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Gather Data, Take a Timely Look, and Make Change
[social-bio] Recently, I read Fetterman, Deitz & Gesundheit’s 2010 article on using empowerment evaluation to renew a medical curriculum. The Stanford University School of Medicine engaged in a process of collecting data about their courses and providing that data back in a timely fashion to faculty and directors who engaged in reflection and discussion to create changes in courses, clerkships, and across the curriculum. Such discussions, timely feedback, and the facilitation by a curriculum evaluation person acting as critical friend were identified as key components of this process. The article provides details including how they addressed challenges for faculty such as balancing demands on time and sharing course and curriculum…
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TLt 2013 Brings Ideas Together
[social-bio] The University of Saskatchewan and the Gwenna Moss Centre hosted this year’s Teaching and Learning with Technology conference on May 1 and 2. The theme was “Making IT Mainstream: Everybody’s doing IT,” focusing on “the mainstream integration of learning technologies at both the level of the institution and individual instructor; what is working and what is not, and how all of this will continue to effect higher education.” Two pre-conference events were held on the first day; Evaluating the Integration of Technology: Understanding the Purpose and Process of Evaluation Research with Valerie Irvine, Brad Wuetherick and Stan Yu, and IDing our Future: A Meeting of the Minds of Instructional Designers, for instructional…
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So You’re Thinking of Flipping your Class: We Can Help
[social-bio] Perhaps you’ve been hearing rumblings about flipped teaching. Maybe you even read my post about it in December (What is Flipped Teaching?). If you haven’t heard of it, flipped teaching is, “the process of moving lecture content from face-to-face class time to before class by assigning it as homework. This allows for more interactive and student-centred types of learning to take place during the scheduled class time. Flipped teaching often involves, but is not limited to, students viewing lecture videos as homework.” So, now that we’re all on the same page, I am pleased to announce a new support from the Gwenna Moss Centre that we’re referring to as…
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Reflecting On Your SEEQ Course Evaluations
[social-bio] Most of us dread, or at the least, have mixed feelings about receiving feedback on our teaching, especially from standardized course evaluation tools such as the Student Evaluation of Educational Quality instrument (SEEQ). However, many new insights may be gained by continuously reflecting on our actions as teachers and by opening ourselves up to a process of continual learning about pedagogy. In a pdf booklet entitled Students Rating Teaching, teachers are challenged and encouraged to reflect upon the quality, usefulness, and potential difficulties of SEEQ data in relation to their teaching practice as opposed to simply reading their SEEQ results (Lawall n.d.). This year when you receive your SEEQ…
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Mind the Gap: Learning Communities, Transitions, and Educational Enrichment
[social-bio] By Erin DeLathouwer “What kind of job can I even get with an x degree?” I’ve heard this question again and again in my time as the program coordinator of learning communities, and I suggest that the anxiety that motivates this question comes from the fact that transitions are hard. For first-year students, for peer mentors, for new faculty, for recent graduates, and for those of us navigating from one job to another – transitions are hard. The difficulties involved in transitions in life are mitigated, however, by education – specifically, the enriching experiences that a good education tends to provide. In my experience, transitions aren’t supposed to be…
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Anything But …
[social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler Not exams. Not this example. Not that textbook again…Anything but that! Our rejection of a particular method or medium for teaching may be motivation enough to try something new. However, “Not ____” just rules out a single direction, leaving open all other possibilities. Deciding between the many alternatives involves setting a goal and sensing what features we want to change and what we want to retain. For example, “Not an exam” leaves open many possibilities depending on our goals. If we want to measure students’ learning of all material in the course, we can decide to keep the end-of-term timing of final exams. A second…
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Looking Back, Moving Forward
[social-bio] As the academic term draws to a close and after my marking is complete, I find myself looking back over the semester, determining which learning activities went well and why, the teaching goals I set forth for myself, where I succeeded and fell short, and what I should do differently the next time I teach. For me, the process of reflecting on my teaching practice, or “recapturing my experience, thinking about it, mulling it over, and evaluating it” (Boud, Keogh, & Walker 1985) begins on the last day of class when I ask my students to come prepared to tell me one significant thing they’ve learned or taken away…
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We Are All Treaty People
By Tereigh Ewert In the fall, the office of the VP Teaching and Learning began offering treaty education to faculty and staff at the University of Saskatchewan. Each month, a cohort of people engaged in an online module, and then their learning culminated in a three-hour face-to-face session with a Traditional Knowledge Keeper who further illuminated treaty history and issues, and who also provided some critical cultural context. Gordon Barnhart, in his 2007 speech to the throne, made treaty education mandatory in the K-12 school system, so our upcoming generation has some knowledge of treaty history and issues. But for most of the rest of us, we have had little…