2012 Cross-Faculty Teaching Forum 

Engaged Teaching | Engaged Learning

Notes from the discussion groups focused on three questions

1. What was the most interesting point in Maryellen's presentation from your perspective?

• Emphasis on transparency and ownership
• Concrete Examples with Story Telling
• Passion for Subject/ Topic
• Ownership and Agreement between Students and Teacher - Participation Policy
• Forms of Participation Valued in the Classroom
• Nurturing the Classroom Climate
• Developing Lifelong Learning Skills and articulating the Learning Process
• Importance of student ownership
• Challenge of delivering content versus time for engagement activity
• Takes a lot of work to engage in learning – set that expectation with the students from the beginning
• Importance of student participation that will result in a deeper level of understanding – how do you know that is happening?
• Importance of getting students excited about learning
• Make students feel as though they will develop skills vs. being intimidated by difference in their skills
• Importance of lifelong learning by teachers
• Ways to get students motivated (engagement with tasks; negotiating tasks, policies; give students ownership)
• Telling students what teacher needs to do job
• Participation policy – turned into assignment (participation partner; would work better in small classes; need specific rubric for evaluation; has a risk factor alongside freedom)
• Strategies for getting students to identify wrong answers
• Introvert comment – how they learn (students and instructors)
• Lifelong learning skills – helping students to develop this
• Developing both content knowledge and learning skills
• How activities build upon each other (instructional design)
• Student ownership, instructors not doing everything
• People are interested in their own learning – students will set objectives for themselves  if you set those expectations
• Insight into the definition of active learning – getting students to do the messy work, not doing it for them.
• “tell me the wrong answer”
• Felt validated by her talk – being self-deprecating/silly as an instructor

2. What implications does this have for your teaching - your learning?

• We want to make sure that students are involved in the learning process; that they know the questions we will address in the course and care about answering those questions – those questions that we answered together could very well be the exam questions
• Being and Active Learner and Active Teacher
• Explicitly identifying the reason for why and how they are learning it
• Focusing on the learning skills and content mastery (e.g., setting the stage and expectations)
• Experiment with different teaching strategies among different groups of students
• Providing an appropriate timeline
• What does it mean to develop a classroom climate for a one-off session
• “stand and deliver” is not enough for students or teachers
• There is a responsibility to show expertise but also to support active learning that leads to understanding
• Integrated senses of assignments that read to skill development as well as an increase in content knowledge
• Skill building as a process that goes on throughout the course – sequence of assignments
• Engagement by students can lead to instructors learning
• Not good to let student default to passive learning
• How do you feel about trying new things? (Challenging -- to instructor and to student; keep it interesting)
•  Helps to get feedback part way through
• Redesign of course to get time to cover material
• Students being able to do something with learning
• Read the reading list!
• Feeling validated by the notion that the assignments should build upon each other (skill development)
• What to do when coming from a content-heavy background?  What about using less content? 

3. What are some examples of high levels of engagement both inside and outside the classroom?

• Games, activities, change of pace, just doing something different/out of the ordinary, showing students you care about their presence; creative (open) assignments
• The example of the Questions in the Box and retrieving during class time
• Different modes of communicating content material
• Self-Reflections, Self-Regulation, promoting Autonomy in learners
• Sharing the ownership in assessment (e.g., pooling exam questions, building rubric)
• Teaching with Silence as an example of high level of engagement
• Twitter – allowing a live feed of comments to open communication/ feedback/ discussion
• What does it mean to develop a classroom climate for a one-off session
• “stand and deliver” is not enough for students or teachers
• There is a responsibility to show expertise but also to support active learning that leads to understanding
• Integrated senses of assignments that read to skill development as well as an increase in content knowledge
• Skill building as a process that goes on throughout the course – sequence of assignments
• Engagement by students can lead to instructors learning
• Worst/best teacher/class discussion
• Level 1 engagement proportional to simplicity/engagement(narrowing specificity better)
• How to retouch students who become disengaged
• Taking learning outside classroom
• Less content, more skills?
• Grad students should get the training they need to teach well.  Mandatory course?  More value placed on teaching (e.g. from NSERC?).  TA’s to mentor each other?
• How to analyze what instructors do intuitively…how to explain it to others.
• Instructors and students should have expectations of each other (e.g. participation)