Our work days get packed with various tasks – giving lectures, running discussions, holding meetings, getting caught up on the latest research literature. What part of your work day do you look forward to most? Continue reading What Inspires You? — Donna Ellis, CTE Director
Back in teacher’s college, I wrote a research paper about the challenges surrounding boys’ literacy in today’s classrooms. Having always been an avid reader myself, I have to admit that I knew very little about the social and pedagogical factors that can help or hurt young students’ acquisition of essential literacy skills (for an introduction to this discussion in the Ontario context, start here).
This year, I set out to create a program here at UW that brings varsity athletes into elementary school classrooms to promote literacy skills and an interest in reading. While I hope that this program will benefit all learners, I believe it could have a particular impact on boys’ literacy. Male reading role models are one of the key strategies that classroom teachers recommend to support both boys’ literacy skills, and their attitudes toward reading and writing.
To this end, Reading with the Warriors was created in partnership with the UW Athletics Department. Last week we launched the first of five pilot sessions with two student-athlete volunteers from the varsity hockey team. Justin and Andy (pictured above) joined two Gr. 2 classes for story time and a craft related to the books they had chosen to read (Thomas’ Snowsuit and Just One Goal!, respectively). Justin and Andy shared their own reading history (e.g., challenges they had with reading, favourite books, why reading is important to them), and answered a variety of student questions relating to school, hockey, and life in general.
The program has been well-received thus far, and I am looking forward to continuing our pilot throughout the month. I am particularly grateful to the five student-athletes who have agreed to participate in the pilot sessions – they have been wonderful! If all goes well, it’s my hope that this will become a regular part of varsity athletics’ community programming beginning this Fall.
At the end of the day, it isn’t necessarily about the stories (although, those are important, too), it’s about students having the opportunity to see interesting, articulate men reading and engaging with books. Research and practice show that male mentors from the community can help all students, but especially boys, see a purpose in reading. I love the idea that our students can collaborate with classroom teachers to strengthen literacy skills in our little guys.
This program has also gotten me thinking: how often do we bring role models and mentors from the community into our university classrooms? I would love to hear examples from the UW community.
If you’re interested in learning more about boys’ literacy, check out this guide from the Ontario Ministry of Education: Me Read? No Way!
I’ve been teaching undergrads since 1994 I guess, as a TA at first, and by 2001 as a course instructor. Since 2006 I’ve been the instructor of record on a large first-year cultural studies course (and assisted in 2005 on the same one). This post is in the head-scratching, old dog / new tricks category, and is about office hours.
Generally speaking, I hold 1.5 to 2 hours of office time for consultation with students. I’m happy when I see three to six students in a week, which only happens around essay writing time. Some students come for help getting started, others with drafts to go through together, and others afterward to understand feedback. Although I ask students to show up or make an alternate appointment, I probably only see ten percent of my class that way in a good year (I teach 200).
Over the years I’ve read about some ways to use office hours more effectively. Don Woods (McMaster, Chemical Engineering Emeritus and architect of their problem-based learning approach) always talks about using student ombudspeople (1 or 2 per 50 students), with whom the professor meets each week or two to have a dialogue about how the class is going. A former professor at York when I was a graduate student there used to have his undergraduates come in to receive their essays — they’d have to read them aloud to him in order to get them back (this usually led to a deeper understanding on their part of their grades and their own writing). Teaching tips abound — and of course CTE has our own version of advice for the beginning TA or instructor.
This year, though, thinking I was past all such tips — surely these are all for beginners, not for seasoned oldtimers like myself — I once again posted my office hours for the term in the learning management system calendar tool. Week in, week out… can I remove just the one instance over Reading Break this time? Yes! Great. But…
…instead of writing “Trevor’s Office Hour” like I normally would, I wondered what might sound more inviting. I’m so tired of the discourse of “information delivery” as our role in higher education. In lecture, I’m not an information-delivery specialist. My discipline isn’t about transmitting information from me to many. That is a subject for another post, but it’s important to think about the whole endeavour, and how I communicate this belief I have. If I simply post my hours as information, how am I welcoming the discussion and support I feel I can share with my first years? So, I tried instead posting the calendar entry with the words: “Trevor’s Office Time: Come and Visit me in xxxx-xxxx from 4:30 – 5:00” (and the same, but an hour, on the other day).
For the first time in nearly 20 years of teaching, two students showed up for my first office hour before the first lecture day. I told them I was happy to meet them, we talked about their interests, majors, futures, and I asked them what made them come see me before the class had even begun. They said “because you invited us to come and visit you.”
