Collaboration and Excellence in Teaching, Engagement, & Research
Session Recordings: Fall 2020
Best Practices for Creating Rubrics for Writing Assignments Workshop Join the Teaching Center for a session on the best practices for creating a grading rubric for writing assignments. We will present a template that can be customized for your specific courses, and we will also look at ways to grade more holistically/formatively.
Date: Sep 30, 2020 12:17 PM Central Time (US and Canada)
The original Bloom’s Taxonomy, a classic learning theory, lays out a hierarchy of learning from the most simple (knowledge) to the most complex (evaluation). Updated for the 21st century, the modified Bloom’s Taxonomy provides an effective framework for linking class activities, informal assignments, and formal course assessments to student learning outcomes and course goals. In this hands-on workshop, participants will learn more about Bloom’s Taxonomy as it has evolved in the last fifty years and how to align class activities, course assignments, and course assessments to enhance student learning.
Date: Aug 20, 2020 09:45 AM Central Time (US and Canada)
Building Connections and Setting Expectations Before Day 1
In this workshop, we explore the use of course orientations, where students are invited to attend a course orientation prior to the start of the semester and the foundation for the course is built, high expectations are set, and class connection and community begins. We will hear about the impact that course orientations have had on courses at NSCC and discuss ways to host your own course orientations.
Presenter: Eli Alvarado and Amy S. Bryant, Associate Professor, Fellow in The Teaching CENTER
Do students give presentations in your class? Have you ever wondered if you are assessing the presentations effectively? Join The Teaching CENTER for a workshop on how to grade presentations effectively. The workshop will include discussions of presentation organization, visual aids, delivery, and more. You will leave with a presentation rubric that you can adapt to meet your course presentation requirements.
Handing Over the Keys: Transparent Grading to Support a Growth Mindset
We will discuss my past two years of experience with a portfolio system and using transparent grading, and some of the rationale behind this decision, to demonstrate methods to overcome or bypass many of the cognitive barriers for students, including: cognitive overload, loss aversion, and the fixed mindset. The presentation will also highlight how a transparent system creates higher efficacy and buy-in from students who struggle with the shift into a college setting. At the end, we will discuss strategies for implementing this system that I use, and I look forward to discussing other approaches and ideas that faculty bring to the table. I welcome anyone else who is using a portfolio system to speak as well.
This workshop is a tutorial of how to use Slido to increase engagement in your courses. During the workshop, we will walk through setting up an account, building a Slido event for a class, and developing different questions for building engagement in your class.
Date: September 14, 2020 11:13 AM Central Time (US and Canada)
Impact of Linguistic Diversity and Public-School Policy on Community College Classes
Approximately five million children (or 10% of the pre-K – 12 population) in U.S. public schools are identified as English Learners (formerly known as Limited English Proficient). Over the last 30 years, there has been a concentrated movement of the families of these children to “secondary migration” states such as Tennessee (which has seen an exponential growth in its EL population since the mid-1990s). Many of these students do their entire K-12 experience in American public schools. When these students head to college, their prior school experiences inform their ability to successfully complete college-level courses. This workshop provides an overview of the scope of linguistic diversity in U.S. public schools, the types of “EL” programming available to them, and the long-range impact of that programming on linguistically diverse college students in your content-area classrooms.
Ideally, all faculty, administrators, and staff would be well versed in motivation theory and research to improve instruction and student outcomes. However, because of numerous theories that have been proposed, reading and understanding the motivational research literature can be daunting. The purpose of our keynote is to offer a new approach to faculty professional development aimed at simplifying this complexity. Dr. Kenn Barron, from the Motivation Research Institute at James Madison University and Motivate Lab at the University of Virginia, will introduce a single motivation formula along with a list of key practices to promote each source with our students. He also will introduce how we can apply the formula to motivate ourselves in the upcoming year as faculty.
Date: Aug 14, 2020 12:39 PM Central Time (US and Canada)
Navigating Difficult Conversations in the Workplace
Difficult conversations have not disappeared in our current environment have they? No matter if you are live or virtual, having strategies for encountering difficult conversations is essential.
Date: Oct 1, 2020 11:48 AM Central Time (US and Canada)
Partial Recording of Session: Topic: Online Engagement Tools for any Course Delivery Mode
We will show you some ways we engage our students online whether it is asynchronously or synchronously, via NS Online, Zoom, or while in the classroom. These are tools that can help you in predominately online settings this semester and also on-ground settings in future semesters.
The purpose of this training is to help prepare us to deliver quality education during the pandemic so we ensure physical distancing, but we also promote social connections between faculty and students. While teaching virtually this summer, we have had the opportunity to explore the different features of Zoom that allow us to replicate and translate our on-ground classroom, lab, and office hours to Zoom.
After four major disruptions to our campus and student education, what did we learn? This workshop gives technological tips, tricks, workarounds, and hacks for maintaining an online presence with your students without losing your mind.
In this follow up workshop, I will give examples of formative assessment in a wide array of subject fields, including STEM. I will use examples from colleagues and other universities who have implemented formative and grade-less systems to demonstrate how we can turn our own assignment into formative assessments. Even if instructors are not ready for a full portfolio system, including some formative assignments can benefit all courses.
This workshop brings a a more specific and hands-on approach to a previous in-service on the portfolio and grade-less system employed by the presenter. The participants focus on specific courses, syllabi, and outcomes of instructors who wish to implement/try a portfolio format; they also work specifically with turning outcomes for the course into active statements that students can understand.
This workshop is for people who are thinking about promotion or tenure and want to know more about preparing their materials. We will review the promotion and tenure applications, discuss the three performance criteria, and provide examples of evidence that you can include.
Recent research indicates that transparent assignment design significantly enhances students’ success, with even greater gains for historically underserved students. This presentation will cover the key principles underlying the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) framework and provide evidence for its efficacy. Participants will discuss examples of what transparent teaching and learning looks like in practice and will discuss how to scale this approach across the disciplines.