Faculty Focus Live

What better way to empower students to make a change in the world than working on their own campus?  In this episode, Beth Choate explains how campuses can motivate students and instructors to make positive changes in their future homes, future jobs, and all of the places that they'll go.
 
Choate explains how the students and teachers at Allegheny College have conducted solar panel installation at local churches, used Geographic Information Systems to map out the city and figure out what residents are at greatest risk for flooding, grown their own food in a 3,000 sq. foot garden, and increased the refill filtered water stations from two to 28 stations. She says there are numerous ways to prepare both instructors and students to help facilitate environmental sustainable goals and help your campus go green.

"If everyone isn't at the  table, then we can't fully understand the depth and breadth of these environmental issues," Choate says.

This week's episode is sponsored by the Teaching Professor Conference. 

How do you know that student learning is actually happening? Usually through assessment, right? But how can you assess students without just a quiz or paper? How can you empower them and motivate them to learn and want to learn, so that assessment becomes something that is both powerful for you as an instructor and to the student as a learner?

In today’s episode we’ll talk about authentic assignments and authentic assessment, specific active learning assessment strategies that you can use in your class, and how to use Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to help mold your assessments.

Recommended Resources:

• Magna Online Seminar: Using Authentic Assessment to Assess Student Learning
• Magna Online Seminar: On-the-fly Assessment Strategies for the Active Learning Classroom
• Magna Online Seminar: Using UDL to Create Effective Educational Assessments
• Magna Online Seminar: Assessment Strategies for Mastery Learning in Large Session Classes
• Magna Online Seminar: Incorporating 360-Degree Assessment into Your Classroom

This week's episode is sponsored by the Teaching Professor Conference. Join us in-person in Atlanta from June 3-5 to pursue your passion for teaching.  

The syllabus…it’s where everything lives. From due dates to policies to your office hours to who you are as a teacher, it’s all-encompassing. And with that, the syllabus can get pretty lengthy, it may sometimes get overwhelming for both you and your students, and maybe even boring for students to read. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In today’s episode we’re going to talk about:

1. How you can add creative flair to your syllabus and specific tools you can use to do this
2. How you can get your students to actually read your syllabus
3. What to look for when you’re creating an inclusive and antiracist syllabus

Recommended resources:

• 20-Minute Mentor: How Can I Create an Engaging, Student-focused Syllabus?
• 20-Minute Mentor: How Can I Write a Course Syllabus That's Worth Reading?
• 20-Minute Mentor: How Can I Build an Antiracist Syllabus?
• 20-Minute Mentor: How Can I Create an Effective Syllabus for My Online Class?
• Magna Online Seminar: Beyond Pedagogy: Infusing Equity into Your Syllabus, Assignments, and Course Content
• Notion: https://www.notion.so/ 
• Coda: https://coda.io/
• Craft: https://www.craft.do/

As we consider online learning moving forward, we must continue to explore and implement best practices for teaching online. In this episode, we’ll do just that. We’ll explore online learning best practices and specific ideas that you can implement into your own courses.

From incorporating FAQs into your course design to implementing a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Challenges (SWOC) analysis to checklists and a three-week feedback form that uses student-centered questions, there are numerous opportunities and ideas that you can incorporate into your own online courses. Join these instructors as they provide clear, practical, and proven online learning best practices.

Recommended Resources:

• 20-Minute Mentor: What Are Best Practices for Online Pedagogy?
•  20-Minute Mentor: How Can I Incorporate Best Practices into My Online Teaching?
•  Magna Online Seminar: Learning from Pandemic Pedagogy: Best Practices for a Quick and Inclusive Transition to Online Teaching

This episode is sponsored by The Wellbeing Elixir, a course about understanding and managing your physical, emotional, mental, social, and spiritual wellbeing so you can experience more joy and less stress. 

Tanya Boucicaut always dedicates a few minutes of class to integrate mindfulness (both online and in-person). From positioning herself from a side view during deep breathing exercises so students can see her, to implementing body scans and mindfulness prompts that put students in different sceneries, her classes have always wedded mindfulness.

"Students are moving so fast. They have so much to do, and mindfulness gives students a chance to be present in the moment, to breathe in the moment, to take care of themselves in the moment," says Boucicaut . "Mindfulness helps give students grace to say, 'I can't do it all right now.'"

Additionally, Boucicaut recently  implemented an empathy experiment in her class, where she asked students to think about the impact of the pandemic on someone outside of themselves (professor, family member, food service worker, hospital worker, etc.).

"When we're thinking about wellness it is so important to think about ourselves and to be embodied in our experiences, but also to realize we don't live in this world by ourselves," says Boucicaut. "There are other people going through things themselves, and that same grace you extend for yourself, you also want to extend it to others.

Additionally in this episode, she covers a post-it project, a pilot program that helped initiate mindfulness on her campus and pushed wellness to the forefront, and her new YouTube channel dedicated to helping students navigate this time as a learner.

Recommended resources:

• Mindfulness is a superpower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6T02g5hnT4 
• Booce Teaches - YouTube
• Magna Course: The Wellbeing Elixir 

In this episode, you’ll join Seena and Stuart Haines on their journey of meditative practices, how you can illuminate the power of mindfulness in your own lives, and how you can use gratitude as a therapeutic superpower. You’ll learn about becoming more aware of your thoughts and emotions, where you can start to reframe them and take a pause of awareness. Additionally, this husband-and-wife duo will cover the importance of taking micro-moments throughout the day to calm your mind and how yoga can help calm us, center us, and ground us. 

