UPbeat

News for and about University of Portland faculty and staff.

TLC Tip of the Week

TLC Tip of the Week: Meet With a Librarian

Could students in your classes use some extra assistance with finding good sources for their papers or presentations? Or maybe you would appreciate some literature searching leads for your own research project.  Make an appointment using this link to meet with a librarian!  Appointments are a great way for you or your students to get personalized and focused assistance with a research question. Librarians assist with questions about any aspect of the research process, including: defining a topic, choosing the best places to search, creating effective search strategies, narrowing searches, evaluating sources, accessing full text, and citing sources.

Use the online Make an Appointment system (linked from Get Help/Contact Us and many other library web pages) to see the availability of reference librarians. All the librarians assist with questions in any subject area, or use the blue “i” icon to identify and select a librarian who specializes in your discipline. Next, choose a date and time that works for you, and then fill out a brief form to tell us about your research question. After submitting the form, the appointment is automatically added to the librarian’s calendar, and both you and the librarian will receive an email confirmation.

For more information about the library’s meet with a librarian service, please contact Stephanie Michel (michel@up.edu, x7418). We hope to meet with you or your students soon!

TLC Tip of the Week: Teaching Reading, No Matter What You Teach

TeachUP for Teaching & Learning CollaborativeIn this IGNITE-funded video, Ellyn Lucas Arwood, education, offers five strategies for increasing the capacity of your students—regardless of academic content area—to be more adept readers of course texts and notes. “How Can I Teach Students to Read In My Academic Discipline?”

For more information contact Karen Eifler, Garaventa Center, at eifler@up.edu.

 

TLC Tip of the Week: What is Useful Educational Technology?

In this IGNITE-funded video, Eric Anctil, education, offers suggestions for choosing educational technology options from among the gazillions now on offer. Rather than discuss specific tools and apps, he offers guidelines that are portable across disciplines, all firmly rooted in teaching and learning priorities.

TLC Tip of the Week: Creating Inclusive, Engaging Class Spaces

In this brief IGNITE-funded video, Jeff Kerssen-Griep, communication studies, offers portable suggestions for creating a classroom where all feel welcome and valued. As a special bonus, embedded within this video is a link to another one in which he explores the notion of “facework” in interpersonal communication with students and colleagues.

TLC Tip of the Week: Enhancing Class Discussions

In this 10-minute IGNITE-funded video, David Turnbloom of the theology department offers strategies for increasing the quality and quantity of student participation in class conversations. His ideas are portable across multiple content areas.

For more information contact Karen Eifler at eifler@up.edu.

TLC Teaching Tip of the Week: A Treasure Trove!

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.

TLC From The TLC: Tutoring Structure & Active Learning

How might a tutoring structure help us to support students? In this week’s Teaching & Learning submission, Jeffrey White from the Learning Commons considers the tutoring cycle as a tool for facilitating active learning during interactions with students and the learning material during office hours visits.

For more information contact White at x7141 or white@up.edu.

 

 

TLC Tip of the Week: When A Student Stops Showing Up

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.

TLC From The TLC: Think-Pair-Share Explained

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.