Teaching.Tools and the Active Learning Library

The Teaching.Tools Website has a few resources that may be helpful to you.

The Active Learning Library https://teaching.tools/activities allows you to explore teaching strategies aimed to increase engagement in the classroom. This site allows you to search for activities by filtering based on:

  • Difficulty (for the instructor)

  • Prep Time Required

  • Bloom’s Taxonomy (e.g., remember, apply)

  • Active Learning (e.g., individual engagement, small group engagement)

  • Inclusive Learning (e.g., gives students choices, emphasizes the relevance or value of the material)

  • Whole-Person Learning (e.g., emphasizes student values and emotions, emphasizes metacognitive skills)

  • Formative Feedback

  • Activity Time

  • Class Size

  • Class Modality

The Pedagogical Reading List https://teaching.tools/resources is comprised of a community-generated database of resources for college teaching around topics including Accessibility and UDL

  • Active Learning

  • Assessment

  • Curriculum

  • Diversity, Equity, Inclusion

  • Education Research

  • Educational Technology

  • Experiential Learning

  • Graduate Students

  • Learning Analytics

  • Mental Health

  • Online Teaching

  • Problem/Project-Based Learning

  • Race and Anti-Racism

  • STEM

  • Science of Learning

While the Lesson Planning Tool https://teaching.tools/lessonplanner provides an interactive template for creating college-level class sessions. You can use the tool without an account. You must sign in to save your lesson. Accounts are free.

Best Practices for Using Rubrics

Weimer (2016) reminds us of the advantages of using rubrics for students: Rubrics clarify assignment details for students. They provide an operational answer to the frequently asked student question, “What do you want in this assignment?” They make grading more transparent and can be used to help students develop those all-important self-assessment skills. For teachers, rubrics expedite grading and can make it a more objective process.

She also points out the advantages rubrics offer instructors: The power to clarify thinking about the knowledge and skills an instructor wants to assess. Faculty can do a great deal of assessment, across multiple courses, semester after semester. It’s easy for the response to student work to become habitual, automatic, and not always thoughtful. After grading so many hundreds of essays and short answers, the good, the bad, and the ugly are easy to pick out.

Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation states: Grading consistency is difficult to maintain over time because of fatigue, shifting standards based on prior experience, or intrusion of other criteria. Furthermore, rubrics can reduce the time spent grading by reducing uncertainty and by allowing instructors to refer to the rubric description associated with a score rather than having to write long comments. Finally, grading rubrics are invaluable in large courses that have multiple graders (other instructors, teaching assistants, etc.) because they can help ensure consistency across graders and reduce the systematic bias that can be introduced between graders.

While the Purdue Owl recommends the following for technical writing in engineering, many of these tips are universal regardless of assignment type:

  • Give students the rubric you will use before they turn in their writing assignments. This helps students understand the basis on which their writing will be scored, and it makes both you and your students accountable to the same set of standards.

  • If students are completing their writing assignments in class, make the rubric available to them as they’re writing by putting it up on the projector screen in a Word document or PowerPoint slide.

  • Consider creating the rubric with your students, because it provides them with a chance to reflect on the assignment and promotes their metacognitive awareness of the rhetorical writing tasks they must perform. Furthermore, if students dictate the parameters of the rubric, they are being held accountable to standards that they set for themselves rather than by an instructor or TA. To get students to think about important criteria for a particular assignment, instructors or TAs might try the following strategies:

    • Open a class discussion by asking students why they think the assignment is important.

    • Ask students to write a response where they describe what effective and ineffective examples of the assignment would look like. Then, have them share their examples and generate criteria based on the characteristics that they describe.

    • Brainstorm evaluative criteria as a class. Ask students to volunteer what they consider important traits or characteristics for this assignment and write their ideas on the board. After all answers have been shared, ask students to rank which traits or characteristics are the most important.

    • Put students into groups and ask each group to come up with several criteria for evaluating the assignment and rank each one according to their importance. Then, have each group share their criteria and use the most important from each group.

  • Have a quick discussion with your students to make sure they understand what each category in the rubric means.

  • Discuss why certain categories in the rubric have higher point values than others. For example, you may discuss why showing conceptual knowledge or having adequate evidence to back up a claim is more important than grammatical correctness.

Quick Tips on promoting inclusion in Computer Science

The following is an excerpt of tips compiled by Cynthia Lee. Dr. Lee is a Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at Stanford. See https://bit.ly/inclusivecs for the complete list.

Mid-Term:

  • Email top performers on a recent homework or exam to congratulate them; be sure to include a diverse group. (Message students from Canvas based on their grade: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-send-a-message-to-students-from-the-Gradebook/ta-p/741)

  • Provide students with clear and timely feedback, including class-wide distribution data. Women and minority students often fear the worst about their position relative to the class and can be reassured by data.

  • After a midterm exam, step through the math showing the class that students can still pass the course even if they did poorly. It’s just some multiplication but take the time to talk about it. Be factual—no need to “sugar coat”—but provide facts that will help reassure students who think things are worse than they really are.

  • Reach out to students who have filed a disability accommodation form with you and ask them if their needs are being met in your class. See: https://studentaffairs.indiana.edu/student-support/disability-services/index.html Reaffirm your commitment to complying with their approved accommodations and your willingness to receive complaints if there is a problem.

Everyday:

  • Review today’s lecture slides to make sure that your slides are free from gendered pronouns, especially those used in ways that conform to stereotypes (e.g., “A programmer should always write comments in his code, so he can remember how it works”). Use of “they” (and their/them) as a singular pronoun is now widely accepted as a neutral alternative, and better than the awkward “he or she” construction because it also includes genderqueer and non-binary. 

