CETL Resources: CETL Newsletters & Presentations

Professor Clare Chambers:

• Issue: There are a lot of textbooks, especially for nursing majors, and finding the time and motivation for students to read these can be particularly challenging. Students feel like there is so much material that they do not know what to focus on due to the volume of words in the assignment.

• Solution: It can be overwhelming just to read chapters in a textbook but working with the textbook in class and looking at the text, images, and graphs together with guided notes can make it seem easier and more accessible.

• Helpful Tips
  • Have students in small groups create flow charts and pictures "picmonics" to discuss what they believe are the major points or critical concepts in their reading. Their points should have page numbers so that during the group discussions the entire class can be engaged in learning (engagement through activity) NOTE: Please see examples of students' "picmonics" at the bottom of the page.
    • As the professor, you need to still guide the discussion to hit the true major points of the text to make sure that the class is taught what they need to, but you are giving them the chance to teach their peers.
    • Also, this kind of activity allows for the students to create their own helpful learning habits and acronyms to remember the material.
  • Teach your students the difference between reading a textbook and maneuvering a textbook. Sometimes it is not necessary to read the entire text but to be able to draw out the big picture ideas that the text is trying to get you to see (not dumbing it down but boiling it down).
  • Teaching from a power point on the screen can persuade students not to read the actual document because they believe their professor is going to tell them what they need to know. The text gives the students the details they need to succeed so try not to use a power point for anything but broad topics that they can use as umbrella ideas.

Professor David Gilbert:

• Issue: Students struggle with engaging with the texts that they are required to read for class.

• Solution: Assigning shorter texts to stay engaged and not become overwhelming.

• Helpful Tips
  • Let students know and understand that engagement with a text is a skill that can be learned and does not have to be mastered when you arrive at college.
  • Point out that no one can read for a whole hour and retain all the material. Learn to catch yourself when you are reading has become skimming over the page and not understanding what is going on before getting too much further.
  • Make reading engagements a decent portion of the grade to make sure they practice this skill. Do this by providing guided questions to stay engaged with text and follow the big points.
  • Use Moodle for students to ask factual questions and discussion-based questions to get a conversation going before class begins so there is a direction when it is time for class.
  • Have the students write out a MIS (Most Important Sentence). A MIS is a quote from the text that the students explain why they think it is the most important.
• NOTE: Please see Professor Gilbert's handout at the bottom of the page.

Professor Marc Mullinax:

• Issue: Getting students to read long articles and pieces of works is a struggle because their attention spans are limited.

• Solution: Try not to use textbooks and instead find internet articles, PDF’s, YouTube videos, podcasts, etc.

• Helpful Tips
  • Try to go from an extrinsic read to an intrinsic read. Get students out of the mind set of having to read for class to wanting to read to better understand the world around them.
  • Weekly assignments for students to reflect on what they have read throughout the week.
    • Triangle: List 3 things most important from the readings that they feel are important to remember and might be on a test.
    • Square: What is something that you agree with in one of the texts?
    • Circle: What do you still need to ask about the readings or to still need help to understand?
    • Link something in the student’s past that they have experienced or already know to a reading. Movie, music, action, or pop culture references are the best ways for students to connect ideas.
• NOTE: Please see Professor Mullinax's handout at the bottom of the page.

Professor Nicole Soper-Gorden:

• Issue: What am I making my students read this text?

• Solution: Lower-level classes need the experience of reading texts like this to be able to understand papers in the future. Upper-level classes need to read the content to help them and guide them through main points of knowledge in their field.

• Helpful Tips
  • As a professor, guide the students through what they should take away from the text you are assigning them to read.
  • Show them the relevancy they need to take away from the reading to better themselves in the course.

Professor Kelly Spencer:

• Issue: How do I get students to want to read and learn in my courses?

• Solution: Step away from just traditional texts and assign podcasts, TedTalks, etc. as well.

• Helpful Hints:
  •  The classroom should have mostly discussion time so that students can have time to understand better. If they come to class already with a background of the information being discussed, they will be able to both retain more and get a deeper understanding.
  • Submit a Bring It to the Table assignment which is what points stood out to the student and then have the student relate to their life with a critical thinking question.
  • Relate their text to the Real World where they take a TikTok, meme, or Instagram post that they see that relates to what they have learned in class (Connection=Engagement).

Question Time:

• Extra Tips
  • Ask them questions that assure you they read the text.
    • What did the author miss or not say that takes away from our experience as the reader?
    • What is something you agreed or disagreed with in the text?
  • Be able to distinguish between entry level courses needing terminology and basic foundational elements of the discipline to upper-level courses where they need to connect these elements with a deeper understanding of their discipline.

Overview:

• Help students get through a text with guided notes to make sure they follow and stay engaged as well as understand the major points.
• Help students contextualize and connect topics to their daily lives.
  • Have students bring in examples of their daily lives to connect to class.
• Have students rewrite terminology definitions in their own words for them to remember.
• Have students explain topics to each other so that they can remember it in their own words.

The Workshop: 

The topic of the webinar is focused on direct, formative assessment of student learning, creation of assessment rubrics and how student learning evaluation tools can help faculty document competencies and skills attained by their students. Attendees will learn how to link formative assessment techniques to student learning outcomes as expressed by competency and skill. Attendees will also learn how to create evaluation rubrics to assess equitable student learning.  

The Bio:  

Dr. Jarek Janio has been working in higher education for over 20 years. He founded an Annual Student Learning Outcomes (SLO) Symposium in 2014, and with the arrival of Covid, he started Friday SLO Talks, weekly events that attract faculty and assessment practitioners from all over the country and abroad. Dr. Janio is currently working at Santa Ana College in Southern California as faculty coordinator at the School of Continuing Education. 

The Time:

Oct 20, 2022, 4:00 -4:45 PM  

Please join Phillip Brantley and the CETL today (Thursday, January 19th) as he helps us start off our semester by being proactive regarding trauma. This workshop will provide an opportunity to review what trauma is, to explore how trauma typically presents in college students, and to establish basic trauma-informed teaching strategies within the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework. 

Games used in the event

This is what the Poll Everywhere word cloud looked like from out session.