How do you know that you are an effective teacher? What are the competencies of an effective university teacher, and how can you demonstrate them? What is recognized as excellence in teaching? How can you plan to develop professionally towards excellence at your own pace?

Research is critical to the endeavors of universities: how and whether research directly benefits the quality of students' learning experiences has much to do with context and approach. In this facilitated conversation, participants explored ways of integrating the research and teaching aspects of their role in ways that can directly enhance the quality of students' learning and engagement.

The Centre for Teaching and Learning invites you to an informal brown-bag lunch session discussing a range of forms of oral assessment facilitated by the CTL's current Visiting Fellow, Dr. Gordon Joughin from the University of Wollongong. Assessment of student learning in universities is dominated by writing - essays, project reports, lab reports and written examinations are the staple fare of assessment in most disciplines. However, many disciplines and professors use oral forms of assessment, including presentations, moots, debates, short vivas to quiz students on their work, and simulated practice scenarios in social work, psychology, medicine and nursing. These forms of assessment can be particularly powerful experiences for students as well as highly authentic forms of assessing their learning achievements. This informal seminar will be an opportunity to share your experience of oral assessment with other interested faculty and to hear from our Visiting Scholar, Dr Gordon Joughin, who has published several articles on oral assessment, including 'Dimensions of oral assessment', 'Contrasting conceptions of oral presentations', and 'Oral assessment and postgraduate medical examinations: establishing conditions for validity, reliability and fairness'.

In this workshop we will be considering the impact that the assessment of students’ learning has on how, what and when students learn and how the assessment of learning can be designed to support high quality learning in universities. Participants will be invited to apply a framework for learning-oriented assessment to their own courses and programs, to explore the impact of their assessments on their students’ learning, and to modify or re-design assessment tasks to meet both certification needs and the conditions for good learning. To do this, we will be looking at assessment from the learner’s perspective, using recent research into students’ experience of assessment and applying this to our own work as teachers and assessors. Workshop facilitator. Dr Gordon Joughin is a senior lecturer in the Academic Development Unit at the University of Wollongong, Australia and a Visiting Scholar in the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Windsor. Gordon has written extensively on assessment and learning and is the editor of Assessment, Learning and Judgement in Higher Education (Springer, 2009).

What can the University of Windsor academic community learn from the Australian experience of assessing student learning in higher education?

This workshop gathers people from different disciplines to celebrate the many ways of knowing at play in the academy. It is designed to help teachers of any discipline appreciate the various forms of knowledge and ways of learning that exist in a class. This will enable you as a teacher to hone and target your teaching strategies. This workshop is designed to be engaging and interactive, with audience participation an important part of the learning process.

Please Note: Due to popular demand, this workshop is a repeat of the one held Tuesday, 30th March.

Invitational Education is a theory of educational practice which maintains that every person and everything in and around schools, educational institutions and other organizations adds to, or subtracts from, the process of being a beneficial presence in the lives of human beings. Ideally, the factors of people, places, policies, programs and processes should be so intentionally inviting as to create a world in which each individual is cordially summoned to develop intellectually, socially, physically, psychologically, and spiritually.

Facilitating successful group work in teaching and learning settings can be challenging for both students and faculty. Students often do not see the value of group work, and the logistical challenges can discourage faculty from using group projects in their classes.

Assessing group work projects fairly, and with some validity is a potential minefield and students often complain about the lack of fairness in assigning grades in this mode. Despite these perceptions, there are a number of things that faculty can do to enhance the effectiveness, efficiency and learning experience of assessed group work. This workshop will encourage participants to consider a range of possible solutions to this dilemma, and enable them to evaluate their own practice in light of some new ideas.

When evaluation is used as a quality enhancement tool, it can encompass a wide range of strategies. Most people are familiar with student evaluation of teaching and this can be done in a range of different ways that you may not have considered. However, evaluation of the overall quality of a course or degree programme can be undertaken at a number of levels, which might include student focus groups, analysis of student assessment results, and/or feedback from employers or a professional body.

Research-stimulated teaching proposes a framework of four different but related approaches to encouraging greater student engagement. In this interactive session the facilitators will provide the opportunity to consider the four approaches to research-stimulated teaching, challenging participants to reflect on how these approaches might be useful in their own practice at both the curriculum and classroom delivery levels, and emphasizing growth as a self-directed learner.

Whether your course is face-to-face, blended or totally online, group work can be what contributes to retention and deep learning in your class, or sends people running in the opposite direction. This interactive workshop will discuss some effective strategies to develop a supportive culture and realistic expectations in your class about the role of group work in learning.

A team of developers under Dr. Sauvé’s direction has developed “shells” for a variety of standard board games, to be used in multi- or single-user formats online. Using these tools, instructors can easily develop educational games adapted to the content of their own courses. The presentation will include a demonstration of these tools.

Based on the principles of personalized learning, the S@mi-Persévérance project integrates academic and social support for students, emphasizing access to skill development, autonomous learning, self-reflection, and self-evaluation. Driven by student input, the platform creates rapidly responsive personal learning pathways based on the user’s preferred learning modalities, preferred learning media and needs.

Given the rapidly expanding array of web platforms, social networking and virtual community tools now available, universities must establish pedagogical and technological criteria to guide their priorities in creating engaging and effective personalized learning contexts for students, and these criteria must take into account the needs to two key user groups: students, and instructors. This presentation will assist those planning online learning initiatives to plan effectively and efficiently to optimize student learning.

In his Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, Ernest L. Boyer argued for a conception of ‘scholarship’ that recognizes traditional research – what he termed the ‘scholarship of discovery’ – but which also includes the scholarly domains of ‘integration’, ‘application’, and ‘teaching’. His validation of teaching has spawned a virtual ‘industry’ devoted to what is now known as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

How do we know that our students are thinking at a higher level? How can involving students in the development of criteria for judgment develop higher order thinking? And how can transparency in teaching, testing, and student self-evaluation together help ensure that the desired thinking skills are learned? Using mastery teaching principles and research-based critical thinking evaluation practices workshop participants will create thinking skill(s) questions. Small inter-disciplinary groups will work together in evaluating the validity of those questions in order to highlight some key problems with creating questions that aim to test thinking skills. The outcome of the workshop is to illustrate a general approach to evaluation that helps build instructor confidence in assessments of thinking. The exercises are also aimed at illustrating how both group and individual student participation in the evaluation process helps students build and independently practice critical thinking skills prior to a high stakes culminating assignment or exam. Participants are encouraged to bring in test items or essay questions from their respective disciplines that are used to test higher level thinking skills.

Facilitating small group discussions can be a challenging task for any instructor, however we know that small group discussion improves learning in our students so we persist. This workshop aims to increase participants’ basic skills in small group discussion facilitation, and to help you develop options for dealing with more difficult situations in groups. We will look at the rationale for using small group teaching, characteristics of effective and dysfunctional groups, and some core facilitation skills that will help you. The workshop will also address questioning strategies in facilitation, managing challenging situations in small groups, and some of the key principles guiding small-group facilitation.

Please note: Due to high demand, this workshop has moved from Room LT2103 and will now be held in Room G141, Lambton Tower Basement.

