Category Archives: Teaching Resources

Black Love as Pedagogical Principle (Event Recap)

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This post was co-written by Contributing Authors Kelly Baker Josephs (York College, CUNY Graduate Center) and Donna Hill (Medgar Evers College).

On February 26, 2021, Kelly Baker Josephs and Donna Hill led a discussion via Zoom about approaching pandemic teaching at CUNY via the frame of Black love. As Black female professors in primarily general education courses at campuses with large populations of Black students, Josephs and Hill have found themselves asking: How can we support our students as “‘whole’ human beings, striving not just for knowledge in books, but knowledge about how to live in the world” (bell hooks, 1994). This has always been a concern at CUNY, but the shift to virtual teaching and the threat of COVID-19 and its aftermath, in all aspects of our lives, has made the need to acknowledge non-academic factors as part of the “classroom” both more difficult and more dire. This hour of intimate conversation focused on the benefits and risks of such openness for Black faculty and Black students. Continue reading →

Making Public Contributions to Knowledge

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Openly exchanging teaching resources is how I learned to teach. I owe a debt of gratitude to colleagues who shared generously: they emailed me their syllabi, explained what a “fishbowl” or “Think-Pair-Share” is, and introduced me to Reacting to the Past. Now after a decade of teaching as an adjunct, I’m certain that one of the best ways to give back to the profession is to share a public contribution to knowledge about teaching.

This is a lesson for our students as well. Ample research shows that students write better when they know they are writing for a large public—whether that’s a publication on a class blog visible only to peers or a professional peer-reviewed journal (see Prof. Danica Savonick’s “Write Out Loud“), a paper delivered at a student or professional conference, a presentation at a local club or community group, a poster at a university symposium, or in any other venue beyond the classroom (see Laken Brooks’ IHE piece on service learning). Writing for an authentic audience increases student engagement in a real-world process where conventions and rules must be adhered to and deadlines must be met. Continue reading →

Course Planning: On Feeling Seen and Heard (Part One)

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While I’m looking toward the new semester, I’m thinking about how I might be the kind of professor who inspires.  My most impactful teachers were the ones who made me feel smart; they stimulated my curiosity, they seemed to take all of my ideas (even the far-out ones) seriously, and they encouraged me to think rigorously.  As I follow their examples, I try to foster communities of learning in which students feel seen and heard.

2020 was/is a nightmare.  And its 2021.  We all know the many reasons why.  Yet, in all this, students are still showing up to college.  They’ve got their reasons; and, hopefully, some of those reasons include their dreams.  Our students will inherit this earth; my ambition is to assist them as they develop the skills they will need to create a future that sees them, hears, them, and empowers them. Continue reading →

What is Ungrading? An Interview on Contracts and Peer Evaluation

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For anyone interested in ungrading, contract grading, and peer-to-peer evaluation, Aaron Blackwelder of “Beyond the Curriculum” has done a great job interviewing Cathy Davidson and Christina Katopodis about their chapter in Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (And What To Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum (West Virginia University Press, 2020). We discuss such things as Carol Dweck’s idea of “growth mindset” and how ungrading focuses on the learning process not just learning as a product. We talk about how, by having a contract based on all assignments in a course, a student can plan in advance. Not every student, we’ve found, wants an A; in a busy semester, they might not be able to do all the workload in a course and be happy to contract to do enough of the work to earn a B. (That kind of mature, careful planning allows the student to be in control, to not simply “flake out” of assignments and look irresponsible when they are simply not able to do the A-level workload during a time when, for example, they are juggling jobs or family responsibilities.) Continue reading →

What is a “Flipped Classroom”?

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In the “flipped classroom” model, currently used by CUNY Professors Donna McGregor and Pamela Mills in the Chemistry department at Lehman College, content explication is moved out of the classroom, which frees the teacher from delivering content via the lecture format. Instead, that content is ported to an at-home format (e.g., video instruction), and thus allows the opportunity to scaffold in-classroom learning through active learning strategies. In a sense, this model converts the real world into the classroom, because that is where the student will have the most engagement with the subject matter; meanwhile the classroom is where the student will engage with their classmates for a deeper exploration of what they have been learning outside the classroom. Continue reading →

What is Participatory Learning or Active Learning?

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The verbs in the names of these two typically interchangeable terms say a lot about them: this kind of learning is meant to engage students, to put them in the driver’s seat of their own education, to make learning active and participation-based, and to make education more equitable. Some of the core elements of participatory learning include community, collaboration, and social justice (Alfie Kohn). Participatory learning descends from genealogies in progressive education that go back to Montessori and Dewey, radical pedagogy (think Paulo Freire‘s dialogic methods and bell hooks‘ emphasis on the intellectual and spiritual growth of students), and a variety of contemporary, engaged pedagogies, including those inflected by social science (such as the work of Carol Dweck on fixed versus growth mindset). Continue reading →

Open TLH Event Recap

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On November 20, 2020, TLH hosted a peer-to-peer workshop, “Open TLH: Sharing Tips for Getting to the Finish Line,” with over 30 attendees. TLH staff kicked off the meeting by introducing themselves as well as sharing their own tips for surviving this grueling semester.

Annemarie Nicols-Grinenko, Director of TLH, talked about running an effective Zoom meeting and her work to try to limit how many meetings she put on colleagues’ calendars. Shelly Eversley, Faculty Co-Director of TLH, shared her strategy for using Zoom’s whiteboard feature with her Baruch students (a strategy we used later in the event, as shown above). Faculty Co-Director Cathy N. Davidson shared a tip she took from Professor Jonathan Sterne to have students use study sheets for final exams (learn more here and here). Assistant Director Khanh Le shared his strategies for co-creating a syllabus with students: he allows students to help create the course syllabus by choosing some of the readings. Finally, Executive Director Christina Katopodis shared her strategy for planning final exams: students help create and refine questions for the final exam. Continue reading →

Resources on the Efficacy of Active Learning

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A recent study reminds us of the importance of active learning. This study reveals that student learning suffered during the switch to remote teaching earlier this year, but that small group activities helped to reduce this loss. See “The Power of Peer Interaction” by Colleen Flaherty, published by Inside Higher Ed on November 3, 2020.

The research on the value of active learning (or the term we prefer: participatory learning) is irrefutable. In May 2014, several scholars from a variety of STEM disciplines published a meta-analysis of 225 separate studies of different ways of teaching and learning. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they argued that active learning improved student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics, from test scores to retention and applicability, or the ability to apply classroom learning to new situations. They write, “students in classes with traditional lecturing were 1.5 times more likely to fail than were students in classes with active learning.” A follow-up meta-study conducted in 2020, showed the same kind of results were even more evident if difference, equality, diversity, and inclusion were taken into account. Another showed equally significant improvements in learning and understanding for international students. One popular account of the PNAS study quipped that if comparative results had been this clear cut in a pharmaceutical study, traditional pedagogy would be taken off the market. Continue reading →

Resources for Teaching Online

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Many educators this Fall 2020 semester, particularly those new to online teaching, are talking about how teaching during this global health crisis feels like teaching for the first time. Even those with many years of experience feel this way. Fortunately, colleagues around the world are sharing their online teaching resources. However, it can be hard to navigate this avalanche of advice and information mid-semester. To help you, we’ve broken up some of these tips and resources into categories below. You can also access more resources at the CUNY Innovative Teaching Academy. Continue reading →