As our Tips for Teaching Month comes to an end, we’re happy to share the 31 days worth of tips we’ve collected from Carleton’s teaching and learning community. Take a look and see if there are any ideas you can incorporate into your own teaching.<\/p>\n
Thank you all for your submissions. The winners of the three $25 Campus Card gift certificates are: Carter Elwood, Erik Anonby and Michael Dolan. Congratulations!<\/p>\n
While the deadline for the draw has passed, your teaching tips are always welcome. Email oavptl@carleton.ca<\/a> at any point throughout the year with your tips and we’ll share them with your colleagues.<\/p>\n Instructors know that, if we’re doing our job, then our students should be improving from assignment to assignment. With respect to essays in particular, that means we’re hoping to see tangible improvement from one paper to the next. But how carefully do we really track that progress? One easy way to do so is, instead of writing all your comments on the student’s paper (which you rarely ever see again), to put that feedback on a comments sheet (a template you create for yourself). On that template, you enter your comments for each student; then, before you staple it to the student’s assignment and return it, you make a copy and stuff it in a folder. When the next essay comes in, you now have more than just a previous grade and a vague recollection to assess your student’s progress — instead, taking one minute to glance at your previous comments sheet, you know exactly the areas of strength and areas for growth you identified last time, and now have a way to measure whether or not the student has addressed the latter. All told, I’ve found that 1) a comments sheet template has reduced the time needed to mark papers by about one third, and 2) the entire process takes very little time to coordinate once you have developed a comments sheet template for yourself.<\/p>\n Morgan Rooney You can never provide too many instructions to your students. Start your class by introducing the topic and wrap up by summarizing. Or, as some would put it: Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you’ve told them.<\/p>\n Maristela Petrovic-Dzerdz The new \u201ctouch-screen monitors\u201d and Microsoft Paint make an excellent \u201cwhite board.\u201d With just a little tutorial, anyone using their finger can draw (and save) impromptu drawings in these classrooms. Not to mention that PowerPoint has an annotation function so annotating with your finger is easy.<\/p>\n Armand Doucet I\u2019m still a believer in the potential of the well-paced, diversified, problem-solving, innovatively-informed lecture. Students still rally, as far as I can tell, to exciting new information that is presented with passion and enthusiasm. It is not my only delivery format, but I love the challenge of getting the lecture formula just right, almost as an art form that generates feeling and excitement as it goes, as a source of enlightenment and pleasure for the listeners. I rarely get it exactly as I want it, but on those special occasions when students say \u201cgreat lecture sir\u201d on the way out of the class, it\u2019s not a simple sop to my ego, but my feedback clue that tells me \u201cmore of whatever I did today, and less of what I did last time.\u201d It\u2019s cumulative learning for me and I still love the challenge, old-fashioned as that may seem. I try to keep the learning environment as rich as I can possibly make it, while always thinking of capacity and transparency. And I love big ideas, as big as Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton et al could make them, to which I try to attach the widest and most useful perspectives I can possibly find. I confess that the discussion leader and technician in me get a bit drowned out at times, but I console myself with the mission of the ideas themselves to travel as viruses of the mind\u2014in that I\u2019m still just a mediator and facilitator.<\/p>\n Don Beecher Make student email the priority in your inbox. Answer student email as quickly as possible. It is part of timely, effective feedback. It facilitates learning. It helps students keep their momentum with their work.<\/p>\n Tim Pychyl Fourth year seminars pose a couple of special challenges. First, they rely on students having done the preparatory reading prior to class. And second, some students are reticent to actively participate, while others don’t mind dominating the discussion. Having worked with educating adults outside of the university environment, I adapted some practices that had a positive impact on my seminar classes.<\/p>\n I assigned two sets of readings to the students. Everyone was assigned to read the first set, but for the second set, I would break the class into four groups of six or seven (with a class of 25) and assign each group a different reading. In class, the groups would be recombined so that each contained members who had read different articles. The assignment for each was to prepare a single sheet that summed up the piece (this would form their participation grade for the course). The composition of the small groups would change each week (accomplished by assigning numbers 1 to 6 prior to forming the groups).