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Today was the final day of the teaching teaching spring class. We’ve been at it since January and have met 14 times. This means folks have devoted some serious time to coming together as a group to talk about their teaching and hopefully learn a few tricks. I started today talking about my design for the course, though of course, Roz designed too, and everyone who participated helped shape the course, either through conversations outside of the class or by their participation.

The design of this course was two fold:

1. To make the best use of the 14 hours we would have with everyone. (Aiming for active, meaningful classes.)
2. To not have any assignments or assessments. The goal here was to save time, since we were already taking so much, but also to help limit anxiety. Everyone starts things with the best of intentions, and several people mentioned that they wouldn’t mind assignments to help further their learning. However, knowing how semesters go, I didn’t want to put added pressure on anyone and I wanted to remove any barriers to attending class. This is because attendance was important for this particular course.
   1. This was because the design of the course required classroom participation. Everyone who teaches has something to say about teaching. I, as the one leading most of these sessions, was guiding the conversation through an instructional design lens. But everyone has something valuable to add and made the class richer. So, it was important to create an environment in which people would come, and limiting out-of-class work was a strategic decision to encourage attendance and participation.

The goals of the course were:

• To help create confidence
  • In the teaching we’re already doing.
  • For publishing in the SoTL; we’re doing really interesting and innovative work, and anyone teaching at ZSR has the ability to publish something in the SoTL. Hopefully this course helped give a framework and vocabulary for how to do so.
• To introduce some theory
  • Enough to be able to know why things the thing you’re already doing work (or don’t).
• To provide some tools
  • New strategies and ideas
  • Sharing information from different courses
• To let people know I’m here to help!
  • Really! If you want to chat about designing your course or class, or just adding in a few active learning exercises, I’d love to talk with you. If you have an idea for a professional development opportunity, I’d do that, too! And if you’ve heard enough from me, you know who is doing what from our course discussions, so you know who else on staff could help.

We also went through the list of topics covered in this course (which you can find in this blog) and discussed a few things people are interested in seeing in the future.

This “class” has been a fun one for me, and really rewarding. Thanks (again!) to everyone who participated and contributed to the program. I think we’ll see the benefits of our work over the next several semesters!