Calling all GATA Networker-Scholars,
You may have seen this going around the inter-webs yesterday, but in case you didn’t, we’re spreading the word:
***The deadline to submit proposals to the Ninth Annual Windsor-Oakland Conference
on Teaching and Learning has been extended to Monday, March 2nd.***
Getting involved in Windsor-Oakland is still the best way to connect to the UWindsor teaching and learning community, as well as those researchers that will be attending from all over Canada and the United States. Beyond that, this year’s conference theme Leading Change in Teaching and Learning: Vision, Influence, Action promises for exciting discussion around how we as students, educators, and even student-educators can shape higher education.
Beverley Hamilton notes that organizers “particularly invite proposals about projects and initiatives that have inspired change in teaching and learning.” Sound like any projects you’ve been working on?
Conferences like these are a great way to work on personal development and an opportunity to share your work with the wider community in a safe space (which is tough for new scholars). Yes, you can benefit just by attending conferences, but presenting your work in teaching and learning at Windsor-Oakland can help you to forge meaningful connections with and gain valuable feedback from experienced scholars in the field.
Learn more about Windsor-Oakland and how to submit proposals on the conference website: http://cleo.uwindsor.ca/oakland/callforproposals.php
Image courtesy of Ipenz at openclipart.org.
Before I start this post, I want to explain that no one is assuming that mid-term failure will be so rampant in classes that the discussion below will be of an absolute necessity. However, because failed midterms tend to carry such important consequences – and often lead to dramatic moments in the classroom – it’s about time we addressed this thing head on: if a student fails your class midterm, they won’t be happy about it.
Related:
Understand that this isn’t necessarily because your/your supervisor’s midterm is too hard, nor is it necessarily because your students have not prepared themselves or studied properly. Midterm performance is complex to say the least, as is counseling those students that might not have performed all that well. Consider the following when discussing mid-term failure with your students:
Check Your Assumptions
If you take anything away from the talk about complexity above, you should realize that we only ever know part of the story when it comes to our students’ performance. Sitting down to talk with a distressed student often yields a lot more insight about the choices that were made – or not made – and the reasoning or factors that contributed to them. In short: don’t assume a student failed because they didn’t try, and don’t assume their failure is all your fault (or theirs, for that matter). It’s always smart to ask students to take 24 hours to reflect on their grades and the feedback they’ve received before discussing them with you, but if they are still upset or unsure about their performance after that period, invite them to share their concerns with you in a private place where you can both be open and honest with each other.
Understand Grades Are Emotional
One of my earliest gut reactions when I first started teaching was to get disappointed students to see that grades are ultimately just numbers. This didn’t mean that I didn’t try to show them that I empathized with their struggles, just that my ultimate goal was to get them to detach themselves from the feeling of failure associated with failing a class assignment. Don’t do what I did. Jamie O’Connor of Inside HigherEd has found that it is often more helpful and healthy to acknowledge the emotions that come with failing a midterm, and some of these can even be used for motivating students to improve.
Failing an Exam ≠ Failing as a Person
Related to the previous point, it’s important that students know that bombing your midterm does not mean they are a failure of a student – or worse yet, a failure of a human being. Even when counseling students about their options in the course moving forward, it’s important to remember Moira Peelo and Terry Wareham’s advice for Times Higher Education: “Do not make personal comments about a student’s capabilities, remember it is the exam performance which is below standard, not the person.” This comment goes both ways, too. It’s no help reminding a student who is otherwise performing well or is generally bright that they are “better than” a low mark. We all have off days. The only time it is necessary to bring up outside performance (i.e., how the student is performing in the class overall, their degree audit, their abilities, etc.) is when helping a student to determine their options moving forward.
Consult Your Students’ Options
Failure on a midterm almost never mathematically ensures failure in a course. It’s useful to keep that in mind when consulting students who are disappointed about their mid-term marks. However, these marks can make it difficult to achieve certain outcomes that the student may be looking for (i.e., an F on the midterm might mean it’s not possible to get an A in the course). When meeting with a disappointed student, engage students in productive reflection on the situation and start the discussion about what steps he/she thinks are necessary for improvement.
- Encourage students disappointed with their mid-term grades to take a self-inventory. What do they think went wrong for this midterm? What are their study habits like? How did those habits fit with this particular test?
- Help your student to determine (or redetermine) their goal for the course and the steps they would need to take to achieve it. Are they realistic?