There are a plethora of new technologies available to us and our students. For some of us, using this technology is second nature, while for others it is more of a challenge. An additional challenge is how to select and use appropriate new technologies in our teaching. This workshop aims to introduce you to a wide variety of new technologies and to discuss their use in teaching and learning. We will explore topics such as blogs and wikis, podcasting, online communication tools, ePortfolios, mobile devices, games and simulations, online labs, video-enhanced learning, and social networking tools. By the end of the workshop, you will be able to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using a range of technologies in teaching and learning, and apply that to your own teaching context.

Please note: Due to high demand, this workshop has moved from Room LT2103 and will now be held in Room G141, Lambton Tower Basement.

Teaching is a highly personal endeavour in which we share something of ourselves with our audience. Humour can be a very effective tool to enhance student engagement and improve their experience in our classes. This workshop will introduce participants to the potential benefits and challenges of incorporating humour into their teaching, and to provide a number of techniques for using humour effectively in teaching. We will look at the definition and benefits of humour; using cartoons in teaching; telling stories and jokes; use of role plays, theatre and videos; appropriate and inappropriate use of video; and where and how to find resources.

Please note: Due to high demand, this workshop has moved from Room LT2103 and will now be held in Room G141, Lambton Tower Basement.

Have you ever thought about how your vocal tone, your facial expression or the way you move in the classroom can shape the learning climate? In this participatory workshop you will explore elements of your vocal, verbal and non verbal delivery. Please come ready to discuss assumptions, try vocal exercises and play with your sense of space and physical environment.

This workshop is designed for participants who are interested in writing better test items. The workshop will introduce participants to the skills of writing measurable objectives for item construction, and creating good multiple-choice and essay questions and scoring key. To maximize the benefits of this workshop, participants are advised to bring past test papers they would like to improve upon.

This workshop is designed for participants who are interested in improving the difficulty level of their test items, the reliability and validity of individual test items, and the test paper as a whole. The workshop will introduce participants to the calculations and interpretations of item analysis for multiple choice items, and the estimation of inter-rater reliability for the essay questions.

Would you like some tips on how to make your Word documents and PowerPoint slides more accessible for your students? In the UK, it is the law to produce accessible lecture notes for students, and to anticipate that there might be a disabled student in the group.

Success in academia is traditionally associated with research productivity, external grant revenue, and disciplinary reputation – at least according to the handbooks for new academics and the story told by promotions documents. However, early career faculty tell a parallel story that is more values-driven, where academic success is also about self-fulfilment, enjoyment, autonomy and security. Early career faculty are pulled in many directions by the performative demands of promotion and tenure processes, the realities of competitive funding, and their own personal career and life aspirations.  Where might restricted external constructions of success leave the early career faculty who wish to identify as more or other than researchers? And how can early career faculty balance their own aspirations and personal constructions of success with the demands of their institutions, disciplines, and students? This seminar presents the findings of a research project on early career faculty experiences, conducted with nearly more than 60 ECAs internationally, and argues for a need to allow space for multiple constructions of “success” in academia.

Microsoft PowerPoint is a popular and powerful tool for communicating with students. During this session, participants will learn how to design slides that assist learning, use PowerPoint during lectures, and effectively use handouts. While this session focuses on using PowerPoint, the material is applicable to a wide variety of presentation technologies and learning contexts.

Join School of Dramatic Art professor Michael Keating for a talk about how to use your vocal powers and physical presence to communicate more compellingly in the classroom. This interactive workshop will include a series of activities, and time for questions and discussion.
Please note: The location for this workshop has changed to the Katzman Lounge, Vanier Hall

Neuroscience research suggests that long-lasting learning is best accomplished when the learning activity is connected directly to physical experience. Students remember best when facts and skills are embedded in real-life activity – in experiential learning. In this workshop, participants will learn how to make classroom activity more immersive by using experiential learning activities like simulation exercises.

Copyright has become a topical issue in recent years as new technologies change the way we share, create and interact with information and with one another. Questions and confusion around copyright abound.

Introduction Session: Friday, December 2, 1:30-3:30pm, Lambton 2103
Closing Session: Friday December 16, 2011, 1:30-3:30pm, Lambton 2103
Dates: Face-to-face sessions will take place on December 2 and December 16, from 1:30-3:30pm in Lambton 2103. The rest of the sessions will be online in CLEW.
Commitment: Approximately 1 hour per day.

Instructors design courses and assignments by determining a learning goal and constructing activities to support students in the process of mindful learning. Brain research and research on the effect of experiential-based learning activities on student learning suggest the importance of linking values and patterns with the technicalities of course design.

This workshop will identify ways in which your lectures can capture the attention and interest of your students by transforming your delivery style. You will learn strategies for effective communication with large groups, utilize Power Point notes effectively, and how to build a relationship with your class.

How does culture affect student learning? In this workshop, participants will interrogate a small number of case studies, and discuss whether cultural background had a particular effect on student approaches to learning.

The very mention of peer review of teaching summons the image of a quick but unnerving visit to one’s classroom, later summarized in a cursory evaluative note written by a reluctant colleague. Small wonder that this approach isn’t the universal companion to student evaluation of teaching!

In this session, we’ll explore the two main functions of peer review of teaching—improvement and evaluation. We will examine the main advantages of and objections to peer review of teaching and the major components of a good system. Finally, we’ll generate ideas for how a peer review of teaching system might be constructed in a way that is suited to the context of Windsor University.

During this session, Professor Clarke will describe the findings from a four-stage study that she and four colleagues from De Montfort University conducted on what constitutes outstanding teaching and enables exceptional student learning. The workshop will include video-clips of lecturers commenting on teacher responsiveness, assessment, curriculum, and classroom technology. Participants will also discuss the extent to which this research has any resonance with perceptions of outstanding teaching at UWindsor.

Good communication is a key element of any relationship and research mentoring is no exception. But how can mentors adjust their approach in order to become more effective? And what can we do when an impasse or outright conflict arises? This workshop focuses on assessing obstacles to students’ success in tandem with what mitigates against our effectiveness as mentors by:

• recognizing our communication style and the challenges this presents when working with mentees who have contrasting approaches;
• identifying and practicing concrete strategies for addressing troubling symptoms and engaging in difficult conversations with mentees; and
• improving understanding of how difference and cultural awareness impact workplace conduct and students’ ability to conduct research.

This workshop is presented by the Humanities Research Group (HRG), co-hosted by the School of Graduate Studies and CTL.

A class project...group work...sounds simple enough. For some, the very thought of group work raises feelings of dread and trepidation. Others thrive in group work settings, and embrace such opportunities. Why the wide gap? Who benefits from group work and who is disadvantaged?

Carole L. Davis will describe how a teaching observation project was found to influence professional practice at Middlesex University in the United Kingdom. The teaching observation experience provided the catalyst for both Professor Davis, as the practitioner researcher, and the study participants to enter into a dialogue about the role of peer feedback and support within the context of the professional development of lecturers in higher education. The project was focused on the identification of the most effective way of carrying out teaching observations, an analysis of the shared experiences of teachers and the overall impact, the outcomes of observations when they were a part of a series, and what observations tell us about subject specific pedagogies.

Educational psychologists suggest that learning is best done within a social, collaborative environment, where students are able to leverage increased engagement and deeper learning resulting from working within a group. In this workshop, participants will explore several examples of how to include collaborative and social constructivist activities within their courses.

Dr. Christine Smith, the University of Windsor’s newly appointed Director of Open Learning, will facilitate an interactive workshop to introduce University staff, instructors, and students to the ways in which the Office for Open Learning Services (TOOLS) can support developments and ambitions for open learning.

