George Brown Polytechnic is located on the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and other Indigenous peoples who have lived here over time. We are grateful to share this land as treaty people who learn, work and live in the community with each other.
6-part professional learning series
This 6-part professional learning series extends over several weeks during the semester. You have the flexibility to choose which workshops to attend, whether it's just one, all of them, or a selection that aligns with your interests, needs and schedule.
Co-create a Positive Learning Environment
This webinar will cover the principles behind effective classroom management. Effective classroom management is much more than simply administering corrective measures when students misbehave. It has to do with developing and implementing proactive ways to prevent problems from occurring in the first place while at the same time creating a positive learning environment.
Planning Effective & Engaging Lessons
It may sound redundant to say that the key to planning a good lesson is to plan. A good lesson plan can make the job of teaching easier, and it can facilitate a deeper, more rewarding learning experience for you and your students. This module will introduce you to the Learning Cycle and help you to create a lesson plan in which the objectives and activities align with your course outcomes. We will also look at ways you can utilize Brightspace to help make your classroom time one of discussion and exploration rather than one of just content delivery.
Active Learning Online & In-person
Active Learning is an approach to teaching and learning that builds on a learner-centered focus. It can be contrasted to more conventional modes of instruction where teachers do most of the talking (usually in lectures) and students learn passively. This workshop will explore the ways that we can start our teaching by thinking about what our students will be “doing” in class. We will look at developing and incorporating appropriate techniques to foster student interaction in the classroom.
Creating Engaging and Effective Assessments
How can teachers use the principles of authentic assessment to measure students' learning outcomes and competencies? How can teachers develop alternative assessments that are more resistant to generative AI manipulation and plagiarism? In this webinar, we will try to answer these and other questions. We will also have the opportunity to share and discuss our own experiences and challenges with assessment in our courses and disciplines. By the end of this workshop, you will be able to design and develop assessments that are aligned with your learning objectives, authentic to your context, and responsive to the emerging trends and issues of generative AI.
Formative Assessment: Feedback to Feed Forward
Determining your purpose for assessment of your students is key to becoming an effective teacher. However, not all assessment needs to be an assessment “of learning.” This webinar will explore practical and easy-to-use strategies we can deploy to find out how much our students are learning, what they’re learning, and how our teaching can change to improve their learning.
Using Your Course Evaluations to Foster Reflection and Improve Your Teaching
At the end of each semester, we ask students to provide feedback on our effectiveness as teachers in the form of student feedback questionnaires (SFQs). But what can students tell us about our teaching? If we’re open to reflecting on them, the end-of-semester student feedback questionnaires contain valuable information and clues on how we can become better teachers.