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All Aligned – Outcomes
This post is one of a 3 part series on the concept of alignment of what you want students to learn, how you plan to teach them, and what you will assess them on. Sometimes called constructive alignment, it has three parts: Your learning outcomes Your instructional approach or learning strategies Your assessments This post focuses on the need for clear learning outcomes for your students, and the next two posts in October and November focus on instruction and assessment respectively. Why outcomes Outcomes are statements that describe what our teaching is designed to help students know, do, or be. They start with a verb, then connect that to the…
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Practice Your Research Skills Early and Often
by Merle Massie, Coordinator, Undergraduate Research Initiative We tend to think of university as a place to soak up knowledge, to learn stuff, to end up with a ‘brain full of smartness,’ as one twelve-year old boy once explained. Yet the new University of Saskatchewan Learning Charter promises, and expects, more. While content knowledge is important, the Charter sets out skills and practices that students, faculty and staff are expected to pursue.Three of those skills and practices are specific to research. USask wants students, faculty and staff to: be able to locate, understand, evaluate and use information effectively, ethically, legally and with cultural appropriateness develop and apply appropriate skills of…
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High quality, respectful classroom dialogue
Summary: High-quality, respectful classroom dialogue can enhance student learning and understanding. How can you create an open, healthy, and inclusive learning environment? Date: August 15, 2024 High quality, respectful classroom dialogue is essential in helping student learning. When students are engaged in actively thinking about their own learning and discussing it with others, they are more likely to understand deeply. If students are just listening to an expert talking without the interaction, they are less likely to remember the learning 6 months later. However, understanding more deeply and remembering more works best if the interaction in class is focused on the most important learning and it is safe and encouraged…
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Building Broad Minds: Active learning strategies for large classrooms
Building broad minds is not about back filling. Broad minds are the byproduct of encountering diverse ideas, thinking deeply about them, and integrating those ideas into our own worldviews and cognitive frameworks. In higher education, the opportunity to be exposed to the thinking of a wide variety of disciplines usually happens at the first year level. However, those are also often large courses where the primary method of instruction is listening to your professor speak. To actually get broad minds, our learning activities have to be active, even in the large classrooms where active learning strategies are limited by the room, and even when students are first encountering the subject…
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Graduates with perspectives and approaches the world needs
We often talk about the skills our graduates will need for success in their work and within our communities. As we aspire to be the university the world needs, we can’t overlook how essential perspective taking and cross-cultural competence are in our increasingly diverse world. In this place, we have a collective commitment to improve the situation for the First Nation, Metis, and Inuit peoples, and to truth and reconciliation. And we can also see the impacts of nationalism and nativism on the global stage, a problem that is prompting us to equip our students with the skills they will need to respond.This post is one in a series related…
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Charter Chats
The University of Saskatchewan has a new Learning Charter. First written in 2010, then updated in 2018, our charter is helpful in framing what we believe about teaching and learning. It will also provide a sense of direction for work at Gwenna Moss over the next year: The Learning Charter thus acts as a conceptual map and planning document, linking together our pursuits and how we strive for them, encouraging and guiding us on our educational journey. As a map, it is also a focal point for our community to discuss where we are and where we want to go in our shared future. This post will be the hub…
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Top Hat: How is it being used at the U of S?
The University of Saskatchewan has a continuing commitment to a technology-enhanced learning environment for students and in January 2016 acquired a campus-wide license for the Top Hat student response system. Top Hat is a software-based student response system, incorporating a “bring-your-own-device” solution, that is available at no direct cost to instructors and students. The primary goal of Top Hat is to enhance the teaching and learning experience for both instructors and students by bringing more engagement and interaction into traditional passive lecture-style learning approaches. Who we are We are a research team at the University of Saskatchewan who are interested in student response systems with a specific focus on Top…
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Getting More Active (and getting more learning)
Summary: Boost engagement and deepen learning with active learning strategies. Discover tips to make your classroom more interactive and effective. Date of publishing: December 20, 2018 This post focuses on easy changes to make your course more active. Step 1- Clarify the purpose of active learning in your class Active learning is time in your classroom when students are actively thinking, talking, and making sense of ideas. It is contrasted with passive learning, when students are being receptive (listening, note taking, etc.) An individual class is typically considered active when 60% or more of the time is students thinking and talking, rather than the instructor explaining. To get started with…
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Tips to Start Internationalizing Your Teaching
This week is International Education Week. It’s a great time to be thinking about how to encourage global citizenship among your students and how to make your course welcoming for international students. We can play a key role in providing the type of education the world needs, especially in a time of increased nationalism and political division. Internationalizing your course is not just about having some international course content. It is about the alignment between your beliefs, how you facilitate, and how you instruct so students learn to embrace diversity of perspective and experience. Once you know you want to help students embrace global diversity, the next step is to…
- Assessment and Evaluation, Curriculum Development, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies
Is Your Instruction Designed to Produce Student Learning?
Lecture is an efficient way to transmit information, especially in large classes. We inevitably feel there is a lot of content to cover, since the gap between what novice students know and expert professors know is large. However, large, uninterrupted blocks of lecture are very inefficient ways to learn, because they are passive. Learners get cognitive overload and stop processing, have trouble paying attention, and remember some ideas that they struggle to apply or connect conceptually. All of these occur, even with strong learners, and even with instructors who provide exceptionally focused, clear delivery of information. The mind just learns more if it is actively engaged in thinking. As a…