New CITL Teaching & Learning Podcast Launches

Teach Talk Listen Learn is a podcast featuring conversations about teaching and learning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Join host Bob Dignan and his guests as they shine a spotlight on the innovative and creative ways faculty and instructors across campus are shaking up the hallowed halls of academia to engage traditional and nontraditional students in all modalities and create transformative learning experiences for them. Listen to the first episode featuring a discussion of undgrading with Billy Huff and Kary Zarate.

CITL is Looking for New Graduate Affiliates

The Instructional Development team at CITL is looking for two new Graduate Affiliates. Grad Affiliates are experienced TAs at Illinois who have a keen interest in the theory and practice of good teaching in higher education. These are hourly positions, intended for those who have primary funding from another source, yet the capability to work a few hours extra per week.

See this page for more information about the Graduate Affiliate position, and for how to apply.

Summer Course Design Series Begins June 14

Lucas Anderson and the CITL Grad Affiliates will be running one of their favorite events of the year: the summer workshop series on course design. Learn about backward course design, and then start designing your course through a series of 8 workshops in which you will consider your audience, craft good learning objectives, choose well-aligned assignments, figure out how to engage your students, and start developing course policies and a syllabus. All while working with a great group of fellow teachers! You don’t have to commit to the whole series, but the more you attend, the more you take away. We are piloting a hybrid approach, where you get to decide whether to attend workshops in person or online via Zoom. The sessions run on Tuesdays and Thursdays from June 14 through July 7. Click here to register for any or all course design sessions.

Overview of Backwards Course Design (Summer Series #1)
Tuesday, June 14
3:30 P.M. - 4:30 P.M., Armory Room 182 and Zoom, registration required
Presenters: Lucas Anderson and Luzmarina Garcia (CITL Grad Affiliate)

Who Is In Your Class? A Student-Centered Approach to Teaching
(Summer Series #2)
Thursday, June 16
3:30 P.M. - 4:30 P.M., Armory Room 182 and Zoom, registration required
Presenters: James Steur and Luzmarina Garcia (CITL Grad Affiliates)

Crafting Learning Objectives
(Summer Series #3)
Tuesday, June 21
3:30 P.M. - 4:30 P.M., Armory Room 182 and Zoom, registration required
Presenters: Lucas Anderson and James Steur (CITL Grad Affiliate)

Choosing Assessments that Align with Your Objectives
(Summer Series #4)
Thursday, June 23
3:30 P.M. - 4:30 P.M., Armory Room 182 and Zoom, registration required
Presenters: Sarah Krueger (CITL Grad Affiliate) and Lucas Anderson

Providing Feedback to Students
(Summer Series #5)
Tuesday, June 28
3:30 P.M. - 4:30 P.M., Armory Room 182 and Zoom, registration required
Presenters: Lucas Anderson and Devyn Shafer (CITL Grad Affiliate)

Designing Active Learning Experiences
(Summer Series #6)
Thursday, June 30
3:30 P.M. - 4:30 P.M., Armory Room 182 and Zoom, registration required
Presenters: Devyn Shafer and Luzmarina Garcia (CITL Grad Affiliates)

Supporting Your Students in Collaborative Learning
(Summer Series #7)
Tuesday, July 5
3:30 P.M. - 4:30 P.M., Armory Room 182 and Zoom, registration required
Presenters: Sarah Kreuger and James Steur (CITL Grad Affiliate)

Course Policies and the Syllabus
(Summer Series #8)
Thursday, July 7
3:30 P.M. - 4:30 P.M., Armory Room 182 and Zoom, registration required
Presenters: Luzmarina Garcia and Sarah Kreuger (CITL Grad Affiliates)

See the CITL Event Calendar for upcoming workshops, and additional training opportunities provided through Training Services (formally FAST3).

Is My Teaching Learner-Centered?
(from Faculty Focus) 

It’s hard to say—we have no definitive measures of learner-centeredness or even mutually agreed upon definitions. And yet, when we talk about it, there’s an assumption that we all understand the reference.

My friend Linda recently gave me a beautifully illustrated children’s book that contains nothing but questions. It reminded me how good questions, like beams of light, cut through the fog and illuminate what was once obscured. And so, to help us further explore and understand what it means to be learner-centered, I’ve generated a set of questions. For the record, these questions were not empirically developed, and they haven’t been validated in any systematic way. However, they do reflect the characteristics regularly associated with learner-centered teaching.  Questions like these can be useful in helping us to confront how we teach. They produce the most insights when asked sincerely and answered honestly. For most of us, there’s a gap between how we aspire to teach and how we actually teach. Given the less-than-objective view we have of ourselves as teachers, it’s easy to conflate aspirations with actualities. 

Interpret Feedback and Interpreting Your Student Reports
(from Stanford University: Evaluation & Research, Student Affairs) 

(Note: This article may be of value as you have just received your end-of-semester ICES Online results).  As you read through your reports, bear in mind that Stanford’s student course feedback forms are designed to direct students’ attention towards their own learning. The responses should reflect how much and how well students learned in your course. The teaching feedback form, however, directs attention to individual section instructors.

Look for patterns: are the distributions consistent and in the ranges you expect? Are there unusual clusters, such as a “spike,” or a very high and very low grouping? A single mean score can be a few decimal points higher or lower simply due to the random sample of students in a particular course from term to term. An increase or decrease of a few decimal points should not necessarily be interpreted as a significant change. For more information, read our discussion paper on the reliability of evaluation statistics (PDF). Finally, it is common to concentrate on outliers or unique responses, but it is more useful to look for patterns and trends than speculate about an isolated score. Let’s begin with general questions.