Whose job is it to introduce students to the craft of academic writing? We often assume our students will arrive with this skill – or at least, pick it up as they go. Or, we might decide that the task rests with out-of-class support services. Regardless, including a single session in which a focus on writing is combined with content delivery offers huge dividends: it allows instructors to set high expectations, introduce students to the particular writing style of the discipline, and demystify one of the most fundamental but solitary practices in higher education.

This interactive workshop will demonstrate one strategy for improving student essay writing. The facilitator will provide you with examples of effective resources, and will discuss ways in which this approach can be tailored to suit individual contexts.

Are you looking for ways to strengthen student engagement, or improve success and retention? Perhaps you are interested in a new teaching practice, assessment, or pedagogy? Are you seeking a new research project, or have already identified an area of interest, but need a team to get there?

Whether for your classes or for research and/or conference presentations, visual presentations are nearly unavoidable. For years, Microsoft PowerPoint has been the standard bearer of slide presentation applications, but several alternatives have emerged. The alternatives offer different functionalities and may even help avoid "death by PowerPoint."

Join School of Dramatic Art professor Michael Keating for a talk about how to use your vocal powers and physical presence to communicate more compellingly in the large classroom.

Good communication is a key element of any relationship and research mentoring is no exception. How can mentors adjust their approach in order to become more effective?

During this workshop, participants will discover fundamental graphic design principles as well as helpful hints on how to create eye-catching and informative academic posters. Participants will also review alternatives to commonly used poster design software, like PowerPoint.

During the first part of this workshop, participants will discover fundamental graphic design principles as well as helpful hints on how to create eye-catching and informative academic posters. Participants will also review alternatives to commonly used poster design software, like PowerPoint.

Participants are encouraged to bring poster ideas or posters they've started so they can work on them during the second part of this workshop. Laptops will be available to work on, or participants can bring their own.

The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) asks instructors to examine their own classroom practice, along with scholarship and research, and share their findings with the aim of improving student learning and enhancing teaching quality. We invite you to join us for an interactive, engaging session on what, why, and how to SoTL. The session will include hands-on activities aimed at helping you become more comfortable with the scholarship of teaching and learning, how to get started, the different forms SoTL can take, and SoTL publication and presentation outlets. The workshop facilitator will also provide practical tips on researching, writing, and publishing SoTL work in peer-reviewed journals, pulling from her experience as the managing editor of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) publication, Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching.

Why do you teach? What inspires students to learn in your subject area? How do you facilitate their learning with your worldview? These and similar questions are at the heart of a teaching philosophy statement.

“…In certain disciplines there are ‘conceptual gateways’ or ‘portals’ that lead to a previously inaccessible, and initially perhaps ‘troublesome’ way of thinking about something” write Meyer and Land. (2005, p. 373). In this session we will unpick and discuss the controversial notion of threshold concepts. Do they exist in your discipline? What are they? Accepting that threshold concepts are a useful framework for thinking about ‘portals’ or key ideas in our subjects, we will then examine the implications for curriculum design during this interactive session.

Being a reflective practitioner sounds simple - but is it? This session examines the role that reflective practice can play in enhancing your teaching and academic practice. We will carry out a number of practical activities designed to improve your own reflective practice - such as a critical incident analysis. We will look at how we can reflect in a more structured way to improve our own performance. We will also finish by looking at some critiques of reflective practice and what you might do differently as a result of the session.

This session will trace the history and emergence of action research and its popularity within educational development. We will examine how it is used in a structured way to interrogate your own teaching practice and become a researcher in your own lecture hall. We will examine some action research projects carried out in Aberystwyth University as part of the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education. This will be both a theoretical and practical session where there is an opportunity to share and exchange good practice.

The recently implemented grade conversion policy and upcoming deadlines for final assignments and exams make this a perfect time to get together to share our best practices in grading. Facilitated by Vice-Provost Alan Wright, this interactive workshop will feature a panel of instructors who will share their models and ideas for assigning numeric grades to a range of assignments, addressing (and forestalling!) student concerns and complaints about their grades, and ensuring students are clear on your expectations. Bring your questions and ideas to join the discussion.

If you've been looking for ways to uncover what's happening in your courses, this workshop is a good place to start. We'll explore common course and program level data -- data you already have access to -- and help you to develop questions about your teaching and student learning, and show you simple strategies which can help answer those questions. On the way we'll work through case examples to illustrate how data confirm (or refute!) instructors' hunches. Strategies discussed will help you to both document your successes for your teaching portfolio as well as gather valuable formative feedback for future improvement. Please bring your own laptop loaded with Excel if possible. If not, one will be provided.

BLDI Day 1: Principles, Pedagogy and Planning in Blended Learning Day 1 of the program focuses on the foundational theoretical underpinnings of blended learning course design, within a practical framework. This series of workshop-style activities will introduce you to concepts such as active learning, student engagement, deep learning and Universal Design for Instruction in blended learning. Mapping and aligning the course, designing and converting courses, best practices in high quality blended classrooms, flipping your classes, authentic assessment, and quality enhancement processes will all be addressed. Participants will use common course design models to begin to plan blended learning approaches in their own courses. Please bring a laptop or tablet if you have one. If you do not have access to one, please email Alicia Higgison at higgison@uwindsor.ca so that enough extra technology can be provided if possible.

BLDI Day 2: Practical Pedagogy: Blended Learning Tools Day 2 focuses on active learning and student engagement using some of the new tools available to instructors at the University of Windsor. It will provide an introduction to Echo360 lecture capturing options, and the Lecture Tools Student Engagement Platform. The sessions will be interactive and hands on. Please bring a laptop or tablet if you have one. If you don't have access to one, please email Alicia Higgison at higgison@uwindsor.ca and we will attempt to provide additional equipment

BLDI Day 3: Consultation Day: Solidifying Plans Mentors and consultants from the first two days of the program will be available for one on one or small group consultations to help you solidify your blended learning course development plan. This day will be the start of the development process, helping you set goals and plan for what support you will need to achieve the goals you set.

In this workshop we will be considering some frameworks of good teaching that will help you to identify what is best in your own teaching, how to describe your teaching in student-centred ways, and the kinds of evidence that you have, or could gather, that will support your claims as a teacher. The frameworks can also help you to identify aspects of your teaching that you might want to develop further. The workshop should help advance your thinking about and documentation of your own teaching (for example, in a teaching portfolio or award submission) in ways that will be most persuasive to yourself and to others, as well as help you to chart directions for progress in the future. The workshop will be based on the facilitator’s experience of working with numerous award winning teachers in Australia as well as on the experience and ideas of the workshop participants.

Discussed uses of Lecture Tools, Echo360 system, and Personal Capture tools.

Blended, hybrid and ‘flipped’ teaching and learning is becoming increasingly more common in higher education, as universities adapt to the changing needs of learners and society, and as we learn more about the most effective teaching practices. Purposeful blending of technology in traditional teaching has the potential to create powerful learning environments that improve student engagement, deepen learning, and achieve learning outcomes.

Faced with anonymous end-of-course student feedback, professors often tend to react personally before they respond instructionally.

Through the use of a short case study, this session is designed to put student evaluations into perspective and context and to explore constructive strategies for connecting student feedback with continuous teaching enhancement.

