Building Stronger Intro and Upper-Division Courses Workshop Sessions
Applicants for a Courses workshop will experience the following sessions. A one day workshop will include key elements from Designing Effective and Engaging Courses which address the four elements of developing goals and learning outcomes, Metacognition & Motivation, Active Learning and Assessment. If your workshop is longer than one day, you can choose to expand on any of these sub-categories in more detail as you also choose a given theme(s).
Designing Effective and Engaging Courses
Finding the time, energy, and inspiration to develop a new course or to re-design an existing course can be a challenge for faculty. Building on more than a decade of On the Cutting Edge workshops, this session will help faculty establish student learning goals for their course and, in the context of those goals, develop course materials that reflect best practices in effective teaching and assessment.
Learn more about this topic: Course Design Tutorial
Learning Outcomes and Course Goals
Thinking about what you want your students to be able to know and do before you start developing activities and assessments for your goals assures that learning is aligned to what you want them to get out of your course. Being explicit with goals and learning outcomes, students are able to have a better understanding of how to meet your expectations from the course.
Learn more about this topic: Learning Outcomes
Assessing Learning and Programs
Understanding what our students are learning is fundamental to good teaching. Within a class, this understanding guides our next steps with each student. On the scale of a course, it allows us to assess where our methods and materials are achieving the desired outcome and when they need revision. This session will provide faculty with additional tools for understanding what their students are actually learning.
Learn more about this topic: Student Learning: Observing and Assessing
Metacognition, Motivation, and Affect
Faculty are very good at addressing the cognitive needs of students in their classrooms, but are often less aware of the non-cognitive or metacognitive aspects of their students' learning. This session will shed light on how to help students learn how to learn, how to motivate them to learn, and how to work with students' attitudes, perceptions and values.
Learn more about these topics: Metacognition, Affective Domain
Active Learning
This session will showcase ways of making the classroom more "student centered." These techniques also go by terms such as active learning, research-based learning, interactive engagement, or engaged pedagogies. They feature attributes such as experiences that approximate disciplinary practice, alignment of activities with desired outcomes and assessment, increased student-student and student-faculty interaction, and respect for different talents and ways of learning.
Learn more about this topic: Pedagogy in Action