The pandemic led to a focus on using technology effectively to promote learning outcomes. Realizing that answering this need also overshadowed a traditional focus on course design and effective teaching, I developed a series on course design with partner facilitators across campus.
Sequence Description
The Course Development and Pedagogy Series will introduce participants to strategies for effective course design and management, including Understanding by Design, field learning assignment sequences, and giving feedback on assessments. The series will also offer a collegial space to revise and share syllabi and rubrics.
Workshop Descriptions
Fall 2021
- Backward Design Featuring Dan Mourlam: Want to know how to create more engaging instruction that helps students master course goals? Dr. Daniel Mourlam will be facilitating a workshop on Backwards Design, a curriculum design process, where attendees will learn about writing clear learning objectives, assessment strategies, and other effective instructional practices that can help your students be more successful in your course.
- Syllabus Writing Workshop: Learn about designing your syllabus as a motivational and communication tool and practice syllabus revision in a collegial environment.
- Designing Field Learning Assignments Featuring Isaiah Cohen: Isaiah Cohen, Assistant Professor of Sociology, will guide participants through the process of designing educational field learning assignments with partnering institutions.
- Rubric Writing Workshop: Learn about holistic, analytic, and single-point rubrics in the classroom and practice using and developing rubrics in a collegial environment.
- Writing Effective Feedback Featuring Michelle Gannon: Michelle Gannon, Coordinator of the Writing Center, will present on best practices and strategies for giving students written feedback on assignments.
Fall 2022
- Backward Design: Want to know how to create more engaging instruction that helps students master course goals? This session will introduce participants to the Understanding by Design framework and backward design. During the session, participants will discuss course goals, evaluate the effectiveness of learning outcomes, and work through the backwards design process for their own courses.
- Syllabus Writing Workshop: What metaphor guides your vision of your syllabus? Is it a contract, a motivational tool, or a handbook? This active workshop will give participants space to uncover and examine the results of their guiding metaphor as they practice intentional syllabus design and revise in a collegial environment.
- Syllabus Sharing Session: As a follow-up to the Syllabus Writing Workshop, join our learner-focused syllabus peer review session. This workshop will introduce participants to the learning-oriented syllabus rubric and offer a collegial environment for syllabus sharing in which participants evaluate one another’s syllabi with the rubric and discuss course development together.
- Rubric Writing Workshop: Rubrics can be a useful tool for optimizing grading, communicating standards, and even promoting student reflection and collaboration. In this active workshop, participants will discuss the uses of rubrics, learn about the gradual release of responsibility model, and evaluate their own rubrics with the rubric for rubrics.
- Writing Effective Feedback: This session will focus on best practices and strategies for giving students written feedback that motivates improvement. Depending on participant courses and needs, topics may include sustainable feedback practices, critique-driven learning, minimal marking, the importance of praise, calibrated peer review, and feedback in large courses.
- World-Centered Teaching: Feel caught between the standards of your discipline and the needs of students? What if there was another way? What if instead of focusing on the curriculum or the learner exclusively we brought the two together by a shared attention on the world? A new educational paradigm is emerging that balances promoting learner agency with a focus on what the world demands of instructor and learner alike. In this session, participants will reflect on the model that influences their teaching the most and discuss practical ways to promote student success in the context of curriculum standards.