- Assessment and Evaluation, Curriculum Development, Educational Technology, General, Graduate Education, Inclusivity, Indigenization, Decolonization, Reconciliation, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies, Open
Gearing Up With Fall Fortnight 2016
[social_share/] [social-bio] “Happy New Year!!” That is how I think of September and the new school year. This often coincides with a strong pull to stationary stores, tidying my office, organizing my supplies, reading new books, and pulling out sweaters and warm socks. Gearing up for the Fall Term is exciting. There’s often anticipation, hope, renewed energy for trying new things and looking forward to tweaking things I tried last year. I think about taking a class. There are new “school” clothes, crisp mornings, and longer shadows when I head for home. All of that is bundled together as the new term starts. I think about the new faculty, staff,…
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Using Reflective Practice to Become the Teacher You Want to Be
[social_share/] [social-bio] With Wenona Partridge, GMCTE Richard Feynman was a great physicist and exceptional teacher, and generally cool person. He had a vision for how he wanted to teach and kept moving towards that vision. For a glimpse of Feynman, see the video at the end of this post (or read more and see the video), and think about the kind of teacher Feynman chose to be. So what is your vision for your teaching? What are your goals? What do you want your feedback from students to say? What stories would you like students to share about your class? One of the ways to move toward your vision is…
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Teaching Goals, the Learning Charter, and the Fall Fortnight
[social_share/] [social-bio] It’s hard to believe, as we sit on a 30+ day, that the fall term is coming up fast! It is even warm in my office today as I write. (And for those of you who have stopped by on other days and needed to put on a jacket, you know how hot it must be out there to warm it up in here!!) At the Centre we have been busy planning for the start of the fall turn and, as always, our guiding star is the University of Saskatchewan’s Learning Charter. It reminds us of our responsibilities and commitments to the university community. There are specific commitments…
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Authentic Assessment
[social_share/] [social-bio] I think of authentic assessments as ways for students to demonstrate knowledge and understanding in a public way. What makes assessment authentic for me is that students do something to show what they know in a public way that benefits a wider community than the one person assigning a grade. The posters that students did in their first year College of Agriculture and Bioresources (AgBio) classes this past term are, in my way of defining authentic assessment, stellar examples. Working in teams, students prepared a research poster as part of their undergraduate research experience. On the afternoon of December 3rd there were 99 posters on display up and…
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Serendipity
[social_share/] [social-bio] This past term, the day after the Dean of the College of Arts and Science Peter Stoicheff”s acoustic guitar noon-hour concert, I got two recommends for new and up-coming recording artists. Stella Swanson is my second cousin. Her grandmother sent me a link to the interview she did with CBC radio and one of Stella’s songs. I listened and was blown away! Stella and her mom and sister had done “in-house concerts” when I visited them this past spring and it was awesome. Talk about taking it to the next level with the CD release and website. Her CD is “I’m not a Bunny.” I bought her CD…
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Crafting Artful Teaching
[social_share/] [social-bio] I’ve been a teacher since I was 6 years old and I still absolutely grin when I see a class that is well-structured and flows with lots of student and instructor excitement and enthusiasm that is “on purpose.” When the class time flies by, things are “accomplished,” there’s action, and “learning” is palpable, that is what we strive for, and to me it’s as beautiful as a great movie, a heart-felt song, or a painting that claims your attention. I saw these qualities in a 50-minute class taught by Leah Ferguson, a new faculty member in Kinesiology. I was absolutely grinning by the end of the class so…
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Where Do You Get Your Examples?
[social_share/] [social-bio] I recently interviewed Leah Ferguson, faculty member in Kinesiology, about how she chooses the examples she uses to illustrate concepts in her first year KIN class… This might surprise you at first but then it’s an “of course!!” What a way to make research real, build a sense of collegiality, highlight what’s going on in the college, and let students know about the research of their other professors. The real examples from the college make the concepts come alive! The interview is about five minutes…let us know what you think.
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Who’s in Charge? You or the Room?
[social_share/] [social-bio] ISSoTL 2014 was held this past October in Quebec City. I was attracted to the conference not just because of the theme (“Nurturing Passion and Creativity in Teaching and Learning”) but also because of the location—I had not been to Quebec City before. I walked from the Hotel Claredon, reputedly the oldest hotel in Canada, to the conference centre through the gates going from the old city to the “new” city each morning. I couldn’t help but notice how different it felt from one side of the wall to the other. The transition zone was well marked and prominent. On the winding narrow streets of the Old City,…
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Creativity? Teamwork? Tips for Effective Creative Collaborating
[social_share/] [social-bio] At a recent Leadership Conversation we focused on creativity as it pertains to collaborative projects. We based our discussion on ideas from the book Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull who was one of the founders and is the current President of Pixar Animation. (For those of us who didn’t read the book, we got the Coles Notes version from a short video of Ed Catmull speaking about some of what he later wrote in this book. It’s well worth the time to watch!) Heather Ross, who facilitated this conversation, focused our conversation around the following three questions: 1. What was one thing that you took away from what…
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Tamarind, Teaching and Undergraduate Research
[social_share/] [social-bio] For the first time today, I tasted tamarind. I felt like I had discovered something so surprisingly delicious and interesting that I wondered why I had gone this long without knowing about it. This fruit’s benefits are wide-ranging and well known apparently—they just hadn’t been to me. I wasn’t introduced to it through family or friends, but I found information about it as I was searching for ways to reduce fluoride accumulations in the body—I was trying to solve a problem and it was one of the possible solutions to the problem. New teaching strategies—or new-to-you teaching strategies—can be similar to discovering the tamarind fruit. Billions of people…