Get to know CELT better! This week we find out more about Neill Clenaghan, ExamSoft Administrator.
What is your favorite part of your job?
Getting students on board with the ExamSoft exam system with the least number of problems to them, and teaching faculty to use the ExamSoft system for authoring their own exam content.
What did you do prior to working in CELT?
Lets see it’s a long list – Server administration, Videoconferencing administration, Assistant Registrar, Case Management in a Sheltered Workshop, Shoe Salesman, Hotline Administrator….and numerous part-time experiments.
Coffee or tea?
Oh most definitely COFFEE!
Where would you like to visit (real or fictional)?
New Zealand, Paris again (in the Spring), Denmark, Chile, Seattle, and Portland (OR)….the list goes on.
Get to know CELT better! This week we find out more about Kimberly Bell, Teaching Assistant Development Specialist.
What is your favorite part of your job?
Teaching our enthusiastic and passionate postdocs, graduate, and undergraduate students.
What did you do prior to working in CELT?
Prior to my current position, I was a postdoc in CELT for 4 years, and before that I was a lecturer in Undergraduate Biology (2016-17), Workshop Supervisor for the Alda Center (2015-16), and PhD student in Genetics (2010-2015) at SBU.
Coffee or tea?
Both, but not at the same time 🙂
Where would you like to visit (real or fictional)?
Oh, so many places, but my top two right now are Puerto Rico and Wales/England/Northern France (my COVID-postponed 10-year wedding anniversary trip).
What was the last book you read?
I am currently reading “Teaching to Transgress” by bell hooks, and recently finished “The Address” by Fiona Davis.
Get to know CELT better! We will begin our series by finding out more about Catherine Scott, Assistant Director for Faculty Development – Testing, Assessment & Evaluation.
Congratulations to Catherine, who will be the new Director for Educational Effectiveness starting March 1st. We will miss her in CELT, but look forward to working with Catherine in her new role.
What is your favorite part of your job?
My favorite part of is helping faculty and staff collect the data they need to showcase all of the great things happening in and out of the classroom.
What did you do prior to working in CELT?
Prior to working in CELT, I worked at Suffolk County Community College as a student assistant. It was my job to manually enter course feedback from surveys into spreadsheets.
Coffee or tea?
Honestly, I could be happy with either. I like to tell myself that coffee wakes me up in the morning, while tea just makes me feel better throughout the day.
Where would you like to visit (real or fictional)?
No doubt Bora Bora! I can’t wait to be in a hut on the beach. I love the water and I need the sun.
Google Calendar invitations will be sent to registrants and all sessions will be held on Zoom.
Seminar 6: Course Design Considerations
What is Backward Design? How can it help you plan/align all the elements of your course or lesson?
Wednesday February 2nd, 3:30 – 5:00 pm
Facilitator: Kimberly Bell, PhD – TA Development Specialist, CELT
Seminar 7: How Do Selected Learning Theories Support Pedagogy? What are Constructivism & Metacognition & how can you incorporate them into your teaching?
Wednesday February 16th, 3:30 – 5:00pm
Facilitator: Kimberly Bell, PhD – TA Development Specialist, CELT
Seminar 8: Effective Teaching Online
How can you engage students online, both in asynchronous and synchronous courses and sessions?
Wednesday March 3rd, 3:30 – 5:00 pm
Facilitator: Kimberly Bell, PhD – TA Development Specialist, CELT
Seminar 9: Panel Discussion with IRACDA Postdocs
How have our IRACDA Postdoc implemented what they learned in these seminars? Ask your questions!
Wednesday March 16th, 3:30 – 5:00 pm
Facilitators: Panelists TBD
Seminar 10: Applying Your Pedagogy to Different Institution Types
How can you teach effectively at different institution types with different populations of students?
Wednesday March 30th, 3:30 – 5:00 pm
Facilitator: Kimberly Bell, PhD – TA Development Specialist, CELT
Jennifer Jaiswal, Instructional Designer & Sr Instructional Technologist
Am I the only one who has heard the collective groan when the class group work project is announced? Am I the only one who has had a terrible group work project, where I’ve been stuck writing the report or presentation on my own? Most students and faculty have had poor group work experiences. What are the reasons for having them in our courses?
As we prepare our students for the workforce, the National Association of Colleges and Employers have teamwork/collaboration as one of the top career competencies that employers are looking for college graduates to have. Working as a team also allows students to develop their competencies in: professionalism/work ethic, oral/written communications, leadership and more. These career competencies can all be developed through group work projects (NACE, 2019).
The group work assignments that we complete in our classes serve as a testing ground for how we should participate in groups in our professional lives after graduation. Assigning a group project with no guidelines or restrictions is not realistic and sets up groups for challenges. But what makes a good group project?
