visit links to the music within the body of the article by going to this link on the TLC blog.
TLC Teaching Tip of the Week
TLC from the TLC: Video on Autism Spectrum Disorder
The number of students diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is growing across the nation, according to Melanie Gangle, accessible education services. At the University, there have also been growing numbers of students diagnosed with ASD. The diagnosis of ASD includes the previously-known category of Asperger Syndrome, also known as high-functioning autism spectrum. To learn more about how to support college students with ASD from a faculty perspective, please check out this video (15:21 in length): Understanding Asperger Syndrome: A Professor’s Guide.
For more information contact Gangle at gangle@up.edu.
Light on the First Day
The Teaching and Learning Collaborative (TLC) is committed to providing all faculty members weekly resources to support excellent teaching on campus. Members of the TLC represent many different units on campus: SARC, internationalization, technology, and educational theory. Resources published in upbeat are meant to be read in the amount of time it take you to enjoy a coffee or kombucha at your desk.
This week’s resource is a brief article by UP’s Learning Assistance Counselor Br. Tom CSC, Shepard Academic Resource Center. In his “Light on the First Day,” Br. Tom draws on neuroscience to explain what is actually going on in 18-year-old brains on the first day of class, and offers practical suggestions for discussing the syllabus with first year students.
If you have a particular topic you’d like to see covered, please contact Karen Eifler, Garaventa Center, at eifler@up.edu.
TLC Tip of the Week
It’s getting to be that time of the semester – projects are wrapping up, finals being taken, and there are crucial grades to be entered. This week’s Teaching and Learning Collaborative tip offers faculty a few helpful pointers for entering grades into Moodle. This short video offers three easy tips to make entering grades into Moodle efficient and hassle-free.
A reminder: all faculty can contribute to the Teaching & Learning Collaborative. Those who have ideas for resources the TLC could provide to promote excellent teaching and professional development for UP faculty, or questions to be tackled, are asked to contact Karen Eifler, Garaventa Center, at eifler@up.edu.
For additional training on Moodle or any other academic technology, contact Ben Kahn, information services, at kahn@up.edu. For more handy tech tips around technology at UP, please visit the UPTechTips blog.
Thinking Through Teaching Quotations
This week’s Teaching and Learning website submission offers two-dozen quotations from various writers pondering the situation and purpose of teaching. As the quotations jostle, complement, and contradict each other, their philosophies may provoke faculty to think through and articulate their own classroom ideals. The Teaching and Learning website can be found here.
For more information, contact Lars Erik Larson , English, at larson@up.edu.