Active Learning with PowerPoint

Have you ever used PowerPoint in the classroom and been less than impressed with it as a teaching and learning tool? You're not alone. This workshop considers the problems instructors commonly face when teaching with PowerPoint and suggests methods to improve student learning with it. Active learning and active lecturing strategies are outlined, as are the use handouts, study guides, and in-class games.

Designing Smart Lectures

When done well, lectures can motivate students, spur their critical thinking, and help them draw complex connections between ideas. Too often, however, lectures fall short, becoming one-way information transfers from instructor to inattentive students. This workshop provides suggestions to help you avoid common problems while offering practical advice as you redesign your lectures to engage students actively and creatively.

Savvy Web Searching: Helping Students Research Electronically

Online research is a common requirement in many university courses. Students, however, often lack the ability to find and effectively analyze material on the Web. The goal of this workshop is to help you create savvy Web surfers who are able to find high quality information sources and evaluate them critically in terms of purpose, authority, accuracy, timeliness, and coverage.

Scenes From a Classroom: Making Active Learning Work

Active learning strategies are becoming more widely used in college classrooms as instructors discover their many benefits. The purpose of this workshop is to offer guidance to instructors as they plan to implement active learning in their courses. Instructors new to active learning will find a comprehensive list of strategies to choose from followed by recommendations to help get them started, while those currently using active learning can extend their practice by considering new contexts and applications.

Scenes From a Classroom: Managing Conflict

Small problems poorly handled can distract you from teaching well and cast a pall on the semester. And while many are ready to complain about situations, we don't often engage in constructive talk about how to manage and minimize troublesome issues when they arise. The goal of this workshop is to help you think through challenging situations you may encounter in the classroom and to see and hear a variety of teaching consultants address the situations.

Syllabus Development

Your syllabus is one of the most important documents you create for your class, serving as an agreement between you and your students. It conveys a first and lasting impression of you and the course you've designed while it shares your beliefs about teaching. This tutorial is designed to help you improve your syllabus by offering suggestions and examples for class expectations, course goals, grading, and more.

The Academic Job Search: Making Effective Impressions

Searching for jobs in academia can be a frustrating or rewarding experience depending on how you approach it. This tutorial is designed to help by presenting a process that has proven successful to academic job searchers across the disciplines. Support for developing dossier materials is provided as are interview tips and techniques.

Writing Your Teaching Philosophy: A Step-by-Step Approach

A teaching philosophy is a self-reflective statement of your beliefs about teaching and learning. Starting a teaching philosophy can be a difficult task, but it need not be. The steps outlined in this tutorial provide a structure for taking you through the drafting process step by step.

Cooperative Quizzes: Learning through Group Assessments

You've probably heard of cooperative learning, but what is cooperative quizzing? What does it look like? To work well, group quizzing takes some forethought, and this tutorial is designed to help you think through some of the issues that make cooperative quizzing such an effective tool. Watch a group quiz in action and learn more about the important considerations you need to make before implementing this powerful strategy.

Internationalizing by Design

The major outcome for this workshop is to help you integrate global perspectives into either a new undergraduate class that you intend to teach or one that you have already taught.