Category: Tips on Teaching

by Yang (Emily) Li, Graduate Assistant, Reinert Center Transformational learning is a reflection process to rethink life changes and events and gain new meaning out of our classroom, community and society (Alexander, 2007). For teachers who are designing courses for higher educational institutions, one transformational learning strategy is including multicultural reading material in classroom discussion.… Continue reading Using This Summer to Transform Your Teaching and Learning

by James Fortney, Instructional Developer, Reinert Center From March to November 2017, the freestanding blog “Conditionally Accepted” will feature a series of weekly posts about sexual violence and higher education. Published first on the Inside Higher Ed website, authors are invited to contribute intersectional perspectives and personal accounts of sexual violence across institutional contexts (e.g.,… Continue reading Teaching on/and Sexual Violence

by Gina Merys, Associate Director, Reinert Center Using rubrics to aid in the assessment of written assignments can be an inclusive teaching practice, when students have access to that rubric before beginning a project. Including students in the creation of that rubric can increase students’ agency in their learning as well as enhance the rubric’s… Continue reading Resource Guide: Two Paths to Student-Created Rubrics

by James Fortney, Instructional Developer, Reinert Center Feeling a sense of agency, or “the intention and capability to take action with respect to one’s learning,” can be an empowering experience for students (Clarke et al., 2016, p. 30). However, many instructors find it challenging to design courses that give students multiple opportunities to act in… Continue reading Giving Students Agency: A Resource Guide

by Chris Grabau, Instructional Developer, Reinert Center Understanding college student’s internal motivations toward learning can provide useful insight when both designing and teaching a course.  While there are a growing number of tools designed to investigate student motivations towards learning, the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) offers a social cognitive perspective to investigate metacognitive… Continue reading Discovering Student Metacognitive Learning Strategies Using the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire

by Mitch Lorenz, Graduate Assistant, Reinert Center When thinking about asking students for feedback there are a number of factors to consider. Your motivation as the instructor, the students’ motivation to provide authentic feedback, as well as your intentions for how to use the feedback all play a role in how the feedback might look,… Continue reading Collecting and Reacting to Student Feedback

by Elizabeth Gockel-Blessing, Associate Dean for Student and Academic Affairs, Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Laboratory Science PROLOGUE: Setting the Stage For over 20 years, I taught a medical laboratory science course that contained an interactive case study unit.  The cases consist of a short introduction of the patient under investigation, the patient’s symptoms, and initial laboratory… Continue reading A Creative Teaching Tip that Doesn’t Involve Reinventing the Wheel

by James Fortney, Instructional Developer, Reinert Center In August 2016, the Reinert Center co-sponsored a daylong workshop focused on sustainability in curriculum development and individual course design. A goal of the workshop was to find ways to empower students with the tools and knowledge they need to be leaders in a future characterized by rapid… Continue reading Sustainability Pedagogy

Two new resource guides have been posted to the Reinert Center website: Creating a Plan for Alternative Assessment of Teaching [LINK] Understanding Student Ratings in Teaching [LINK] If you want to talk with someone about either of these topics in your own classes, you may request a teaching consultation by completing this form [LINK]. If you have ideas for resource… Continue reading New Resource Guides