There is no single ideal teaching Philosophy Statement; each one is as unique as the teacher who writes it. The Philosophy Statement is at the very heart of every teacher’s dossier, offering the context for your teaching practices and decisions. First and foremost, your Philosophy Statement should be personal and genuine. It should clearly articulate and then animate the conceptual framework that underpins your teaching values, principles, and goals.

This session is designed to provide guidelines for several approaches to creating your Statement. Each approach will focus on setting coyness aside to select the best, most persuasive foundation to showcase your teaching achievements and to provide reflective contexts for them.

Effective communication does not look the same from culture to culture. As teachers working with students of different cultural backgrounds, it is useful to be able to identify different communication styles in order to increase student success. Participants will engage in experiential learning to challenge some of the underlying assumptions that can interrupt communication and learning in a multicultural/multilingual classroom and practice strategies that they can use right away.

Most faculty in higher education institutions are expected to publish and teach – responsibilities that are traditionally carried out in isolation. However, this tradition of isolation creates challenge, as it lacks a structure to facilitate professional dialogue and so limits faculty’s opportunity to benefit from the insights and talents of other faculty members (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2013; Eib & Miller, 2006).

Active engagement of students promotes critical thinking and a deeper approach to learning. It can, however, also be challenging to implement, particularly in large classes. Join us in this interactive workshop to explore different ways that faculty have made the most of technology newly available at the University of Windsor to efficiently and effectively encourage students to engage in courses from a variety of disciplines.

Belonging to no discipline yet informing and affecting pedagogical practice in all, the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) can be intimidating. Complicating matters further, SoTL has its own conventions, assumptions, models, and literature that may strike disciplinary scholars as foreign.

SoTL investigates the effects of teaching and learning practices, with the aim of refining higher education over time. Much SoTL involves the use of students as research participants. In fact, some argue that SoTL has made insufficient use of students, for it relies too much on teachers' perceptions and other proxies that cannot be linked reliably to student learning. Certainly, many argue, if student learning is the phenomenon we are most interested in investigating, we must study the students themselves.

Yet, a variety of ethical issues arise when students participate in SoTL research. Some of these are handled by local Research Ethics Boards (REB), some are not. In every study, researchers must bring an array of values, principles, reasoning, and duties to bear on the ethical issues involved -- if they notice or anticipate them. When issues go unnoticed, of course, the ethical resources one may use to deal with them are irrelevant.

Can we make justifiable and useful claims in SoTL without using our students as research participants? If so, given the ethical issues involved in such use -- including potential harm/benefit, justice, and human dignity -- do we have a responsibility or obligation to conduct only SoTL research that does not use students as research participants? Furthermore, do the same considerations imply an obligation to conduct only research that is likely to benefit students?

The session will use a case-study to challenge participants to think through the beliefs and values underlying their practices as SoTL researchers, tease out complications and implications, and dig through surface issues to the deeper problems beneath. The conclusions reached through this dialogue cannot be known in advance, though the value of the journey, wherever it may end, could be substantial. That said, we anticipate that by the end of this session attendees will be able to:

• Apply principles of research ethics to their work as SoTL researchers;
• Surface and discuss ethical issues and implications of SoTL research practices;
• Articulate their underlying beliefs and values as researchers.

This workshop for local and central leaders of Learning and Teaching at the University will parallel those now completed or underway with learning leaders of assessment in Europe, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, the USA, Malaysia and the University of the South Pacific, as part of his role as National Senior Teaching Fellow with Australia’s Office for Learning and Teaching.

It will explore whether assessment practices at the University of Windsor confirm that we are producing graduates who are not only work ready for today but work ready plus for tomorrow, contributing to a comparison of Canadian practices with those elsewhere. A short, one page outline, of Professor Scott’s work is attached.

Participants are asked to bring along with them one example of an assessment task which they have found to attract high levels of positive student feedback and which taps into the sorts of capabilities needed for students to successfully perform effectively in the rapidly changing context of the 21st Century.

Demonstrating quality of teaching is a significant challenge, but a growing imperative for personal, professional, and institutional reasons. This workshop will explore the applicability of the Australian University Teaching Criteria and Standards (AUTCAS) framework to the Canadian context, and in particular to University of Windsor faculty.

Developed through an extensive review of the literature and current practices in international and Australian universities, as well as wide consultation across the higher education sector, the AUTCAS framework is underpinned by carefully researched definitions and principles of quality teaching that are expressed through seven criteria. For each criterion the framework suggests standards of achievement that might be applied to each promotional level, cross-referenced to examples of indicative evidence that could be used to demonstrate achievement. The framework was developed with the intention that these criteria, standards and indicative evidence be adapted by individual universities to suit their own context and values. The framework also supports individual teachers in building evidence of their impact in an increasingly complex work environment including traditional research-teaching academics to teaching focused academics and professional staff.

Participants will obtain a working knowledge of the Australian Teaching Criteria and Standards, and consider how they might be applicable to documenting and evidencing the quality of their teaching.

Designed to enable students to become more aware and critical of searching for information online, Information Searching and Analysis is a full course offering that resulted from an exercise in a media studies class challenging students to learn about online sources and begin to sort out trustworthy information from junk. The issues (political economy of information, search personalization, news sourcing) proved to be multilayered and I decided to create a full semester course which explores our tendency to engage in confirmation bias and how search algorithms produce an online version of it, how to read “news” more critically and develop ways to analyze online information sources. Student reactions to the course indicate despite the workload, they learned a lot about the topic, the nature of digital information and searching, and themselves.

In this workshop, we will begin by surveying our information literacy practices in the classroom. I will then present the logic and key assignments of the course, sharing key materials including the evaluation forms students use in their analyses of websites and news. Participants will then have a chance to explore how these materials might effectively be transferred to their own disciplines. My hope is that the discussion might inspire new initiatives that make information literacy concerns better addressed across campus.

This workshop will explore the new policies and procedures for academic integrity at the University of Windsor. Through case study and discussion, participants will learn positive and proactive solutions to academic dishonesty, including correct procedures to follow when plagiarism is suspected, techniques for determining whether a given assignment is plagiarized, and best practices for interpreting originality reports from the new plagiarism detection service Blackboard’s SafeAssign. Participants will also gain insight into key methods instructors can use to encourage academic integrity, and prevent students from cheating in the first place.

We all know the benefits of providing learners with formative feedback, but we may not have considered the benefits of receiving formative feedback on our own teaching. In this CTL “lunch and learn” event, we’ll offer an overview of several options for getting formative feedback on teaching. Come learn more about each, share your own stories, and take a moment to reflect on what might work best for you in the coming term. Now is the time to plan!

Are you interested in broadening your repertoire of teaching strategies and creating a more inclusive, dynamic, and engaged classroom?

If you're beginning to see that there are useful insights hiding in your course evaluations (SETs), but you're not sure how to unlock the information trapped in those tables of numbers, this workshop is for you. How can you use SETs to examine facets of your teaching and continually improve the classroom experience for your students?

This teaching workshop provides a snapshot on how a New Zealand teacher has significantly improved student completion and success rates for both Maori and European learners, largely through a thorough understanding of each of his student’s individual journeys. But how is it possible to build robust individual relationships when significant student cultural and social diversity exists and when class sizes continue to expand? This workshop, facilitated by CTL’s current Visiting Fellow James Paterson from Tauranga, New Zealand, examines ways of creating robust relationships by understanding whanuangatanga and “walking in two worlds”, and how these concepts impact on student success. In addition, as a proud Kiwi, husband, dad, teacher and sports fanatic, the facilitator will leave you with a greater understanding of New Zealand, and New Zealand’s contribution to global education.

