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Change is Good (and archives are also good). A.K.A. Goodbye, CTE Blog!

a pair of glasses and a book with a dark blue back cover and the last page showing the words The End sit atop a brown wood desk.
The End

Many years ago, we began the CTE Blog in order to engage with ideas in a less formal way for our various publics. Over time, we’ve had a small number of loyal followers (thanks!) and a wide readership for certain posts or series of posts. The blog has been a space for CTE staff, including our talented graduate students and undergraduate co-op students, as well as occasional faculty guests, to convey information, advice, and opinions from week to week and month to month since Fall 2008. After careful consideration throughout 2017, though, we have come to the conclusion that our efforts are better placed elsewhere, for now. The blog will continue to exist as an archive.

It’s impossible to do a proper roundup of all 450 posts to date, but some of our more popular posts have been:

Once in a while, we may end up Tweeting or otherwise referring to some of the rich resources that have come out of this ten-year experiment. We continue, of course, to add Teaching Stories and to revise our popular Teaching Tips on our Resources section of the CTE website. These latter receive millions of hits globally, so our attention will be focused on ensuring their quality while also planning new forms of communication as a result of our Self Study and External Review (2017).

Thanks for reading; follow @uwcte on Twitter, and visit our website often!

 

A Culture That Constantly Strives to Improve – Magdalena Bentia

While sitting in an 8:30 morning class of over 100 students with caffeine as the sole driving force for consciousness it is easy to overlook the dynamics at play. It is easy to miss the carefully structured slides made with purpose to be as accessible as possible. As you pull your iClicker out it is easy to miss how each question was designed according to Bloom’s Taxonomy so that concepts are tested at different levels of comprehension. Designing a lecture that keeps everyone’s abilities in mind is not a simple task.

Upon starting to work at Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE) I had no idea how many resources and mechanisms are in place to allow the teaching community at the University of Waterloo to continually improve. There is undoubtedly a necessary push to keep up with the ever-changing technology in the classroom but the aspect of being inclusive is not always as clear cut. It amazed me to see how many faculty and staff members at the university took time out of their day to participate in workshops at the CTE such as “CTE779: Accessibility in Teaching”. Teaching staff do not just settle and do their required job but rather look for ways to learn and improve their teaching methods so that their students get the most out of each lecture.

From an undergraduate student perspective it is comforting to know that there is genuinely a concern for creating the best learning environment where lessons learned will be fundamental in any future academic endeavors. It is through constant self-assessment and passion for teaching others that our community excels as a world-leading university.

 

Photo taken at the 2016 Teaching and Learning Conference by CTE Staff

Gender Identity, Pronouns, and Lifelong Learning – Tommy Mayberry, Instructional Developer

A sign that says, "I am still learning."There might be two fundamental things to know about me to avoid conversational confusion. First, I’m a drag queen: I visually present on an almost day-to-day basis as masculine, but I identify under the transgender banner because my embodied identity oscillates across the gender binary and my proper pronouns are he/him/his, she/her/hers, and they/them/theirs. Second, my partner and I have the same name: each is Tommy (born “Thomas” with a birth certificate to confirm), and together we are the Tommies. I say these two things might be fundamental to know about me to avoid confusion in conversation because while I do not speak about myself in the third person (if you hear me say “Tommy,” you would do well to assume I mean my partner), people do speak about me, and they speak about me with a variety of pronouns that fit me and align with who I am. This has proven to be very puzzling to some folks at several times (my dear 85-year-old grandma has finally got the knack of “the Tommies,” but that plurality for her is my partner and me, not myself and I). I love this perplexity because in life as in teaching, this is an opportunity for learning.

In teaching language studies specifically, a grammar lesson in parts of speech and number agreements would seem to be an appropriate exercise for first-year Undergraduates; it may not, though, seem immediately fitting for first-year non-language courses or even upper-year language courses where the knowledge and understanding are assumed to be established and built upon. But it is. The refresher of a language exercise like the one below not only reaffirms language and communication skills for learners but opens the window to an opportunity for learning that is wider than a grammar primer.

Continue reading Gender Identity, Pronouns, and Lifelong Learning – Tommy Mayberry, Instructional Developer

A Reflection On The CTE Professional Development Day – Davis Dolan

In early June, I had the pleasure of going to the Waterloo Aboriginal Education Centre (WAEC) at St. Paul’s University College with my colleagues from the Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE). Our Centre went to WAEC for our annual Professional Development Day where we learned more about each other through various activities. One of the activities that stood out for me was indicating on a map where we live, where we are from, and where our roots originate. This activity allowed us to see that we all come from different places around the world, but we come together to make the CTE team. This activity also showed that we all have unique experiences, and we should use those experiences to help the Centre, and each other grow.