They'll explore the setbacks and failures we all encounter, and how being grateful for these difficult moments can take your mindset in a different direction. Rather than dwelling on our setbacks, we can appreciate them for the journey they take us on and for the discovery they provide. They also explain the concept of the “heartbeat of our why” and how exploring your belief system and mindset matters—especially when paying attention to the environment around us.

“The environment matters—be on the lookout for the things that might make us step backwards instead of forward,” said Stuart. “There’s a wealth of resources and data that can help guide us and set our course in the right direction.”

Seena and Stuart are also the presenters in Magna’s brand-new Wellbeing Elixir course. They hope this course provides individuals an opportunity for self-reflection, provides motivation and time to think about core values, highlights steps to take deliberate action towards the things that mean most to you, emphasizes the importance of a community of shared learning and the power of connection, and encourages you to try something new.

Recommended resources:

• Magna Course: The Wellbeing Elixir 
• Yoga Apothecary with Seena Haines

There’s a trickle effect with happiness. When teachers are mindful and intentional about practicing happiness and spreading joy, students also reap the benefits. In this episode, Sara Rutledge talks about several things that herself, the instructors on campus, and her overall university, Mount Aloysius College, are doing to foster positivity despite the hurdles campuses worldwide are facing. From walk and talk office hours, a hot chocolate bar, tea with the teacher, customized camping chairs and class outside, to virtual study nights, volunteering with the students, and alumni panels, there are numerous ideas to inspire faculty and students, and bring a sense of community to your campus again.

This week’s episode is sponsored by The Wellbeing Elixir, Magna’s brand-new wellness course for educators, where experts will help guide you through wellbeing and resilience. 

• Dr. Sara Rutledge serves as the coordinator of the Newer Faculty Mentoring Program and as Chair-Elect for Faculty Assembly. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Pennsylvania Association of Colleges and Teacher Educators, the Editorial Review Board for the Kappa Delta Pi Record, the Journal of the International Honor Society in Education, and on the Technology and Teacher Education Committee of the Association of Teacher Educators.  

As we enter the new year, your list of goals and intentions for the year may be a well-crafted and well-thought-out plan. And perhaps on that list of yours are ways to be more mindful and effective when teaching online, specifically if you’re using Zoom or other alternatives. If that’s the case, stay tuned, because this episode will cover mindful techniques you can implement into your online classroom. We’ll even dive into specific Zoom features and other techniques that can help increase student interactivity, from polling to the annotate function to the Wheel of Names.

Recommended resources:

• Implementing Mindful Online Teaching Using Zoom
  • Wheel of Names
• An Online Educator's Guide to Using Zoom Features to Enhance Student Interactivity 
• Engaging and Interacting with Students in Online Courses
• Teaching Professor article (paid subscription): Simple Tips for Engaging Students in Zoom
• Faculty Focus article: Simulating the Classroom Experience with Zoom

This week's episode is sponsored by the Teaching Professor. 

"We can choose to look at the current teaching situation as a risky situation where anything could go wrong, or we can look at it as an opportunity to have courage and take risks and try new things. The more you dare to be creative, the better you become," Carine Chisu says.

In this episode, Carine Chisu and Christine Boyko-Head explain how entrepreneurial thinking can be applied to learning and teaching when assessing the risks educators and learners are taking–especially now with new codes of virtual learning and teaching. Additionally, they dive into reciprocal teaching, where learning and teaching has become more of a continuum because teachers are learning and learners are teaching.  "I can teach students something, but they can certainly teach me. Let's share in the knowledge and the places we're at," Boyko-Head says.

Lastly, they explain how turning an activity, no matter how small or how big, into a ritualized activity is by 3D-briefing it. They dive into the 3D-briefing process where you ask students: "What?" "So what?" "Now what?"  Where the "What?" is an identification question. The "So what?" is part of the analysis and interpretation. And the "Now what?" is the evaluation and creation stage. Fundamentally, this process helps students understand what they are doing and why they are doing something. "It's more like a bridge that gives you an opportunity to transform from one state to another state," Chisu says.

Recommended resources:

• Building an Entrepreneurial Thinking Environment in Education: https://www.facultyfocus.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Entrepreneurial-thinking-in-HE-white-paper-012021-C_Chisu.pdf 
• Reciprocal Learning and Learners: (Re)framing the Post-Secondary Learning Experience to Meet a Complex Future: https://www.facultyfocus.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/TD.11.2._Boyko-Head_Reciprocal_Learning.pdf
• Designing Empowered Curriculum: Thinking Preferences, 3D-Briefing and the Adult Learner: https://www.facultyfocus.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Christine-Boyko-Head-IJTDC-612-2018-235-244.pdf 
• No Such Thing as Just a Game: A Briefing on 3D-Briefing: https://www.facultyfocus.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/No-such-thing-as-just-a-game_3D-Briefing-IJTDC.pdf

Almost everyone loves a good game. In this episode, we'll go through specific gamification strategies and play-based activities you can implement into your own class. From creating badges and leaderboards to playing word associations or the "sometimes, always, never" game, you'll have a toolbox full of ideas you can bring back to your courses.

Additionally, we'll discuss how gamification, when integrated correctly, can increase student persistence and student engagement. Although gamification can be an adventure of fails and successes, it's important to have fun and embrace the power of failure.

Recommended resources:

• What 5 Play-based Activities Can I Use to Create an Active, Learning-centered Class?
• How Do I Design Effective Combinations of Gamified Elements to Encourage Deeper Learning?
• How Can I Use Simple Gamification Strategies to Engage My Students?
• What is Gamification and How Can it Promote a Growth Mindset?