This month, I am pausing my usual research-related content for a post about pedagogy. The semester break between December and January is a relatively chaotic period of course development and preparation so my lab time has been limited and I tend to not find inspirational hardware store trips overly productive during the holiday shopping rush.
While my tenure of teaching may be short, my breadth of teaching is quite wide – I teach in both Arts & Science and Business faculties (weird, I know, but statistics and data analysis are needed by everyone!) and teach in a multitude of modalities (online, in-person, field courses, hyflex). Given the diversity of my courses, my pedagogy must be ADAPTABLE. I’d like to share a few practices I use in my courses that my students rave about…
- Minimum 24-hour test windows. Students who are accustomed to online classes and learning (especially those who have had asynchronous classes) have learned a routine that works for them. For some, this means they have evolved to do their best work from 1:00-4:00am. For my classes (even synchronous), I allow my students to complete their exams sometime in a 24-hour period, allowing students to complete the exam in their most productive window. This allows the students to put forth their best work.
- Visual course calendars. After working with a number of learning management systems, I have come to the conclusion that making my own calendar of course events is superior. I take a Microsoft calendar template and populate it with the “when” (class time), “where” (class location), and “what” (topic/due date/exam). Developing these helps me as much as the students, so it works well to have it posted on the course website to keep everyone accountable and on track.
- Formative assessments. This deserves a post to itself…frankly it deserves a whole book series. The design of my assessments has been an ongoing learning journey that has culminated in an assessment style that integrates the pillars of my teaching philosophy: information synthesis, integration of that information from multiple formats and sources, critical assessment of those sources looking at validity and quality, construction of opinions or arguments, and reflection to recognize and reassess as new information becomes available.