The Institute will be offering Lunchtime seminars and presentations on topics to enhance teaching and learning. The seminars provide an opportunity to gather with colleagues to listen, discuss, comment, interact, and reflect on a number of topics. They are organized on a first-come, first-serve basis. Seminars are from 11:15 a.m. to 1:10 p.m. All seminars will be held in the John W. Rowe Center for Undergraduate Education (ROWE), Room 320.
A boxed lunch will be provided. If you have special dietary needs (vegetarian, gluten free, or both) please e-mail Stacey Valliere. Requests made within 7 days of seminar will not be honored.
The seminars are available to faculty, graduate students, and professional staff. Reservations are required and are accepted on a first-come-first serve basis. If you have signed up and are not able to attend, your colleagues would appreciate it if you unregistered, as we often have others who would like to register. Feedback from you is also important. It will help us focus as well as plan a more diverse program.
Spring 2015
Using Informal Writing to Promote Engagement and Critical Thinking in Small and Large Courses Across the Disciplines
Tom Deans, English & ITL-Writing Center
Friday, January 23rd
Targeted Audience: Faculty & TA’s
Most of the writing we assign in college courses–papers, lit reviews, lab reports–is formal and high-stakes, and typically takes lots of time to teach and grade. This workshop will focus on a whole different kind of writing: informal, low-stakes writing that can be woven strategically into both small and large enrollment courses. What would it be like, for example, to interrupt a lecture and have students write for 3 minutes on a key question, data set, or quotation presented on a slide? Such quick writing activities–often done in class, often not even collected–can promote engagement, spark critical thinking, and reinforce course content.
Responding to (and Grading) Student Writing in the Disciplines
Tom Deans, English & ITL-Writing Center
Monday, January 26th
Targeted Audience: Faculty & TA’s
Responding to and grading student writing will always take time, but there are more and less effective and efficient ways to do it. This session will reveal what research on writing in the disciplines suggests about best practices. We’ll also discuss some less common but quite promising practices–such as recorded audio responses, quick individual conferences, and peer review–that take less time than traditional written commenting on drafts.
Talk Moves to Enhance Discussion and Student Thinking
Mary Truxaw, Curriculum & Instruction
Friday, January 30th – 11:15-12:30pm
Targeted Audience: Faculty & TA’s
Are you interested in promoting discussion in your classes that support student thinking and learning? Five “talk moves” will be introduced, discussed, and practiced by participants. You should leave the session being able to try out one or more of these moves in your classroom.
Academic Honesty, Cheating, Plagiarism, and SafeAssign
Steven Park, Academic Services, AVPT
Monday, February 9th
Targeted Audience: Faculty, TA’s Staff & Students
As college instructors we do not want to create an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion in our classrooms. But, on the other hand, we don’t want to be naïve about questions around academic integrity, honesty, and cheating. In this workshop we will talk about finding that right balance, to let our students know that we know why and how some students cheat, and what we can do to minimize the risk and create a positive learning environment. We will show the open use of SafeAssign, HuskyCT’s originality – checking software. Goal - The goal of the workshop is to help instructors find the right balance in the classroom between letting our students know that we are savvy about academic dishonesty—- without negatively impacting the atmosphere of learning.
Prework
Please read the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
November 17, 2014
Think Students in Your Class Might Be Cheating? Here’s What to Do
By Beckie Supiano
http://chronicle.com/article/Think-Students-in-Your-Class/150091/Program: Avery Point Campus
Promoting student engagement in your course
Preston A. Britner, Ph.D, Human Development & Family Studies (HDFS)
Friday, March 27th
Targeted Audience: Faculty
We will focus on finding ways to create a learning environment that maximizes student-faculty interaction in the classroom and student engagement in the course material and assignments. Topics will include: faculty preparation; active vs. passive teaching; use of questions, humor, activities, and stimulus diversity; types of assignments & assessments; and, how to gather data to inform your approach. Discussion will encourage attendees to offer their own teaching strategies that have worked – or failed — for them in captivating student interest and promoting involvement of students in the learning process.
Intercultural Communication
Mihwa Lee and Patricia Lin-Steadman, International Student & Scholar
Wednesday, April 1st
Targeted Audience: Faculty, TA’s, Staff & Students
Working at a higher education institution, we engage in intercultural communication every working day and become skilled in dealing with differences that exist among their clients and colleagues. This session will provide a conceptual framework for those interactions, to increase familiarity with the terms of intercultural communication, and to broaden the understanding of how culture influences behavior.
Mentor Texts: Using Writing from the ‘Real’ World as Models for our Students
Jason Courtmanche, English
Friday, April 17th
Targeted Audience: W-Instructors
One of the best ways to help our students learn to write discipline-specific essays is to use examples of ‘real’ writing from our field as models. This workshop will provide some ideas for how to incorporate mentor texts into our writing instruction.
To register for all or any of these workshops, please visit http://itl.uconn.edu/seminars/.
For more information, contact: Stacey Valliere at stacey.valliere@uconn.edu