We also learned more about Truth and Reconciliation while at the WAEC. We were taken through a blanket activity (an example of a blanket activity can be seen on the left) that acted as a simulation of the history of what aboriginal people had experienced. Our staff started out standing on some blankets that were spread across the floor (to form one large blanket representing Turtle Island), but as the activity went on, the blankets kept getting folded in and shrinking the space we had to stand on (representing the lands that were taken from the aboriginals). In addition, some people were taken from the main group and told to stand on a separate blanket (representing a residential school). Other members of our group were told that they had to leave the blanket because they had become a lawyer or doctor (aboriginals lost their status if they became certain professions), or because they had gotten a deadly disease that was brought by the settlers. By the end of the activity, there were only 3 out of about 26 people still standing on the blankets that had been significantly reduced in size. The activity opened my eyes to some of the hardships that the aboriginal people have been through.

Overall, I thought the day was a success. I was able to learn more about myself and my colleagues, while also learning a bit more about the history and hardships of aboriginal people.

Photo taken by Bernard Clark at Queen’s University, Creative Commons (found on Flickr)

 

Planning for Active Learning in Large Classes

Active learning is “anything course-related that all students in a class session are called upon to do other than simply watching, listening, and taking notes” (Felder & Brent, 2009, p. 2). Examples include team debates, think-pair-share, team-based learning, and using clickers or other technology to provide opportunities for discussion (for more on active learning, see our Active Learning Tip Sheet).

Photo taken at the back of a 200-seat lecture hall looking toward the front white board.
One of Waterloo’s large classrooms

But what happens when there are 300 students in your classroom? Many of these techniques scale to larger settings although they require additional planning. To help with designing and running these activities, I think about four design elements. For each element, I ask myself a set of questions to help plan the activity.

Continue reading Planning for Active Learning in Large Classes

From crisis to crisis: teaching in challenging times

A stressed out figure with head on desk surrounded by books
Bonhomme Stressed

I don’t know if it’s some kind of confirmation bias as I think about all the people around me, but this past term has seemed much more stressful for many staff, faculty, and students on campus. Including me! Burnout among students and instructors seems more prevalent than in prior terms.

I suspect that it may have something to do with uncertainties and the erosion of rights on every front as we all live through the (very real) simulacrum that is the 45th U.S. President right now, coupled with the ways in which media outlets and social media amplify certain kinds of story.

There are things that happen in the world over which we have no control, but that are part of an increasingly invasive news cycle. Even the weather network seems in constant panic mode with “Alerts” and “Special Statements” that, when opened, say little more than that typical seasonal weather is about to happen.

In the face of events that make the news ticker and get amplified by friends and family, it is often difficult to know what and what not to do in the classroom. Faculty have expressed to me a deep sense of care about how they themselves, and how their students, can best handle daily news of crises. One of the most cited web-based resources out there is a Vanderbilt University guide called Teaching in Times of Crisis. Originally written in 2001, after 9-11, it was updated by Nancy Chick in 2013.

The gist of this well-researched piece is that we should say *something* about a crisis event in class, but we should say it while also referring students (and ourselves I think!) to available resources. I strongly encourage people to spend some time reading this piece; it’s helped a lot of us to address things head-on in classes rather than ignoring the “elephant in the room.” These crises may be local or global — everything from bombings to stories about sexual assault, from school shootings to the removal of same-sex marriage rights.

I wonder, too, whether this is something that is mainly a question for people in social science, environmental or health studies, or arts disciplines, or whether colleagues teaching large first year classes in, say, Engineering or Physics or Math also think about this stuff? In my experience, yes, but it’s not as directly relevant to the topic of the week (as it may well be in my Women’s Studies first-year lecture).

Teaching teaching to (future) teachers – Joseph Buscemi

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Having an opportunity to reflect on my brief time with CTE is a most welcomed development. Not only for those interested in CTE, but for myself, this chance to pause and consider all that has transpired within my introductory entry into the world of CTE has been, quite frankly, remarkable. I’ve only just wrapped up my first term as a GID (Graduate Instructional Developer), though the wealth of experiences makes it feel as though I’ve been here much longer (and I mean that in the best way possible). Firstly, I suppose a bit of preamble is in order before we get ahead of ourselves… Continue reading Teaching teaching to (future) teachers – Joseph Buscemi