Teaching Strategies

The information collected below is for faculty and instructors in the School of Art and Design. If you see an error, broken link, or have a suggestion for improvement please email the Director.

 

Active Learning

  • Active learning strategies involve involving students in doing things and thinking about what they are doing. Approaches that promote active learning focus more on developing students’ skills than on transmitting information and require that students do something—read, discuss, write—that requires higher-order thinking. There are a spectrum of activities to promote active learning, ranging from very simple (e.g., pausing lecture to allow students to clarify and organize their ideas by discussing with neighbors) to more complex (e.g., using case studies as a focal point for decision-making).

Gaming and Gamification in Learning

Lecturing

  • Lecturing is more than being a ‘sage on a stage.’ This resource from Vanderbilt University covers basics of the lecture method, effective visuals, and interactive lectures.

 

Teaching Tools

  • Rubrics
    • The site from DePaul University describes types of rubrics, their use, and evaluation, and provides examples.
  • Exit Tickets and Mid-term Surveys
    • This site from DePaul University explores exit tick​ets and midterm surveys as ways to collect feedback from students that can be used to improve your class sessions and identify what is already working well.
  • Course Workload Estimator
    • Ever wonder how much work you are actually assigning your students? This quick and easy workload estimator from Wake Forest University estimates the amount of time the assignments, readings, discussions, projects, and exams you assign in a class takes a student each week.
  • Who’s In Class Form
    • The Who’s in Class? Form, developed in collaboration with students, faculty, and staff members, helps instructors foster an inclusive learning environment early on and throughout a course by increasing their awareness of the diverse assets that their students bring to the classroom. Instructors administer the anonymous form online in their courses at the start of the semester, and students complete it on a voluntary basis. A link to the article about the form, as well as the structure of the form are included in the link.

Evaluating Teaching

  • This article on the Faculty Focus website introduces a new instrument for capturing students’ perception on understanding, interest, and engagement. The instrument and suggestions on how to use the instrument for faculty formative practices are provided. 

 

Resources

ACUE — Association of College and University Educators

Podcasts

Books

  • What Inclusive Teachers Do, Tracie Marcella Addy (Author), Derek Dube (Author), Khadijah A. Mitchell (Author), Mallory E. SoRelle (Author)

Inclusive instruction is teaching that recognizes and affirms a student’s social identity as an important influence on teaching and learning processes, and that works to create an environment in which students are able to learn from the course, their peers, and the teacher while still being their authentic selves. It works to disrupt traditional notions of who succeeds in the classroom and the systemic inequities inherent in traditional educational practices.―Full-time Academic Professional, Doctorate-granting University, Education

This book uniquely offers the distilled wisdom of scores of instructors across ranks, disciplines and institution types, whose contributions are organized into a thematic framework that progressively introduces the reader to the key dispositions, principles and practices for creating the inclusive classroom environments (in person and online) that will help their students succeed.

Even on good days, teaching is a challenging profession. One way to make the job of college instructors easier, however, is to know more about the ways students learn. How Humans Learn aims to do just that by peering behind the curtain and surveying research in fields as diverse as developmental psychology, anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience for insight into the science behind learning.

The result is a story that ranges from investigations of the evolutionary record to studies of infants discovering the world for the first time, and from a look into how our brains respond to fear to a reckoning with the importance of gestures and language. Joshua R. Eyler identifies five broad themes running through recent scientific inquiry—curiosity, sociality, emotion, authenticity, and failure—devoting a chapter to each and providing practical takeaways for busy teachers. He also interviews and observes college instructors across the country, placing theoretical insight in dialogue with classroom experience.

Trauma-informed initiatives tend to focus on the challenging behaviors of students and ascribe them to circumstances that students are facing outside of school. This approach ignores the reality that inequity itself causes trauma, and that schools often heighten inequities when implementing trauma-informed practices that are not based in educational equity.

In this fresh look at trauma-informed practice, Alex Shevrin Venet urges educators to shift equity to the center as they consider policies and professional development. Using a framework of six principles for equity-centered trauma-informed education, Venet offers practical action steps that teachers and school leaders can take from any starting point, using the resources and influence at their disposal to make shifts in practice, pedagogy, and policy. Overthrowing inequitable systems is a process, not an overnight change. But transformation is possible when educators work together, and teachers can do more than they realize from within their own classrooms.

Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in and by higher education, and rewrites the spaces, times, and economies of disability in higher education to place disability front and center. For too long, argues Jay Timothy Dolmage, disability has been constructed as the antithesis of higher education, often positioned as a distraction, a drain, a problem to be solved. The ethic of higher education encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual, mental, or physical weakness, even as we gesture toward the value of diversity and innovation. Examining everything from campus accommodation processes, to architecture, to popular films about college life, Dolmage argues that disability is central to higher education, and that building more inclusive schools allows better education for all.

In this compelling new tip book you’ll find innovative and surprising ways to keep your personal diversity journey moving and the diversity commitment of your organization. Written to make this information bite-size and accessible, you’ll find quick answers to typical What should I do? questions, like: What if I say the wrong thing, what should I do? What if I am work and someone makes a sexist joke, what should I say?

Purchase copies for everyone at your organization to make sure everyone knows the culturally effective way to approach diversity situations. With this book they can be prepared and practiced at moving diversity forward!

Content Areas

 

Art History