Now that we are back from Thanksgiving break, finals are looming and our students, hopefully, will already have a study plan in place. This is likely not the case for plenty of our students and we know from our own experiences that prioritizing tasks and following an effective time management strategy is difficult. We can […]
Teaching Squares Returns for Spring 2025
Our office is excited to be partnering with the College of Arts & Science’s Academic Affairs team for a second year to offer the Teaching Squares peer observation opportunity in Spring 2025. Teaching Squares is a non-evaluative, informal peer observation program that has been used for more than two decades at many different types of […]
Classroom Activity: Jigsaw
Jigsaw is a classroom activity that involves students working in small groups. You might want to consider using a Jigsaw in learning situations where you wish to integrate multiple pieces of information into group deliberations, such as getting students to practice playing roles in a new process or understanding multiple factors that can shape a […]
Peer Pedagogy Support: Faculty Learning Communities
For most faculty, peers are the most trusted source of information and support about teaching, but it can be hard to find formal and informal pathways to build and sustain those connections. Peer observation, mentorship, and faculty learning communities are some of the ways institutions have tried to help by providing a formal program with […]
New Office Website
We’re happy to announce that we’ve got a brand-new website! Not only does it look new and swanky (if we do say so ourselves), but we’ve also organized our resources and support services. Our efforts in doing so help us further align with the office’s transition from the Office of Educational Technology to the Office […]
Summer 2024 Teaching to Engage Shoutouts
In partnership with the Graduate School of Arts and Science (GSAS), the Office of Teaching Excellence & Innovation offers a 3-week asynchronous course to graduate students who hope to learn about pedagogy and educational technology. This course is called Teaching to Engage. To date, we’ve had 77 graduates from this offering! We had 13 new […]
Exploring Pedagogy: Authentic Assessment
What is authentic assessment? All assessments inherently do just that: assess. Authentic assessments, however, require students to apply what they’ve learned to a new situation. This is in comparison to a traditional exam that might ask students a multiple choice question. Identifying the correct answer can indicate learning, but doing so does not require students […]
Empowering Students to Succeed – Release Conditions in Brightspace
To facilitate student learning, instructors must consider many factors during their course design process. In addition to discipline specific pedagogy, the modality of the learning environment, the makeup of the student cohort, and their institutional context, instructors must design their learning materials with the student experience in mind. Whether teaching online or in-person, the quality […]
Exploring Pedagogy: Ungrading
What role do grades play in learning? Susan D. Blum’s text Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) encourages instructors to consider the above question. This scholar, in addition to countless others, is a part of a recent movement that seeks to de-emphasize grades attributed to student work in an effort […]
Spring 2024 Teaching to Engage Cohort Shoutouts
A total of 64 current and aspiring instructors have completed the Teaching to Engage Seminar, one of the Office of Teaching Excellence and Innovation’s faculty development offerings, since its first cohort of graduate students participated in the fall of 2022.This three-week intensive course provides a fully asynchronous experience, allowing instructors to discuss research-based pedagogy, experiment […]