- Consider what opportunities might exist to help students persevere in your course. For instance, are students allowed to complete extra assignments for bonus marks? Would the supervisor be willing to alter the weight of future assignments to give this student a chance to improve their overall mark? Just be sure these extra measures are applied consistently and thoughtfully (Read: Have clear guidelines).
- If it just isn’t possible for a student to achieve their course goal, what sorts of implications might this have on their degree? Invite students to speak with an academic advisor about their options for dropping the course, grade appeal, etc.
Connect Students With Support
I have always been of the mind that it’s never too late to turn a negative situation into a positive. If a student is struggling in your course, connect them with the S.T.E.P.S. program to improve their study skills, or a peer-tutoring service like the Writing Support Desk or the Science Learning Centres, or a mentorship program like Connect4Success.
It’s highly likely that this blog’s crowd is already on the up and up about MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses). But those of us that don’t consider ourselves tech-savants might not be as familiar with what MOOCs are all about.
For those of you that have never heard the term before, we’re talking about large-scale courses that are made available (and often free) to the general public through online platforms. But of course, there’s more to it than that, including whether or not the course is synchronous (live) or asynchronous (static), whether it offers a certificate upon completion or just a friendly “congrats.” Dave Cormier offers this brief explanation of MOOCs:
It just so happens that UWindsor recently entered into the MOOC game (and hey, its first MOOC is connected to the UWill Discover conference!). The Office of Open Learning recently launched its very first MOOC, which focuses on encouraging undergraduate research.
Have you heard? Our #UWillDiscover #MOOC is live and ready for you to register! http://t.co/TjQHStPDVV
— UWindsorOpenLearning (@UWinOpenLearn) February 6, 2015
I’d be foolish to neglect mentioning the debate swirling around MOOCs, which generally splits people into three camps: those who hate MOOCs, those who love them, and those that see both good and bad in them. Come to your own opinion, but I tend to align more with the last camp.
There are MOOCs out there on just about every topic imaginable – from Chemistry 101 to “Basic Accounting.” There are a number of sites out there that collect these MOOCs and updates about them, including mooc.ca and mooc-list.com.
The deadline to submit applications to the UWill Discover Undergraduate Research Conference has been extended until midnight Monday (that’s 11:59:59 pm, Monday, February 9th, 2015). Conference organizer Simon du Toit has sent along a preview of what to expect at the event celebrating undergraduate research work, the first of its kind at UWindsor.
The First Annual University of Windsor
Undergraduate Research Conference
Students can submit research proposals through the Scholarship at UWindsor Portal:
http://scholar.uwindsor.ca/uwilldiscover/2015
The conference will take place on Tuesday, March 24, 2015, in the Ambassador Auditorium and the CAW Centre. It will have the following features:
- The conference will be preceded by a Collaborative Massively Open Online Course, or CMOOC. This online process will host an international discussion focusing on best practices around undergraduate research conferences. We will invite guest presenters to host a series of evening discussions that will approach that topic from various points of view.
- There will be no printed posters in this conference. Instead, students will present posters digitally, using projectors. Each poster will be supported by a Mini-TED talk recorded in advance by the presenter. We will ask every presenter (whether a poster, an oral presentation, a keynote, or an installation) to record a short talk about his or her research or creative project. The tone will be informed but informal, delivered in lay language full of enthusiasm. Recording facilities will be provided by student film directors working in CTL’s studios, and made publicly available through a University of Windsor YouTube channel a few days before the conference.
- As an aspect of the CMOOC, all conference posters and Mini-TED talks will go live on the website on the Friday before the conference. This will permit asynchronous engagement with the conference material, and will also foster deeper questioning and engagement with the presentations.
- During the conference interactive kiosks placed in the CAW and around the campus will go live. All the three-minute Mini-TEDs, conference posters, and keynotes will be available on demand. Students on our campus, in regional high schools, and across the country will be able to log on, watch the presentations, and pose questions for the presenter during the conference sessions. The live audience for each presenter is potentially global.
- Leddy Library staff will participate in the conference in a number of ways. Librarians will serve as panel moderators and judges. Leddy will provide important contributions to our online presence:
- Leddy is providing a flow-through publication process that will track student projects from submission, through review, to publication as conference proceedings, all on the Scholarship@UWindsor portal. The Scholarship website for UWillDiscover! is already in development.
- All the submitted abstracts, digital posters, and presentations will be warehoused on the Leddy website and accessed through the Scholarship portal. This approach not only offers significant cost savings both to the students and to us, but also allows us to group poster presentations that are thematically linked, and to flex our timetable to permit mini-keynote speeches associated with particular groups of poster presentations. Furthermore, our conference will be green, because paper waste will be minimized.