I was pretty much gobsmacked, not having expected anyone to pop by until three weeks hence when the paper is due. I hope this signals an increase in the frequency of visits and the diversity of visitors. Pleasant surprises like this, that by the students’ own account were because of the three small words “come visit me,” are the kinds of things that keep my enthusiasm for teaching so high even after eight iterations of the same course.
It is often mentioned that with large engineering classes, it is difficult to truly engage students and provide them with the opportunity to get involved in classroom activities. I recently had the opportunity to teach a tutorial review session, for which I prepared extensively. I presented the material in a very organized fashion, while being careful to periodically ask a few questions while I was solving problems on the blackboard. Based on the answers I was receiving, as well as some feedback from the class, I felt that students understood the material very well. However, upon marking a final exam question, one very similar to the one I had solved in class, I was quite surprised to see that the majority were not capable to meet the basic framework of the solution. Upon reflecting on this fact, I realized that there is a major difference between students understanding my approach and them being able to solve questions on their own. This realization was quite important, because it has forced me to somewhat re-think my tutorial teaching strategies in the future.
Provide more opportunity for students to think about the problem
Instead of dwelling on copying the problem requirements on the board, I could provide students with a copy of the question (wither on a Power Point slide or a handout) and ask them to take two minutes to read it carefully. Then, I would ask students a few clarifying questions to make sure they have understood the problem requirements.
Provide more opportunities for students to solve the problem
After going through the first step, I would allow students to work in pairs or about 2-3 minutes to discuss a few ideas on how to start solving the question. I feel that it is important, as it would make students feel that their suggestions are valuable to the development of the solution. This would increase their level of “ownership” over what is discussed in the class, rather than having a one-way teaching approach.
Facilitate and moderate discussions on alternate solutions
Often times, students only have the opportunity to be exposed to a single solution to a problem. Offering students the opportunity to think and suggest alternate solutions in a supportive environment would be a great opportunity to expose students to more approaches as well as to encourage creativity in engineering classes. This is a critical point that should be endorsed in tutorials. Students may be encouraged to propose an alternate solution in class or they may be to be allowed to post their own solutions on a forum or wiki page, where their peers can discuss or correct their input (this would be a bit harder to moderate, but it would certainly be interesting).
In general, I think that tutorials in engineering should be more student-focused and should promote discussion, rather than being an extension of lecture time. These are just some of my ideas which stemmed from recent experience in teaching tutorials in large engineering classes.
[With her permission, we have reprinted below a posting by Aimée Morrison (Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo) that originally appeared on the Hook & Eye blog.]
Grading is personal. And I’m starting to recognize that, for my students, no matter how I frame my response to their papers (“This paper argues” rather than “You believe”, for example) they take it personally: the grades hurt their feelings, they feel personally slighted. Continue reading Grading: It is personal, actually! — Aimée Morrison
I’m proud to work at a teaching centre that strives not only to serve instructors at our own university, but is also happy to share its resources and expertise with staff and instructors from other institutions. A case in point is the meeting that CTE’s Director — Donna Ellis — and I had on November 22 with a delegation from King Saud University. Continue reading Reflecting On Our Work — Mark Morton
One of my favourite jobs as a teaching developer is to visit other people’s classrooms. I get to learn new things while providing a helpful service (observation and report for feedback to individual instructors). There’s another benefit that accrues too, though. I get to bring ideas from a panoply of disciplinary approaches back to my own classroom, reinvigorating my own teaching and ratcheting up my students’ learning.
Rarely is this more apparent than during our Open Classroom series. Open Classroom is Waterloo’s unique way of celebrating our Distinguished Teaching Award winners by asking them to do some work! Each term, if possible, we ask the DTA winner to open his or her doors to other professors, new or more seasoned, it doesn’t matter. The attendees (a few to half a dozen, depending on the room capacity) sit in on the live classroom as observers, and then have an opportunity to ask questions for an hour after the class. This gives a chance not only for the visitors to experience what it’s like to be a learner in the Award-winner’s class, but for the professor to explain his or her thinking behind instructional approaches taken that day.
What is really important here is that one need not be from the professor’s home discipline to benefit from this observation and discussion. I have certainly learned some things from Waterloo professors I’ve observed, and while some of it has gone way over my head, the techniques themselves have found their way directly or indirectly into my own cultural studies lectures (even math and physics approaches!). I would heartily encourage attendance at this term’s Open Classroom (Ted McGee’s English course, the Rebel) and future Open Classrooms, regardless of your own discipline. You will find some relevance in watching and asking about a different approach, I am sure.
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The Centre for Teaching Excellence welcomes contributions to its blog. If you are a faculty member, staff member, or student at the University of Waterloo (or beyond!) and would like contribute a posting about some aspect of teaching or learning, please contact Mark Morton or Trevor Holmes.