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Increasing Voice and Choice in the Classroom
Summary: Boost engagement in your classroom! Discover strategies to amplify student voice and choice, making learning more personalized and empowering for all. Date of publishing: December 21, 2022 When we think of increasing voice and choice in the classroom we may immediately think of choice in assignments or assessment tasks. Whereas these do increase student choice, these alone do not get to the heart of increasing student voice and seeing students as partners in the teaching and learning process. It is for this reason that supporting student voice and choice requires building a learning environment focused on partnerships, student agency, flexible learning paths, and deep learning tasks. The learning framework…
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Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement within JSGS
By Jamie Mayoh-Bauche, Instructional Designer, U of R, Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy Keeping up with the latest scholarship on evidence-based practice can be a challenge for instructors who are busy with their own areas of research, amongst all the other things. In response to this challenge, Johnson Shoyama Graduate School (JSGS) embarked on creating a culture of continuous learning by making recent evidence-based teaching and learning practices easy and accessible for our instructors. Throughout the 2021/2022 school year, we organized a series of events and workshops aimed at building a shared understanding of program level competencies and instructional approaches that enhance student competency development. We gathered monthly…
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Perusall or Discussion Boards
Previous blog posts have introduced Perusall to turn pre-class readings into social learning. In this post, let’s explore how instructors might use Perusall to overcome discussion board fatigue and provide resources on using Perusall along with sample learning activities. Perusall is a free social learning tool that students can access through Canvas. Students have discussions in the same space as they read course material. The image below shows what a student would see in Perusall, with the reading in the middle and the conversation on the side. This post only refers to the use of readings in Perusall. However, videos, images, podcasts, and webpages can all be used. Additionally, responses…
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Assessing Outcomes versus Grading Assignments
Shift your focus from grading tasks to assessing outcomes. Learn how this approach fosters deeper learning and provides a more meaningful evaluation of student progress. In this article, we will examine why assessing outcomes can target learning improvements better than grading assignments.Ooutcomes-based assessment starts with articulating what students will be able to do (the learning outcomes), followed by designing learning activities and assessments linked to the outcomes. However, even with clear outcomes and learning activities, instructors often fall into the habit of grading assignments rather than assessing outcomes. Consider the following scenario. Learner 1 and Learner 2 both have 75% in your class. How do you, the instructor, or the…
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From Grit to Pearl: Understanding our SLEQs
Guest Post by Roslyn M. Compton, Sithokozile Maposa, Sheryl Mills, Schroder Sattar This past year we decided to approach our SLEQs differently. Because we planned and taught NURS 306 as a team, we decided to review our SLEQs as a team. In this post, we share the step-by-step process we used to shift from a solitary, dreaded, anxiety-provoking endeavor to a collegial, objective and reflective learning opportunity. We moved from a place of isolation, self-doubt, insecurity, and defensiveness to openness, curiosity, puzzling, surprise, and reaffirmed confidence. Rather than gritting our teeth, we polished our pearls by looking at our SLEQ, wearing our researcher hats and analyzing our SLEQ data. …
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Experiential Learning Resources – 5 Top Picks
Summary: If you’re wondering how to enhance your experiential learning practices and make meaningful connections with learners’ knowledge and experiences, here are five valuable resources to support experiential learning. Discover rubrics, learning modules, reflection models, and prompting questions. Date of publishing: October 11, 2022 When exploring the USask Experiential Learning framework, you might want information about reflection frameworks, providing efficient feedback, and grading reflection. While we have built some resources around reflection and feedback, other higher education institutions have some gems to support Experiential Learning. Brock University – Reflection in Your Course and a Critical Reflection Rubric Lays out why and when students should reflect, what reflection could look like, and…
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Announcing a New OER – Universal Design for Learning (UDL): One Small Step
We know that learners bring a wide range of knowledge, skills, backgrounds, and experiences into the classroom. As educators, we can expect to find variability in our classroom. The USask Learning Charter lists, as one of the Educator Commitments and Responsibilities, to Strive for Excellence in Teaching. This commitment means that educators work to develop respectful and inclusive learning environments that support student learning. Honouring this commitment requires that educators co-create with students a shared space for learning in which all participants feel respected, valued, and empowered to contribute as they achieve their goals and share the gifts of their identities in relationship with one another. This approach is also part of…
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Non-Disposable Assignments and Why You Should Use Them
This post originally ran on the Open Education at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) website and is reposted here under a CC-BY license. By Jen Moss, Instructional Designer and Adjunct Faculty at UAF The idea of the non-disposable or reusable assignment has been around for a while. The last couple years may have brought new practices and strategy to your teaching and new thoughts about assessment strategies. Perhaps some of those thoughts revolve around designing assessments connect meaningfully with the community outside the classroom bubble in some way. This is one of the fundamental points of open pedagogy and something that can be accomplished through the reusable assignment. David…
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How do you know when you need Experiential Learning?
Summary: Identify when your teaching can benefit from experiential learning to boost student engagement with practical, real-world applications. Date of Publishing: September 22, 2022 Experiential learning (EL) is not a new approach to teaching, but in recent years has become increasingly common in higher education. It is an engaging approach to teaching and learning that can be extremely beneficial for students, especially as they start their careers. Due to practical limitations, EL can’t always be used, which leads to the question: when should you use EL? Situation 1: When students are learning a skill that is important in the real world Some skills taught in university courses are critical for…
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Efficient Feedback
Struggling to learn something? Trying something complex or hard? There is nothing like feedback to help you learn well. For many of us teaching in higher education, however, providing feedback is an aspiration. We know it is important, but we struggle to provide it early or sometimes at all, particularly in large classes. Even when we have specifically designed an activity where students have an experience in an authentic context, we struggle to give timely feedback that students can use to improve their learning. Most of our feedback comes at the end when learning is done (e.g., final paper). It’s laborious, and we question if students are even using it. …
