Design Thinking in Teaching
How do we take a design approach to create a successful lesson? In this workshop, we will discuss common challenges in lesson planning and develop a toolkit of best practices and strategies to generate meaningful learning experiences for learners. By the end of this workshop, you will be able to:
- Identify common practices in lesson design and assess pitfalls and promises in implementation
- Transform your current design practice and develop a toolkit to generate meaningful learning experiences for your learners
- Appreciate the value of coherence within the lesson and alignment to your professional discipline
Please join us for this interactive workshop to explore and learn more about design thinking in teaching.
Facilitators: Mabel Ho & Jens Vent Schmidt
Developing a SoTL Project
Have you or the course instructor tried a new teaching technique (or want to) but remain unsure of whether it was effective? Are you curious about the effect of some practices in your course? Would you like to learn more about your students and their learning?
This workshop will help you design a research project to evaluate quality of teaching and learning in your course. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is the systematic inquiry into teaching and learning processes and their effectiveness, made public. In this workshop you will learn the fundamentals of SoTL in terms of approaches, ethical considerations, and first steps. You will leave the workshop with a better understanding of SoTL practices, as well as a blueprint for your very first SoTL project.
You invest a lot in improving your teaching – this workshop will help you evaluate whether you achieve your goals, using a research lens.
Facilitators: Kristi Carey and Ido Roll
Experiential Learning: Concept and its Application in Lesson Planning
“Experience plus Reflection = Learning” – John Dewey. Building on the earlier work of John Dewey, the educational theorist David Kolb proposes a “learning cycle” comprising different stages by which learning happens through the transformation of the learner’s experience. In this workshop you will explore Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, discuss its value in your teaching contexts, and find ways of integrating this model into your lesson planning and teaching. Join us for an interactive session to connect this important teaching model with your teaching practice.
Facilitators: Rowshan Rahmanian & Lucas Wright
Giving a Guest Lecture/Presentation
In this session, we will compare and contrast presentations and guest lectures. With this, we will design a toolkit to prepare for successful presentations or guest lectures. Finally, we will collaboratively explore common challenges associated with public speaking and practice strategies to overcome these.
Facilitators: Austin Taylor & Jens Vent Schmidt
Incorporating Results from SoTL
This session provides a framework for analyzing and incorporating The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) into classroom practices. SoTL involves scholarly inquiry into student learning and making findings public, in order to advance teaching and learning. A large body of literature contains findings from SoTL inquiries across numerous disciplines. In this session, participants will be introduced to SoTL and the body of literature associated with this field of study. This session consists of three parts:
- Identifying ways to incorporate SoTL and SoTL results into your teaching
- Describing strategies for introducing teaching approaches into the classroom
- Developing strategies to gather feedback from students to inform your practice
Examples in this session will be drawn from a variety of disciplines to provoke discussion across a broad range of subject areas and classroom environments.
Facilitators: Lesley Liu & Roselynn Verwoord
Metacognition, Lifelong Learning, and Disciplinary Practice
Metacognition, Lifelong Learning, and Disciplinary Practice – “..teach them to fish, and they will eat for a lifetime.” As teachers, we are often looking to help our students become lifelong learners in not only our own disciplines but also in their wider lives in general. But does simply “covering” content actually accomplish that goal? In this session, we will examine the idea of metacognition as a distinct and valuable practice in teaching and learning; covering the way practitioners plan, monitor, and evaluate their own work. We will develop some strategies, within our own disciplines, to help learners not simply know what a practitioner knows, but start to think the ways a practitioner thinks.”
Facilitators: Arnab Ray & Joseph Topornycky
Graduate Student Mental Health
Do you ever feel like you don’t belong in grad school? Like everyone around you is smarter, more qualified, more pulled together? Do you ever feel overwhelmed as a TA and feel like the students can see right through you? The responsibilities of being a grad student can be intense and leave us feeling like an impostor both as a grad student and as a TA. In this workshop, we will address raising self-awareness on “impostor syndrome”, identify strategies for self-care, as well as identifying strategies for preparation for teaching in the classroom and navigating life as a grad student.
Facilitators: Andrea Johnson, Ying Yin Lau, and Erin Yun
Trans Literacies
The Promoting Trans Literacies workshop explores how Teaching Assistants can develop safer, more trans-inclusive pedagogical practices in their various role(s) in the classroom and on campus so that students of all genders have equitable access to learning environments. Using case studies drawn from real-life student experiences, this workshop helps participants learn to understand and identify trans-oppressive practices at the university and in the classroom and also offers tools for countering these practices.
Facilitators: A.J. Lowik & Evan T. Taylor
Unsettling Classroom Guidelines
Classroom guidelines, ground rules, or agreements are tools often used by educators in different settings with the intent to keep discussions focused and productive, invite inclusive participation, and establish a “safe” learning environment. At the same time, anti-oppression educators Sensoy and DiAngelo (2014) have argued that classroom guidelines sometimes serve contrary goals because when they fail to recognize and respond to issues of power and social position, thereby creating unsafe and silencing environments for students who are not part of the dominant group or who are underrepresented in dominant discourses.
Facilitators: Deb Chen, Janey Lew, & Amy Perreault