How can you help your students understand lives and cultures that are quite unlike their own, concepts and theories that seem utterly alien? This workshop will introduce you to ideas you can use to think through the challenging – and rewarding – task of answering that question, and thus create meaningful learning experiences for students that truly broaden their understanding. Although Educating for Understanding will be most directly relevant to faculty members in the arts, humanities and social sciences, many of the techniques and ideas shared will also be useful to those in other disciplines.

Multiple choice questions are one of the most common ways to assess students, and yet some of the most difficult to write effectively. In this workshop, we will explore best practices in formulating effective questions, ensuring that questions are appropriately challenging, as well as reliable and valid indicators of student mastery. We will also explore a model for testing students that encourages students to collaboratively and critically engage with multiple choice questions, the 2-Step Exam (also known as the Group Exam). There is evidence that this method of testing students promotes deeper knowledge of the subject matter and reduced reliance on rote memory and guesswork.

Whether you’re a rookie or at the top of your game, feedback is a critical tool for continued development, improvement and success. 360-degree feedback effectively taps into your students, your colleagues, and yourself (among others) as valuable sources of information that can collectively provide insight into what’s working and what isn’t in your classroom. In this workshop, we will explore a variety of strategies to obtain high quality, practical and comprehensive feedback to help you develop your teaching skills. We will demonstrate different methods for gathering information, including what questions to ask and when to ask them, advantages and disadvantages of different approaches, and tips on how to ensure the feedback meets your needs and goals. We will also identify common challenges to obtaining and analyzing feedback and ways to overcome them, including what to do when feedback conflicts.

The purpose of the eleventh annual University of Windsor-Oakland University Teaching and Learning Conference is to explore and celebrate the many ways we can contribute to the enhancement of a culture that values teaching.

Through case study presentation, activities and discussion this 2 hour workshop will explore some of the challenges Faculty face when needing to cover large amounts of content in core courses with large student enrolment. It is recognised that in the case of courses e.g. nursing and human kinetics which deal with accreditation by professional bodies that much of this content is often non-negotiable. The workshop will address these important concerns and provide participants with a range of approaches and practical techniques that may be used whatever their discipline or context.

Come to a workshop which encourages participants to focus on student feedback and its relationship with assessment. You will be required to think about your own current practices - what is working well, what is working fairly well but needs some tweaking and what is working less well. The workshop is intended to be provocative , broaden horizons, provide some reframing of the familiar whilst emphasising that there are often different options which are context specific. Throughout we will keep sight of the relationship between feedback, cognition, effective learning and confidence.

The emerging information age provides unprecedented opportunities for rethinking our approach to teaching large-scale foundational courses in Science as well as other disciplines. We can abandon the passive lecture halls, generic instruction, standardized exams, and expensive textbooks of the 20th century, and build inclusive, engaging points of entry into virtually any discipline or topic.

The University of Michigan is currently engaged in a campus-wide Foundational Course Initiative to establish a new, 21st century collaborative approach to the creation and instruction of these courses. Faculty, staff, and students from departments are joining together with instructional consultants from the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching to form Collaborative Course Design teams and to design, develop, and deliver next generation versions of foundational courses. In this session, participants will learn the details of this multi-year project and discuss the strategies that they might employ in rebuilding their own foundational courses using the best evidence-based teaching methods to engage and motivate students, the most appropriate and effective technology solutions, and an assessment toolkit focused on measuring and improving student learning.

The 21st century began amidst an information revolution that promises to change higher education in a variety of ways. Many of these changes have already happened: information is increasingly online, lectures are being flipped, and students are distracted in class by social media. But while some changes seem positive and others not so much, it is an ongoing question as to how specific changes impact student learning and engagement, and how faculty might work towards improving their classroom experiences. Harnessing information technology for learning analytics is one approach to answering this question. We already gather rich and extensive information about student performance, activity, status, and engagement. Analyzing and using that data effectively can give us new insights to optimize our education of an increasingly diverse student body, increase personalization, and ultimately to create much greater student motivation and engagement.

This workshop will explore the new policies and procedures for academic integrity at the University of Windsor. Through case study and discussion, participants will learn positive and proactive solutions to academic dishonesty, including correct procedures to follow when plagiarism is suspected, techniques for determining whether a given assignment is plagiarized, and best practices for interpreting originality reports from the new plagiarism detection service Blackboard’s SafeAssign. Participants will also gain insight into key methods instructors can use to encourage academic integrity, and prevent students from cheating in the first place.

Have you ever caught your students zoning out in class or focusing on Facebook instead of the lecture? You’re not alone!

The literature on high impact learning experiences, such as undergraduate research and study abroad programs, tends to focus on the opportunity for students to have transformational experiences and develop career-relevant skills in critical thinking, a global perspective, collaboration, and communication. Developing and offering a high impact experience can feel quite daunting for faculty who feel the experience comes will come at the expense of their research, particularly when it is not clear how these experiences are also to their benefit. The purpose of this workshop is to use personal examples to describe how high impact experiences do not come at the expense of faculty research, and can lead to interesting and unexpected professional and personal growth opportunities for faculty. Participants will be given an opportunity to consider how they can benefit from the adoption of a high impact learning experience.

Current students have been referred to as the Technology Generation, defined as “technically savvy, well adapted at communicating via the Internet, and used to instant action due to the Internet technology they have always known” (Tucker and Bari 2010). Although these students have demonstrated their enthusiastic use of technologies such as the Internet, smart phones and social media, this use does not ensure they are developing the skills or depth of learning they need to achieve. For students to progress from foundations and more surface approaches to learning, instructors need to employ technology in a transformative way. This involves expanding thinking beyond traditional literacy to an additional set of 21st century fluencies, and aligning and adapting technology use to our knowledge of learning. In this workshop, we will explore a model for using digital technology to foster deep learning, moving beyond the 3Rs (reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic) towards development of 4Cs: creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking.

We work hard and take pride in the courses and programs we’ve designed for our students. How do we ensure that they are achieving the goals we want them to? In this interactive workshop, we will engage in curriculum mapping: a strategy to visualize and analyze your programs to ensure student success.

Student feedback, student engagement in class and online, as well as student academic performance can provide instructors valuable data for assessing and reviewing their course design. In this workshop, we will explore a variety of different approaches to collect and use this data to better inform our teaching and grading. Methods include

• conducting surveys and focus groups to capture a richer picture of student engagement with course materials and with learning activities/tools;
• using test-item analysis to identify threshold concepts and points in the course where students would benefit from additional resources;
• tracking student use of resources to help determine those that students find most useful and whether they seem helpful for increasing student success

Supportive leadership from deans, department heads, and senior colleagues is crucial for the retention and success of early-career faculty. Leaders and managers of faculty just starting out need to be familiar with the resources, support and professional development opportunities available to early-career faculty and to give clear messages about expectations and requirements. At the same time, they need to recognize the faculty members’ own agency and provide appropriate support for an individualised approach to academic career development. This seminar offers findings from an international research project on the experiences of early career faculty and academic leaders. Findings reveal that without the backing of a supportive head of department, faculty just starting out are less likely to be promoted quickly, will likely be less satisfied with their working conditions, and will find it harder to balance their home and work lives. The presentation will also share resources that have been developed from the project to help leaders who are working with and mentoring early-career faculty, and will ask participants to share their own thoughts on supporting new faculty colleagues effectively.

Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) produce legitimate information about some facets of your teaching practice, but finding meaningful information in that data – and more importantly, effectively putting it to good use – depends on the way the data are reported, interpreted, and contextualized. New approaches for presenting and investigating SET data can enable us to uncover and tell our teaching narratives more accurately and effectively, and point us in new directions for inquiry and growth.

Workshop participants will explore new and relatively simple techniques for:

• uncovering the perceived strengths and challenges students report in a single course offering;
• visualizing aggregated and longitudinal SET data to identify, reflect on, document, and annotate meaningful patterns; and
• finding insights that can lead to improved teaching practice for an individual instructor or within a program.

This session will focus particularly using SET data in teaching dossiers to increase the clarity and richness of your narrative and evidence, with an emphasis on using multiple forms of evidence.

What are “common intellectual experiences” and “learning communities” – and how can you create them for your students? In the first installment of a workshop series devoted to combining effective use of high-impact practices (HIPs) with the principles of experiential learning, you will be introduced to the essential characteristics of these two fundamental – and frequently misunderstood – HIPs. Through a combination of presentation and guided discussion, you will learn about what distinguishes HIPs, experiential learning, learning communities, and common intellectual experiences from imposters that co-opt those labels. You will also be provided with ideas and processes to help you create common intellectual experiences in your own programs.

Capture the attention and interest of your students by transforming your delivery style. In this interactive workshop, you will learn strategies for effective verbal and non-verbal communication, making the most of your room, creating content that persuades, and building a relationship with your classes, both small and large.

We teach so our students learn, and memory is key. How we teach and assess can leverage what is known about attention and memory. In this session, we will explore the role of memory and attention in learning and identify concrete strategies you can draw on to help improve students’ ability to retain, apply and critically evaluate information throughout their programs.

You have designed an innovative way of engaging students with challenging concepts, developed an experiential learning course, or included more group work in the curriculum of your program and you want to know whether your students are more engaged, whether they are able to apply these new concepts in the field, or whether their knowledge is deeper as a result of the changes you implemented.

In this workshop, we will explore embedded models of scholarship of teaching and learning designed to assess the impact of new teaching approaches. Embedding research starting at the initial stages of course and program design can allow you to effectively measure, for example, how students are progressing towards program or course outcomes; how effectively a new learning activity such as group work or community engagement is helping students develop their interpersonal communication skills; or how a new assessment is helping them develop their critical thinking skills. Measuring processes and outcomes from the initial stages of development, through delivery, to eventual redesign (1) improves outcomes and accountability; (2) increases flexibility; (3) provides real-time feedback which allows for responsive change; and (4) enables capacity building as an evaluation that focuses on process/use. The scholarly approaches to outcomes assessment presented in the session are applicable to both teaching and curriculum renewal, as well as professional development initiatives and other scholarly activities.

Teaching controversial, complex topics often evokes strong reactions, and divisive, polarized opinions. Certain issues might cause some students to boil over, propelling the whole class into unproductive argument, and others might cause students to shut down, further wounded by subjects that are closely tied to their lives and experiences.

In this interactive workshop, the facilitators will share techniques from a course developed to help teach students controversial topics in the Faculty of Law. Participants will have the opportunity to envision how these techniques might be applied in their own disciplines.

We want our students to succeed beyond the walls of academia. Teaching students “professional” or soft skills that transfer into a workplace is as equally important to their success as disciplinary knowledge. How can we ensure that students are taught these essential skills? In this participatory workshop, we will engage in examining the various professional skills that apply across disciplines, such as integrity, communication, and teamwork; hear examples of how they can be incorporated into course and program curriculum, and discuss strategies you can adopt to ensure your graduates are meeting these expectations. You will hear from someone who has bridged their work between academia and a workplace environment and leave with a set of resources you can use in developing your courses or programs.

Dealing with suspected plagiarism, whether intentional or unintentional, isn't always straightforward. While online services, such as SafeAssign and TurnItIn, may make it easier to detect academic dishonesty, they aren't fail safe. Knowing how to recognize red flags in student work can be useful for instructors and others grading assignments. This interactive workshop, which is a collaboration of the Writing Support Desk, the Office of Academic Integrity, and the Centre for Teaching and Learning, will provide participants with strategies for preventing plagiarism and recognizing possible red flags in written assignments, as well as how to deal with confirmed cases of academic dishonesty. Participants will have a chance to work in small groups to assess case studies and share their own best practices for plagiarism prevention.

Please join Indigenous academics Dr. Valarie Waboose of the Faculty of Law and Professor Rebecca Major of Political Science in a facilitated conversation of implementing Indigenous pedagogy in the classroom. The content of the facilitated conversation will discuss worldview and ways of understanding to illustrate teaching methods that are inclusive of Indigenous pedagogies. The goals for this discussion are to bring awareness of the different ways Indigenous content can be used in the classroom and in class materials, and to assist people in understanding how Indigenous ways of knowing differs from non-Indigenous knowledge systems. To facilitate this conversation, open discussion will start the session. We will move into breakout groups, and then regroup in a circle for idea-sharing. By holding the conversation this way, it is done through Indigenous communication methods and can cater to the different disciplines of the participants. This will create personal value and connect people personally to the materials they teach. No is technology required. This background is meant to serve as a starting point for brainstorming ideas with participants of how they can apply this to their own classrooms.

What are the personal costs – the emotional and physical demands –of teaching and learning? Is it possible to be an excellent educator without suffering burnout? How can we learn to thrive in a time of precarity and limited resources? Where do we find resources to nourish our own intellectual development, meet career goals, serve student needs and still have a personal life? Are there ways we can develop networks and resources within the academy to support our lives and work?

This participatory workshop will identify the often “invisible” issues which shape our lives in the professoriat – from time management, emotional resilience, stress, work-life balance, job security, to ever-changing student expectations.

It will include a brief presentation on current research on the issues, participatory exercises, break-out discussions and an exchange of information and resources. The goal is to establish an ongoing network of support and identify issues to explore more fully in future CTL workshops.

Trying to figure out how to stay sane, balanced and get everything done that needs doing at school and home during the break? Need a breather? Drop in and join us for egg-nog, convivial chat, and some relaxation to help you out over the break. We will provide a short, educational “end-of-semester relaxation” session with techniques and resources to help you cope with seasonal stress, in the office or grading at home!

As professional voice users, teachers often struggle to acquire and maintain a healthy, clear sound that projects in the classroom. In this session, participants will learn the basics of vocal anatomy and physiology, healthy voice care, and how to make the most of what they've got.

Participants in this interactive session will receive individualized feedback on their voice use in the classroom. Breathing techniques, pitch, imagery, and intention will be explored and practiced in a real lecture hall. Participants should be prepared to present a short excerpt from a typical lecture. It is recommended that you attend the previous session to get the full use out of this session.

