January Teaching Workshops

We invite you to join us for one or more of the January 2022 Workshops on College Teaching.  

All sessions:

• Place: conducted by Zoom
• Time: 9am – 11am  (Tuesday, Jan 18 has an additional afternoon session 2pm - 4pm)
• 1 CEITL Participation Certificate Point for each event

Below is the schedule:

College students tend to use study strategies that are ineffective relative to strategies supported by research found to promote learning. In our own work, we found that most students report using less-effective strategies such as rereading and highlighting. Moreover, it is the relatively less-skilled, low background knowledge students who are especially prone to using these comparatively ineffective strategies. We found that students instructed to use deep processing strategies tend to perform better on exams compared to students who do not use the deeper strategies.In response, we have developed a set of open, online course materials, located with the Student Cognition Toolbox (SCT) that instruct students about effective study strategies. The SCT is situated within an internationally known online instructional platform. Distinctive features of the SCT include practice components that facilitate students’ mastery of each study strategy, and self-regulative components in which students identify and document learning strategies relative to course-related learning goals. The fourth edition of the SCT, based on performance measures and feedback from over 4,500 UNH students, was released this fall and is available on the worldwide web as an open educational resource. The SCT includes modules on retrieval practice, self-explanation, elaborative interrogation, worked examples, spacing, and interleaving.

Learn how you can help your students succeed by providing them with the tools that have been empirically demonstrated to promote learning.  

Presenters: SCT Team at CEITL: Catherine Overson; Victor Benassi

Moderators: SCT Team Colleagues: Lauren Kordonowy; Jennifer Calawa

This workshop will provide instructors with student activities which can be completed during or outside of class that are designed to promote study strategies to improve student learning.  These activities will allow your students to apply the study strategies included in the Student Cognition Toolbox directly to learning your course material.  Each of these activities can be tailored to either face to face or remote instruction and delivered synchronously or asynchronously. This workshop will provide you with several companion activities for the study strategies in the Student Cognition Toolbox that you can readily implement in your course.   

Presenters: Lauren Kordonowy, Science of Learning Project Coordinator, CEITL; Jennifer Calawa, Graduate Assistant and Research Associate, Student Cognition Toolbox, CEITL

In our January workshop, presenters and participants will share their experiences with new strategies or practices they have integrated into their online courses this year, and we’ll get a head start in course planning for Spring 2021. Presenters will share the end-results and student feedback from Fall semester’s cross-disciplinary, collaborative project—Anthroperspectives.  They will reflect on the results of the Fall-semester pilot project to explore best practices for sustaining meaningful connection and community in the (online, hybrid, and in-person) classroom, and they will discuss plans to scale up the smaller pilot project from Fall 2020 for use in their large-enrollment courses this spring. Participants will also be invited to share lessons and challenges from Fall 2020 and workshop plans for Spring 2021.    

Presenters: Sara Withers, Senior Lecturer, Anthropology; Jennifer Purrenhage, Senior Lecturer, Natural Resources and the Environment

In this workshop, we will re-envision the "content vs writing" approach to course design. The writing program director will cover the WI Guidelines, the concepts and goals behind them, and illustrate how they provide an integrative framework for incorporating writing in any course (WI included). A cross-disciplinary faculty panel will then share their approaches and practices for incorporating writing in their courses and also discuss what adjustments or impacts (if any) teaching under COVID 19 conditions had on writing in their courses. After presentations, there will be time for Q&A.

Presenter: Ed Mueller, Director, UNH Writing Program                                          

Faculty Panel: Elizabeth Caldwell, Lecturer, Psychology; Leslie Curren, Senior Lecturer, Biological Sciences; Vanessa Grunkemeyer, Clinical Assistant Professor, Animal Sciences; Stephanie Harzewski, Senior Lecturer, English (Women's Studies)

Mind wandering – a shift away from task at hand (such as attending to a lecture, video, or when reading) toward internally generated thoughts or feelings – can have a deleterious effect on students’ learning and academic performance.  Capturing and sustaining the attention of students in a remote-learning course may be a particular challenge. This workshop will offer seven cognitively supported strategies that you can incorporate into your course that can help keep students on task and promote learning. 

Presenter: Catherine Overson, Associate and Current Interim Director, CEITL

Hear from and interact with a panel of international students taking UNH courses from within the US or their home countries during the pandemic.  In this session, students will discuss the challenges that arise from studying in a distant time zone, navigating a virtual or socially-distanced classroom as a multilingual student, and experiencing cultural differences related to the pandemic. Following the student panel discussion and Q&A, faculty and staff participants will have time to explore problems and solutions in a separate discussion. 

Co-facilitators: Gigi Green, Academic Transition & Integration Advisor, Office of International Students & Scholars; Juan Rojo, Clinical Assistant Professor in Molecular, Cellular and Biomedical Sciences, College of Life Sciences and Agriculture

Student-centered active learning produces significantly greater learning outcomes and student success than teacher-centered pedagogy. How can we engage students with active learning online? In this session, participants will take an active role in the presentation through the use different types of polling, and engage in active learning exercises while learning about active learning and the implementation of active learning sessions in synchronous, online classes.

Presenters: Scott Kimball, Xuan Cai, Fran Keefe, Mike McIntire: Learning Development and Innovation, CEITL

As an instructor, you have likely heard a lot about inclusion, accessibility, and accommodations. There are often great trainings on things like creating accessible materials and effectively teaching students with disabilities. The problem is that sometimes these concepts can seem disconnected or seem like separate initiatives. The reality is that all three are necessary and there is a great deal of overlap. 

The purpose of this presentation is to take a step back and look at the bigger picture to see how these important pieces fit together. In particular, we will talk more about the broader goal of teaching all learners. Within that context, we will explore how you can make connections to the ways in which inclusion, accessibility, and accommodations can help you to meet that important goal as you work to help your students succeed in courses that you teach.

Presenter: Scott Lapinski, Ph.D., M.Ed., Director of Student Accessibility Services

Every learning environment is either a site of reproduction or a site of change. In other words, education can be liberating, or it can maintain the status quo. It can sustain colonization in neo-colonial ways or it can decolonize. Marie Battiste (2017) writes “For every educator, our responsibility is making a commitment to both unlearn and learn to unlearn racism and superiority in all its manifestations, while examining our own social constructions in our judgements and learn new ways of knowing, valuing others, accepting diversity, and making equity and inclusion foundations for all learners.”  This highly interactive training is meant to invite reflection and dialogue on what educators can do to recognize and challenge ongoing colonial legacies in the classroom, course content, and pedagogical practices. Over the course of this training, participants will reflect on the following questions: 

• How do we create inclusive classroom spaces? 
• What does equity look like at Primarily White Institutions (PWIs)? 
• How does one’s pedagogical philosophy either hinder or encourage marginalized students to feel like they belong? 
•  How can we transform the curriculum, teaching, operations, and culture of an historically white university? 

Learning Outcomes: 

Participants will be able to

• create inclusive syllabi. 
• understand the ways current educational practices sustain colonization and oppression. 
• implement strategies for inclusion, equity, and liberation in the classroom. 

Presenters: Caché Owens-Velásquez, Ph.D., Director of the Beauregard Center for Equity, Freedom and Justice, Affiliate Faculty in Education, Social Justice Educator at UNH, and Honor’s College Faculty at UNC Charlotte; Allyson Ryder, MPPM, Director of Trainings and Programs, Office of Community, Equity and Diversity at UNH, Social Justice Educator, and Adjunct Faculty, Granite State College