Dr. Sidharth Jaggi, Associate Professor, Department of Information Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong
January 31, 12:00 pm - 1:20 pm, SRN 330W (Busch Campus)
As instructors we often bemoan the fact that many students focus exclusively on grades, sometimes to the detriment of actual learning. I posit that at least part of the problem lies in the market-style reward structure we instantiate when designing assessment structures, with scarce resources (high grades) being offered to students in exchange for high quality work (assignments, exams). Students, being on the whole rational actors (despite some claims to the contrary), then tailor behaviour to capture the marginal grades.
Perhaps a key insight is that one way out of this is to carefully design market-style incentives coupled with appropriate graded learning activities to create virtuous cycles of positive peer-interaction behaviours among students, and create true communities of learning. At least to some extent altruism/community norms can supplant mercenary market incentives, leading to powerful peer-based learning.
In this talk I'll walk through a case-study of a freshman engineering mathematics class I've taught/am teaching in flipped format. I'll give examples of such incentive mechanisms coupled with T&L activities and learning outcomes, and a framework to structure these around. I'll also highlight some remarkable student learning outcomes.
I aim for this to be an informal talk, and hope there will be an interactive discussion with audience members about their own T&L ideas and experiences.

        Eugenia Etkina, Distinguished Professor, Graduate School of Education and Department of Physics and Astronomy
February 14, 10:20 am - 11:40 am, SRN 330W (Busch Campus)
In this workshop the participants will learn how to set learning goals for their courses that can be assessed directly and how to help their students understand those goals and work towards achieving them. We will work through a 3-step process: identifying a goal, selecting activities that help students achieve it, and designing feedback mechanism that will allow the students to self-assess their progress and the instructors to provide quick and meaningful feedback to the students. The feedback mechanism involves that use of rubrics that describe different levels of the achievement of a desired goal. The students use those rubrics when they work on the activities to improve their performance as they go and the instructors use the rubrics for evaluation and feedback.
Resources: Examples of rubrics that we have been using in the last 15 years are at https://sites.google.com/site/scientificabilities/.

        Christine Altinis-Kiraz, Assistant Teaching Professor, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
        Martha Haviland, Professor of Teaching, Director of the Office of Undergraduate Instruction, Division of Life Sciences
        Dr. Charles Ruggieri, Assistant Professor of Professional Practice, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University
        Natalya Voloshchuk, Assistant Teaching Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology
March 6, 10:20 am - 11:40 am, SRN 330W (Busch Campus)
A common belief among higher education instructors is that students should already know how to learn and how to succeed in their university courses. However, students have rarely had explicit instruction on effective methods for self-directed learning, and the definition of and pathways to success vary greatly across courses. In this workshop, we share easily implemented teaching tools from our experiences within the 2018-19 cohort of the ACUE course in Effective Teaching Practices which we found helpful in guiding our students toward becoming self-directed learners and to persist in their studies. Attendees from any field and any teaching role will learn to: (1) clearly communicate course and assignment expectations using checklists and (2) improve students’ abilities to assess their own learning strategies using exam wrappers, homework wrappers, and the Critical Incidence Questionnaire (CIQ). We will address common challenges and misconceptions associated with these techniques, and provide tips for successful implementation within a variety of course contexts.

        Geraldine Cochran , Assistant Professor of Practice, Department of Physics and Astronomy
        John Kerrigan, Instructor, Department of Mathematics
Tuesday April 7, 1:40 - 3:00pm (Busch Campus)
In this workshop, we will describe our efforts to promote equity in introductory mathematics and physics courses for STEM majors. We will also discuss some challenges we faced and the ways in which we assessed our success