Note from instructor: Given the need to prioritize the safety and well-being of our colleagues on campus during this challenging time, I would like to invite you to participate in a different kind of online version of my workshop Peer Editing in the Classroom: A Creative Approach. On Friday, March 20, I will make available a written version of my presentation for your perusal. Over the course of the following two weeks, from March 20 through April 6, I will welcome questions, be they about my presentation specifically or on the topic of peer editing in general. I’ll then prepare a compilation of these questions and answers to disseminate to all participants. Thank you for your understanding and flexibility, and I look forward to collaborating with you!

Impostor Phenomenon (IP) is commonly experienced by individuals in academia and is characterized as an intellectual feeling of phoniness that can undermine confidence in oneself. However, many individuals do not realize how common this phenomenon is within teaching, research, and administrative roles. In this workshop, we will share some results from a campus-wide survey we recently conducted on the Impostor Phenomenon in undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, staff, and faculty members. We will discuss how the IP may present itself while teaching and will also provide practical tips and resources for recognizing and managing feelings of impostorism. We also intend to provide teaching-specific examples throughout the session.

This session will be taught using Blackboard Collaborate with a link to be sent out a day before the workshop starts.

We’ll meet via Microsoft Teams to explore the principles and practice of authentic assessment and how these might be adapted in an online setting. Specifically, participants will review a course’s learning outcomes and brainstorm how we can design meaningful assessments that measure what students know, value, and can do. Participants will leave with resources with which they can re-envision their own courses.

Welcome to a short workshop occurring just before Reading Week, to provide colleagues with a moment for self-care and a check-in, with resources to reduce stress. This will include a short breathing/relaxation session, and Q&A with CTL members to provide reassurance you are on the right track with teaching set-up and methods, along with links to important resources. The goal is to reduce ongoing stress, and provide a much needed breather during this challenging semester.

How can you engage your students, help them learn, and survive the term teaching remotely? Come and gain practical insights and lessons learned from your colleagues across disciplines teaching large classes, including insights around communicating to such large groups remotely, engaging the large groups in online courses, connecting with your students, organizing exams, and more. Share some of the challenges and lessons you have learned, and engage in an informal drop-in discussion following the presentations. We will have people in the chat to help with technical issues and questions.

With the pivot to online learning, both students and faculty are having to adjust to a whole new set of rules and expectations for interacting in the classroom. In this workshop, students will share their perspectives about how classroom disruptions affect the learning experience, along with strategies they have found to be helpful. Faculty will add their ideas for creating positive learning spaces online. Together, we will explore best practices for encouraging constructive dialogue, while minimizing and managing disruptive behaviour when it occurs.

Co-sponsored with St. Clair College

In a traditional flipped classroom, lectures, resources and activities are placed online while class time is dedicated to working together face-to-face, applying the course material and making meaning. So, how can you flip an online course? Online courses offer both asynchronous and synchronous learning opportunities for learners. The flipped online classroom enables the instructor to build an interconnected community by working with learners synchronously while also providing rich learning experiences asynchronously. Using educational technology such as Blackboard, Teams, videos, and podcasts, a flipped classroom provides opportunities for students to engage with content and each other asynchronously before attending synchronous sessions.

Ranging from journals in nursing to lab notes in the sciences, reflection is a major component in many approaches to learning that are commonly identified as transformative (e.g.., experiential learning, inquiry-based learning).

At the same time, research suggests that there are many differing, competing definitions of reflection, and the theory and methods for effective reflection are not well understood (Mann et al., 2009). Further, the personal nature of reflections, matched with the power dynamics inherent in university classrooms, can cause students to contribute superficial, inauthentic reflections (Boud & Walker, 1998; Creme, 2005; Jung, 2011; O’Neill, 2002). Because there can be inordinate risk to honest and authentic reflections that challenge norms, or that may not offer the “right” insights, many students will simply construct the narrative that they want or that they expect others want to hear.

In this session, we will unpack the expectations and assumptions in reflective writing as a transformative learning experience with a view toward generating approaches and strategies that encourage a more authentic learning experience.

After a year of online learning, students, faculty, and staff continue to face challenges that have had both positive and negative effects on mental health and well-being. In this workshop, students and faculty will participate in an interactive panel discussion to discuss and develop strategies aimed to alleviate some of the mental health challenges fueled by our current online learning environment. Attendees of the workshop will have 10-15 minutes at the end of the panel discussion to participate in an open conversation and ask questions of the panelists.

Groupwork in the classroom can be challenging in the best of times, particularly in the online classroom. This session will be a scholarly exploration of the concept of Team-Based Learning (TBL) and discuss how we can implement this practice into our online courses. The session will include a literature review on TBL, challenges & benefits, assessment strategies, suggestions on technology for faculty to further explore, and practical strategies faculty can utilize in their teaching practice.

Part of our University’s internationalization strategy is to expand opportunities for students to develop their global competencies. Traditional exchange programs provide a culturally immersive experience, but not all students have the time, money or opportunity. Short-term programs can have substantial impact and benefit. Instructors, students and the Office of Experiential Learning will share lessons learned about how to design the opportunities, what models are possible, the benefits, and how challenges might be overcome.

Utilizing a community responsibility approach, this highly interactive workshop engages participants as key stakeholders in the prevention of sexual and interpersonal violence and harassment within our campus community. The training encourages participants to become activated bystanders, equipping them with practical skills to identify and safely intervene in a range of harmful situations. Implementing proven research-based prevention and response strategies, the workshop activates bystanders at ALL levels (before, during, and after) harmful behaviour has occurred. The training enables participants to more effectively create and sustain violence-free learning and working environments. Join us in fostering a safe and respectful campus community for ALL.

Impostor Phenomenon (IP) is commonly experienced by individuals in academia and is characterized as an intellectual feeling of phoniness that can undermine confidence in oneself. However, many students do not realize how common this phenomenon is. In this workshop, we will share some results from a campus-wide survey we recently conducted on the Impostor Phenomenon in undergraduate and graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, staff, and faculty members. We will also provide practical tips and resources for recognizing and managing feelings of impostorism. This workshop is targeted at GAs/TAs, but faculty and staff are welcome to join the dialogue.

This session will be taught using Blackboard Collaborate with a link to be sent out a day before the workshop starts.

As an instructor you play an essential role in making course material accessible and in creating a climate of equity and inclusion. Many things can be done to address the needs of diverse learners, and in this workshop practical steps will be provided to help you make course content more accessible to a broader base of students. The presenters will contextualize the student experience to highlight the importance of embedding accessibility into your course design. Attendees will learn about such resources as screen readers, a form of assistive technology, and how to make documents more accessible for people who use this support. The workshop will also cover how to provide audio description of visual content and how it helps fill the gap for those who can’t see images. By describing visual elements, students who have low vision are better able to participate in the learning environment and have a richer experience.

This session will offer advice to instructors returning face-to-face in the Winter from a panelist of those who have taught face-to-face over the Fall semester. The discussion will focus on helpful suggestions and best practices for the return to campus, including general logistics, classrooms management, and pedagogical strategies that account for the range of health measures in place. Attendees will have opportunities to ask questions and resources will be shared during and after the session.

Long valued by scholarly teachers and scholars of teaching and learning - and more recently encouraged by our provincial government - high-impact practices (HIPs) are teaching and assessment methods that, when strategically and skillfully used, increase student engagement, deepen learning, and help students make connections between courses - and between their degree programs and the rest of the world. In this session participants will learn about learning communities and collaborative assessment tasks: how, and when they're valuable; conditions that enhance or decrease their educational power; and how they connect to other scholarly teaching practices. By the end, participants will leave with ideas for how to implement these practices in their courses.