Guidelines:
Don’t assign a group project without a team plan. Planning ahead can help to make sure that everyone in the group has an idea of what the group will be completing and what their own individual responsibilities are. Using a Group Contract can help students think through the key features of a functioning team and what they each will be responsible for in the project.
Contracts should include:
Names and contact information: This helps to set up accountability and the ability to get in contact with each other.
Team roles and responsibilities: Each team member should take responsibility for part of the project and list its responsibilities in the contract. Team members may take on multiple roles as part of their project, but listing out what their responsibilities are helps to balance the workload upfront and create the timeline. Some examples are:
Leader – sets the agenda, sends reminders, and keeps team members accountable.
Researcher – gathers raw material for the group and cites sources; can be more than one in a team
Writer/Producer – connects the research together to tell the story
Editor – reviews the final draft for errors, references, and makes sure that it is ready to be sent to instructor or ready for presentation
Asking this at the beginning helps to avoid the conflict later.
This helps to set up accountability and a schedule for touching base over the course of the project.
You can also arrange your groups based on what times they are most available to help the group have a natural meeting time.
Timeline:
What are the tasks that need to be completed by each member of the group?
What is a reasonable time by which that task should be completed?
The Writer/Producer should work with the Researchers to set a deadline that gives them time to produce the project
The Editor should set the final timeline to make sure they have enough time to review and complete the project before the deadline.
Signatures:
All members should sign to show they agree with the written plan and turn a copy into the faculty member.
Getting Started:
If you are looking for a sample to get started see our Group Contract Template. This has suggestions for information that can go into your contract. You can make a copy and edit it to best meet your needs.
The description of your assignment should be clear and understandable with the knowledge that your students will have of the course and its content. It should be broken down into manageable tasks that students will be able to complete in the time allotted. Offering examples of previous projects that did well can also help students make sure they are not planning the scope of the project to be too big.
Creating a model where the group project can be evaluated on an individual basis can also help the group to function better. This shows that you are interested in all members completing tasks and working on the project together, and can help to prevent group members from becoming estranged, not participating or letting the other members carry all the weight of the project. For example, you can have a joint presentation but also have a reflection paper where students cover what they learned in the process of the project that can be evaluated for an individual grade. For more information and methods on assessing groups please see this article by the Eberly Center from Carnegie Mellon.
Reflection
Last but not least, ask your students to reflect on their process, the project, their participation, and other member’s participation. This gives the students the opportunity to alert you to any challenges in the group and if members were not participating equally. You can have reflections at multiple points throughout the project, not just at the end. Some sample questions you can ask are:
How is the team working as a whole? Are there challenges? What are they? How are they being resolved?
What have you been working on since the beginning of the project?
How have your peers been participating in the project?
What do you think of your own contributions to the project?
Thinking out the process of the group project and what the expectations are can help to make a better experience as students learn how to design and plan a project while learning how to manage and work with a team. For help with your group project please contact CELT.
Reference
NACE Staff. (2019, March 29). The four career competencies employers value most. National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/the-four-career-competencies-employers-value-most/
Be on the lookout for CELT’s Conversations on Inclusive Pedagogy. We will kick off the spring with a panel discussion about feminist pedagogy and the teaching practice.
Schedule a customized workshop!
In addition to our scheduled workshops, we are reaching out to share other topics that may be of interest to departments, small groups, and/or individuals. CELT would be pleased to schedule a session around one of the following topics or a customized topic of your choice.
Design Your Course for ALL Students! Not all students learn in the same way. Creating courses that allow for diversity in how we interact with the content helps students to find different ways to engage and to connect with the course material. In this course we will discuss Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and redesign a course activity to be more inclusive.
What Inspires You to Learn and Teach? Building a Foundation for Your Teaching Philosophy (For TAs and Postdocs): If you are a Postdoc or TA preparing for your future career, join us for this workshop. We will explore and share what learning and teaching experiences have impacted you, what the components of an effective teaching philosophy are, and you will participate in an activity that will help you begin to develop your own philosophy. You will also hear specific advice and strategies for writing your teaching statement for job applications.
Teach All of the Students in Your Course – Developing Inclusive Pedagogy: In this session we will reflect on the connections between social identity, privilege, and equity and how these can influence both you and your students. By becoming aware of our own biases and the identities that may be present in our students, we make great leaps in being able to manage our classrooms, prevent negative influences, and perhaps more importantly, develop strategies for open and honest communication to help us when we inevitably make mistakes.