  • Start class today by renewing your invitation to students to come to office hours. Understand that not all students have had the mentoring necessary to know how you expect them to interact with you, so explicitly instruct your class on how to do it. For example: “You don’t need to have a particular question—you’re welcome to just stop by for 5 minutes to introduce yourself,” or “I’m not just here for homework questions—if you are considering changing your major to CS and want to talk about it, if you want to know what it’s like to work as a software engineer, or if you are thinking about applying to grad school but don’t know where to begin, I’m happy to discuss that kind of thing as well.” 

  • Look around your office and/or lab space. Consider if there are things you could add or remove that would make the space more welcoming generally, and also signal welcome to a diverse student body (e.g., remove very masculine or heavily CS-stereotyped movie posters).

  • Actually write a tally of how many times you call on students of different genders in class today. People of all genders are prone to calling on men more often. You may do this unconsciously unless you consciously do otherwise.

  • Go through today’s lecture slides and add “alt text” written descriptions of all images and diagrams. If you’ll use a video clip today, transcribe it. You will need to do this for all your class materials when you have a student who requires these accommodations, so even if that doesn’t apply this term, doing it now is a good head start. Make sure that students who are red-green colorblind will be able to interpret all the graphs and diagrams in your slides. -(Note the Office of Disability Services (ODS) will provide video transcripts to videos you produce if a student who is deaf or hard of hearing is enrolled in your course and registered for ODS services. See: https://studentaffairs.indiana.edu/student-support/disability-services/index.html Additional resource: https://accessibility.iu.edu/creating-content/multimedia/transcripts-captions.html

  • Thinking about today’s lecture, do you plan on using any examples or anecdotes about your childhood or daily life that may cause students to feel excluded for economic reasons? (e.g., talking about pricey gadgets or vacation travel as normal) Even if you know that you did not experience these things and are simply using them as an example, students don’t know that and can assume you are referring to them in a normative way. 

Tips for Successful Team Management

Teamwork can increase knowledge and skills in ways that enhance individual learning. Teams need to be formed, guided, and managed carefully and deliberately in order to achieve desired learning objectives.

Here are some additional tips that can increase the likelihood of success of teamwork techniques as paraphrased by Oakley, et al. (2004) and Felder & Brent (2016, p. 255).

  • Clearly establish team policies and expectations and follow consistently throughout the course.

  • Make the team assignment too challenging to be completed individually. This necessitates group members to rely on each other.

  • Define unique and distinct roles for team members (e.g., coordinator, recorder, monitor).

  • Allow students to bring their unique expertise to the team or provide supplementary training for unique technical contributions.

  • Give bonus points for good team performance on tests.

  • In oral reports, arbitrarily assign team members to report on different parts of the project. All team members should be able to explain various parts of the project.

  • Collect one final product per team but adjust the team grade for individual performance.

  • Ensure individual student accountability:

    • Give individual tests on project content

    • Monitor individual understanding

    • Give credit only to active participants using team signatures

    • Use peer ratings to adjust team project grades for individual performance (see Peer Assessment Rubric for Group Projects)

    • Provide last resort options of firing and quitting

    • Use self-assessment strategies to monitor progress

  • Explain how and why teamwork is being used.

  • Deal with difficulties as they arise using active listening and conflict resolution. This may be performed as an in-class-crisis-clinic or out-of-class-special-cause as deemed appropriate.

Felder, R. M., & Brent, R. (2016). Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. https://iucat.iu.edu/catalog/16014698

Oakley, B., Brent, R., Felder, R., & Elhajj, I. (2004). Turning Student Groups into Effective Teams. Journal of Student Centered Learning. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.422.8179&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Scaffolding

Why do students ask what’s going to be on the exam?  This question can come after you have: 

  • placed learning objectives in your syllabus, 

  • provided students with a course packet, and 

  • spent weeks lecturing and providing lab or discussion activities related to what is going to be on the exam.

As college-level instructors, we have high expectations for our subjects and our students. However, we can forget what it’s like to be a learner in their first or second year of college, especially if we didn’t struggle with passing courses in high school or during our undergraduate experience. Students come to college at all different levels in a variety of different subjects, and can get overwhelmed, particularly if they did not develop the type of study skills that are needed to be successful in college. It can be useful to some students to explain how to incorporate strategies into your course content, whenever possible to help students be successful in the first- and second-year courses you teach. One such approach is Scaffolding.

 To achieve these high expectations, we should aim high and build in scaffolds for all students to reach the top level, as suggested by Oakley, et al., (2021, pp. 27-29) and Tomlinson and Javius (2012).During scaffolded instruction, students move incrementally (via ‘scaffolds’) towards a deeper understanding of material and concept, enabling them to gradually build understanding. Consider how the learning styles approach can help to scaffold instruction to support and enhance student learning. The scaffolding strategies below can reach all types of learners, considering differences in learning styles, learning speeds, and memory capacities (Alber, 2011 and “Scaffolding,” n.d.):

Resources:

Alber, R. (2011, May 24). 6 Scaffolding Strategies to Use With Your Students [Web log post]. Retrieved June 24, 2020, from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/scaffolding-lessons-six-strategies-rebecca-alber

Oakley, B., Rogowsky, B., & Sejnowski, T. J. (2021). Uncommon Sense Teaching: Practical Insights in Brain Science to Help Students Learn. New York, NY: Tarcher Perigee. https://iucat.iu.edu/catalog/19574677

Tomlinson, C. A., & Javius, E. L. (2012). Teach Up for Excellence. Educational Leadership, 69(5), 28-33. Retrieved April 05, 2021, from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/feb12/vol69/num05/Teach-Up-for-Excellence.aspx