Long valued by scholarly teachers and scholars of teaching and learning - and more recently encouraged by our provincial government - high-impact practices (HIPs) are teaching and assessment methods that, when strategically and skillfully used, increase student engagement, deepen learning, and help students make connections between courses - and between their degree programs and the rest of the world. In this session participants will learn about writing-intensive courses and capstone projects: how, and when they're valuable; conditions that enhance or decrease their educational power; and how they connect to other scholarly teaching practices. By the end, participants will leave with ideas for how to implement these practices in their courses.

Long valued by scholarly teachers and scholars of teaching and learning - and more recently encouraged by our provincial government - high-impact practices (HIPs) are teaching and assessment methods that, when strategically and skillfully used, increase student engagement, deepen learning, and help students make connections between courses - and between their degree programs and the rest of the world. In this session participants will learn about internships, community-based learning, service learning, and diversity/global learning: how, and when they're valuable; conditions that enhance or decrease their educational power; and how they connect to other scholarly teaching practices. By the end, participants will leave with ideas for how to implement these practices in their courses.

Long valued by scholarly teachers and scholars of teaching and learning - and more recently encouraged by our provincial government - high-impact practices (HIPs) are teaching and assessment methods that, when strategically and skillfully used, increase student engagement, deepen learning, and help students make connections between courses - and between their degree programs and the rest of the world. In this session participants will learn about first-year experiences and common intellectual experiences: how, and when they're valuable; conditions that enhance or decrease their educational power; and how they connect to other scholarly teaching practices. By the end, participants will leave with ideas for how to implement these practices in their courses.

After two years of remote teaching and learning, instructors and students may encounter challenges when returning to the face-to-face learning environment. In this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to identify and consider the challenges of returning to the face-to-face classroom and discuss ways to mitigate these challenges. Participants will also be able to identify ways Blackboard can be used to help with this transition. This workshop will be in-person and is also available through the Blackboard Learn Training series.

Leddy Library’s course resource system (Leganto) connects your students to millions of library resources and print reserves directly through your Learning Management System (LMS). In this session, participants will learn how to create customized and engaging course resource lists that connect to your course site, how to update and reuse them in future courses, and how library staff can collaborate with faculty to clear copyrights, and digitize materials and help students benefit from easy access to course content without extra cost. We'll also learn how to use enhanced features like shared annotations, student discussion, and usage analytics. It is recommended that you bring a laptop with you to this session.

What is ADHD? How do we support students with ADHD? What is it like to be a university student with ADHD? All of these questions (and more!) will be answered during this workshop. Join The ADHDe Project and The Center for Teaching and Learning for an interactive session geared towards educators who want to learn more about ADHD and neurodiversity. For more information about The ADHDe Project and our goals, please visit our website.

Leddy Library’s course resource system (Leganto) connects your students to millions of library resources and print reserves directly through your Brightspace course. In this session, participants will learn how to create customized and engaging course resource lists that connect to your course site, how to update and reuse them in future courses, and how library staff can collaborate with faculty to clear copyrights, and digitize materials and help students benefit from easy access to course content without extra cost. We'll also learn how to use enhanced features like shared annotations, student discussion, and usage analytics.

It is recommended that you bring a laptop with you to this session.

Have you ever wondered if there might be ways to make grading more manageable, equitable, and meaningful? In this interactive workshop, you will explore the world of un-grading i.e., emerging alternatives to conventional grading schema. Join us for a lively conversation about the challenges and opportunities afforded by practices such as specification (spec) and consultative grading.

Looking for ways to foster student engagement in your classroom (and with your subject matter)? Classroom maps are visual representations of the interactions between you and your students, students with each other, and students and their environment. In this interactive session, we will explore the process of both making classroom maps and using them as formative assessment tools for enhancing engagement among all your students. Participants will leave the session with the ability to evaluate classroom maps (for themselves or others).

Over the past 25+ years, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), in which instructors conduct research on their teaching practice, has becoming increasingly recognized in renewal, tenure and promotion (RTP) processes. In this interactive workshop, we will navigate considerations for the documentation and evaluation of scholarly work in this dynamic and diverse field of study. Even if you are not a SoTL scholar yourself, you may find this workshop useful if you are a member of a review committee, a peer mentor, a faculty leader, or related roles in which you provide insight or guidance on the RTP process.

After two years of sweatpants, Zoom calls, and remote teaching and learning, we found ourselves returning to in-person teaching in a way that is both familiar and unique. For some students and instructors, this was their first in-person University class. Using this pivot back to in-person learning experiences offers a valuable opportunity to rethink some of our approaches to teaching and take advantage of what we’ve learned during this challenging time. In this session, participants will meet a range of faculty members who will share practical strategies (e.g., note taking, classroom agreements, etc.) to enhance the face-to-face teaching experience.

Having trouble getting students to read course material? Or heard the dead silence following the question “what was the reading about”? Do students tell you they don’t need to read the materials in your course? Are they right? In this workshop we will dive into useful (and less than useful) strategies for getting students to read course material and how to troubleshoot when students don’t do their readings. Participants will be invited to think and discuss how they can adapt these strategies to their own disciplinary context.

Zines are an incredibly powerful method of telling stories that can be used across the curriculum as a vehicle for students to communicate their learning, share their ideas, and express themselves. In this workshop, you will learn how to create a one-page foldable mini zine with comic artist Cole Pauls. What you will need: one 8.5x11” sheet of paper, pencil, pens & scissors!

This discussion-based workshop will explore the barriers instructors may encounter while communicating with students from cultures that are different from their own. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss challenges they may have encountered, or may encounter in the future, and review strategies they can utilize to promote respectful and compassionate communication in the classroom. Through comfortable conversation, participants will be able to explore cultural sensitivity by means of self-awareness and reflection on their personal and professional experiences.

This workshop will examine who are our students and why accessibility considerations are so important. Participants will discuss ways in which instructors can create a welcoming environment and strategies that will promote full participation for students with disabilities or who may have diverse support needs. The workshop will consider aspects that can create or reduce barriers such as delivery method (online, in-person, hybrid), assessments, physical environment, and views on disability in post-secondary. Participants will also join in the discussion on how the community can collectively promote accessibility and inclusion for all.

Igniting student curiosity is critical to their engagement and success in higher education. Through curiosity, students may become self-driven in their learning. Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) is a student-centred pedagogy designed to provoke students’ interests through the exploration of their own questions. Through the application of a cyclical and reciprocal formative feedback process among students and students with the teacher, IBL creates opportunities for students to enhance their communication, collaboration, reasoning, and research skills; key skills for critical thinking.

In this 3-hour highly interactive workshop participants will learn about the cycle of IBL and will engage in the first stage of developing and refining inquiry questions through formative feedback.

Bring your curiosity, a device to conduct research, and your favourite writing tools.

Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) is a student-centred pedagogy designed to provoke students’ interests through the exploration of their own questions.

In this workshop participants will experience the full cycle of IBL - refining their inquiry questions, engaging with and critiquing literature to construct new knowledge, providing and receiving formative feedback, and critically self-reflecting on their work. Additionally, participants will learn how to help students navigate the emotional effects that often occur when engaging in high impact pedagogical practices.

Participants who did not attend the previous session are encouraged to review the resources on the CTL website .