- In the fall 2014 semester, UWillDiscover! hosted the Leddy Research Question Competition. This is a “best practice” adopted from the University of Alberta: http://www.uri.ualberta.ca/en/URIPresents/FURCA/WhatsURQuestion.aspx
Students proposing the best questions won prizes, and thirty questions were printed and posted around the campus.
Conference Event Planning
On the day of the conference – March 24, 2015 – all participants will gather in the CAW at various times. The actual event will have the following features:
- Posters and Mini-TED talks will be projected in small groups of five in the Ambassador Auditorium. After each group of five has been screened a moderator will facilitate questions and discussion.
- All Mini-TED talks and digital keynote presentations will be close-captioned, facilitating access for disabled students and ensuring that audiences can follow presentations even in noisy conditions.
- The Open Space in front of Tim Horton’s will be used to host performances, installations, and demonstrations from a variety of disciplines.
- The Opening Ceremony will be a Keynote Bomb, and will include three-minute Mini-TED keynotes from various guest speakers.
- We have a significant number of awards to be distributed during the Closing Ceremony, including awards for audience participation and first year researchers.
- Student volunteer support staff will be led and coordinated by Outstanding Scholars. OS students will take responsibility for the social media, both prior to and during the conference. OS students will also participate in submission review and conference management. In future, we expect the conference to become increasingly a student-run event.
- We are developing relationships with community partners who will serve as keynote speakers, moderators, judges, or sponsors. We would appreciate any suggestions you may have in that regard. Our goal is to connect student researchers with partners in local industry, government, and entrepreneurship.
This is a collaborative event shared between many partners on our campus. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us.
Simon du Toit, Conference Coordinator, Outstanding Scholars
Erika Kustra, Center for Teaching and Learning
Dragana Martinovic, Faculty of Education
Heather Pratt, Office of Research and Innovation Services
You may have noticed that we’ve reorganized the blog’s archives to make it easier to find the subject you’d like to read up on. You can find these new archives in the main menu bar above. It all breaks down into three pages:
GA/TA Resources
Looking for something to help you in your role? Maybe a tool, a piece of research, or a teaching tip from a colleague. This page is full of useful information you can apply to your everyday teaching and learning, like how to match technology to specific problems in the classroom.
GA/TA Life
Sometimes being a GA or TA is just plain tough and you find yourself looking for a quick joke to make sense of it all. Other times you find yourself thinking about how being a GA or TA affects your everyday life. In short, this is where you go if you want to learn APA Style from a cartoon dragon or read scholarly parodies of the World Cup.
GA/TA Events
Stay connected to GATA and UWindsor’s student teacher community by staying up on current events like Windsor-Oakland and the UWill Discover conference. Here you’ll find information about workshops, lectures, presentations, and other personal/professional development events that you can participate in. You can also share your own event by emailing us the details at gata@uwindsor.ca.
Today, in Windsor, discussion is dominated by two burning topics, both summed up in this Facebook photo from Randy Mulder via @WeatherNetwork:
Post by The Weather Network
Teachers Do Stupid Things Too
‘Teacher You Are Stupid!’ – Cultivating a Reflective Disposition
Thomas S.C. Farrell has had his own stupid teaching moments, and once a student even told him he was stupid to his face. He used it as ammunition to reflect on his teaching practice:
Reflective language teaching involves teachers not only systematically gathering data about their teaching and using this information to make informed decisions about their practice, but also involves a particular reflective disposition. This disposition comprises of three essential attitudes of open-mindedness, responsibility, and whole-heartedness, all of which can make reflection meaningful for the practitioner. Reflection thus implies a dynamic way of being both inside and outside the classroom.
Read more from Farrell’s article here.
Teaching Mistakes From the College Classroom
Back in 2010, Faculty Focus asked college teachers to share their worst teaching mistakes for the purpose of educating others what not to do. The result was a special report collecting 15 short articles covering topics from mismanaging unhappy students to cross-cultural naivety. In one of these articles, Megan S. Grayce shares four tips for beginning instructors, among which is a plea to use lesson plans (and we agree):
I can’t stress enough how much better your classes will go if you use a lesson plan. There are many forms of lesson plans available on the Internet, just pick one that works for you or your college may already provide one they prefer you use. I suggest you select a lesson plan that you can fill in electronically and save as a document you can edit at a later date. Lesson plans aid the instructor in defining the objectives for the class, staying on track, achieving the stated objectives, and avoid frustrations.
Read more from the complete guide here.
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