Passport to Teaching Effectiveness

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5-part professional learning series

This 5-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-creative a Positive Learning Environment

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. This online workshop will explore working with learners to create a classroom environment that fosters student engagement, developing and implementing proactive strategies that build a community of learners and reflecting on our assumptions about student classroom behaviour and how these affect our teaching.

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 online 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. 

Planning Effective & Engaging Lessons

A good lesson plan can make the job of teaching easier, and it can facilitate a deeper, more rewarding learning experience for your students. This online workshop will introduce you to the Learning Cycle and help you to create a lesson plan in which the objectives and activities are closely aligned with your course outcomes. We will also look at ways you can utilize Brightspace to help make your classroom time a time of discussion and exploration rather than one of just content delivery.  Participants will be able to integrate appropriate teaching activities that will help the learning process and create lesson plans that allocate enough time for the practice and application of new knowledge. 

Formative Assessment: Feedback to FeedForward

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 online workshop 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. 

Effective Assessment Strategies

Developing interesting assessments can provide your teaching with greater effectiveness, and it can help to increase your students’ engagement. It can also become an important medium of communication in the classroom and help to create an important dialogue between you and your learners. 

In this online workshop, participants will be able to understand the connection between assessment and student engagement; how to define authentic assessments; and how using rubrics can save time and enhance the quality of your feedback. Participants will also be able to understand the importance of alignment between your assessments and your course's learning outcomes.