<\/p>\n The seminar would be organized in three parts: my 20-minute presentation on the subject matter of the week, a discussion within each of the six groups with each person having about 12 minutes to expound upon their article and answer questions concerning their review, and a class discussion of the general readings and how they related to the specific articles.<\/p>\n I would used this system for most weeks of the term but sometimes the subject matter was inappropriate. Each year my students would tell me how much they got out of the course.<\/p>\n Michael Dolan If you have an out of town conference that you wish to attend but you don\u2019t want to cancel your class that week, contact CUOL to pre-record your lecture for class playback to your students. You get to go to your conference and the students don\u2019t miss a lecture.<\/p>\n Paul Smith Always respond to student emails. Many students will not communicate face to face in class or come to office hours, and prefer the relative anonymity of email. \u00a0But make sure that you set acceptable parameters for response times in both your course outline and your first class. \u00a0I usually use the formula “You can expect a response within one working day”. \u00a0Explain that you will not be responding immediately if they email at four in the morning, and not at weekends, because you also have an outside life off campus. Most students will respect this.<\/p>\n Andrew Robinson Have a back-up plan for lectures. Do not only rely on the network for your teaching documents. Bring your presentation to class on a usb stick as a back up.<\/p>\n Frank Heney Whenever possible, it helps to relate something you\u2019re teaching to an aspect of pop culture the students might recognize. \u00a0In my own courses, I often allude to or even show clips from The Simpsons and South Park, among others.<\/p>\n Arby Siraki As a \u2018theatre\u2019 there is access to \u2018props\u2019 at the KM Theatre. Some instructors have come to my office and requested some for pedagogical purposes. If we have them, we\u2019ll provide them! Theatre is a wonderful pedagogical tool in itself. I have had a professor ask me to view and comment on a \u2018play\u2019 he wrote to use to explain vectors to his students. The students became both actors and props and got new insight into the subject matter.<\/p>\n Nina Karhu I am teaching a class of 193 students. In the past, returning assignments in class has been pandemonium. I recently setup 10 folders, number 0 thru 9, and with maybe only ten minutes of effort I can quickly sort all assignments by a student’s last digit in their student number and place them into the separate folders. Students now only have to look through 1\/10 of the assignments to quickly find theirs. The pandemonium has been reduced significantly for those days I bring graded assignments to class.<\/p>\n Richard Dansereau I work hard to learn and remember the names of all my students in each class, as I find that the personal connection is great for the classroom atmosphere and sense of community; it also gives me a better understanding of where students are coming from. Now that CU has photo class lists available to teachers, this is a lot easier for me, and with classes that have less than 60 students, I have managed to attain my goal each time. I\u2019m actually not very good with names, so I could use this as an excuse, but if a teacher really cares then all it takes is some time and effort \u2013 the time invested in learning students\u2019 names is well spent.<\/p>\n Erik Anonby When designing your course, think about what you want your students to remember and be able to do one year after the course is over. Write this down and keep your focus as you develop your content and activities. To solidify knowledge and skills, engage students and approach main concepts a few times during the course \u2013 \u201cRepetitio mater studiorum est.\u201d<\/p>\n Maristela Petrovic-DzerdzMarch 31<\/h2>\n
\nEducational Developer, EDC<\/p>\nMarch 30<\/h2>\n
\nInstructional Designer, EDC<\/p>\nMarch 29<\/h2>\n
\nSupervisor, Maintenance, IMS<\/p>\nMarch 28<\/h2>\n
\nEnglish<\/p>\nMarch 27<\/h2>\n
\nPsychology<\/p>\nMarch 26<\/h2>\n
\nPolitical Science<\/p>\nMarch 25<\/h2>\n
\nTechnical Operations, CUOL<\/p>\nMarch 24<\/h2>\n
\nPhysics<\/p>\nMarch 23<\/h2>\n
\nTechnical Operations, CUOL<\/p>\nMarch 22<\/h2>\n
\nTeaching and Learning Support Analyst, EDC<\/p>\nMarch 21<\/h2>\n
\nProduction Coordinator, KM Theatre<\/p>\nMarch 20<\/h2>\n
\nSCE<\/p>\nMarch 19<\/h2>\n
\nFrench<\/p>\nMarch 18<\/h2>\n
\nInstructional Designer, EDC<\/p>\nMarch 17<\/h2>\n