Setting up Successful Group Work in your Online Course: The Phases of Engagement Model: By applying Conrad and Donaldson’s phases of engagement model, we can build student-to-student interaction in the online course and demonstrate productive group work and collaboration. These strategies have been shown to increase a sense of community and decrease feelings of isolation for students. Tools can include discussion boards, google documents, slides, infographics, and VoiceThread.
Jump Start Engagement with Active Learning: Active learning can improve student outcomes and keep students engaged during and in-between your class meetings. Getting started incorporating active learning, implementing it, and assessing its effectiveness can seem challenging. Join this workshop to hear more about why active learning works and strategies you can implement and assess easily in your courses right away.
Supporting Students’ Self-Regulation Skills in Your Course: In this workshop, we will go over the importance of self-regulation skills and how they are linked to academic achievement and academic success. We will also discuss how to model and help students develop these skills in your course.
Avoid Academic Dishonesty with Assessment: This workshop will introduce you to assessment strategies that you can easily implement to prevent cheating. You will find that small adjustments to your existing assessment strategy can help prevent cheating and encourage student success, both online and in-person.
Happy end of the semester and Happy Holidays! As you prepare for your January and spring classes, please keep us in mind if you would like to schedule a consultation.
While CELT is still available over the next few weeks, we will not be posting on the blog until January 11, 2022.
We wish everyone a safe, healthy, and relaxing break.
You often may hear the term engagement in an educational setting, but what do we mean by engagement?According to a popular framework, Fredricks et al, (2004) describes engagement as a multifaceted, mega construct including behavioral, emotional and cognitive components. It is considered to be malleable and responsive to the environment which means instructors can influence a student’s engagement in their course.
Overall, students who are engaged are more likely to be successful in their courses (Kahu, 2018) as there is research to support that engagement has a positive relationship with academic achievement (Fredricks et al., 2004, Kahu & Nelson, 2018). A recent framework developed by Kahu and Nelson (2018) seeks to expand upon the concept of engagement and describe the complex relationship between institutional factors and students’ backgrounds that influence students’ engagement. There are many factors involved including the University culture, policies, teaching as well as student motivation, skills, background and support. (See Kahu & Nelson (2018) for a more in depth review).
Kahu and Nelson (2018) found through their research four factors that strongly influence student engagement including self-efficacy, emotions, belonging and well-being. While these factors are not a definitive list, they are critical factors to consider. Here are some strategies you can use in your courses to help students increase their engagement based on these four factors.
Self-efficacy: This is the student’s belief in their abilities. If a student believes they can be successful, they are more likely to be motivated, persistent, and use appropriate self-regulation skills. To build students’ self-efficacy, instructors can:
build achievable assignments and assessments early on in their course to help build confidence
break down large assignments into smaller parts to make them more manageable
provide a well-organized syllabus and course with clear expectations
Emotions: Learning is an emotional experience and recent research is paying more attention to academic emotions. Students can be experiencing a wide variety of emotions from enthusiasm and enjoyment to frustration, anxiety, and boredom.
To build interest and enthusiasm instructors can:
relate the subject matter to real-world experiences
incorporate varied and frequent assessments and activities
allow the opportunity for choice when appropriate (but not too much choice!)
incorporate an appropriate level of challenge
To mitigate frustration, anxiety, and boredom instructors can:
present clear and direct instructions for assignments and assessments
avoid questions that are designed to intentionally “trick” students
break down long videos into 8-10 minute segments
provide a well organized syllabus and course with clear expectations
Belonging: Belonging is described as how connected a student feels to their educational environment or the degree of fit they perceive (Kahu & Nelson, 2018). To increase a sense of belonging, instructors can:
practice inclusive teaching by incorporating diverse perspectives, creating an inclusive classroom climate, and examining your own implicit biases
use welcoming language within your syllabus and classroom
Well-being: Well-being is influenced by a students’ stress level. Stress can come from both school and personal factors and all can affect engagement. High stress levels are linked to a decrease in motivation and lower levels of enjoyment (Kahu & Nelson, 2018). All of the strategies listed above can mitigate stress levels and increase a student’s sense of well-being and in the end, can increase a student’s engagement. In addition, instructors are encouraged to:
include resources to support services on campus including Counseling and Psychological Services, Dean of Students, Academic Advising and Academic Tutoring
If you are interested in learning more about incorporating any of these strategies into your courses, feel free to email CELT.
References:
Fredricks, J. A., Blumenfeld, P. C., & Paris, A. H. (2004). School engagement: Potential of the concept, state of the evidence. Review of Educational Research, 74(1), 59–109. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543074001059
Kahu, E., & Nelson, K. (2018). Student engagement in the educational interface: Understanding the mechanisms of student success. Higher Education Research & Development, 37(1), 58–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2017.1344197
What is your favorite part of your job?
What is your favorite part of your job?
