Instructor perspectives on undergraduate class size in Canada Invitation to participate (Français ŕ suivre) I am inviting instructors at Canadian universities to participate in a short research survey about how instructors define undergraduate class size. The purpose of this study is to better understand how instructors across Canada think about categories such as small, medium, […]
Category: Academia
Guiding the planning, design and use of active learning classrooms
By: Gavan Watson & Natasha Kenny Post 1 of 2 Dr. Natasha Kenny (University of Calgary) and I have collaborated on two posts focused on the planning, design and use of active learning classrooms. The development of these kind of learning spaces are a relatively recent development in Canadian Higher Education, with a majority of […]
When is a White Trillium not?
A post shared by Gavan Watson (@gavanwatson) on Apr 30, 2017 at 5:56am PDT Here’s a bit of a natural history mystery that I found yesterday: this green flower in a bed of White Trilliums (Trillium grandiflorum); something that I had never seen before. The few initial web references I found suggested this is caused […]
Synchronous, collaborative curriculum mapping with Google Sheets
Prideax’s (2003) description of three levels (the planned, the delivered, and the experienced)Â for examining curriculum is helpful for thinking about what kind of questions get asked about curricula. With a focus on the delivered curriculum, faculty members engage in curriculum mapping to see, over the course of a program, what gets taught, when it gets […]
Considerations for Podcasting as a Higher Education Assignment
This morning, I’m doing a quick scoping of the teaching and learning resources related to using Podcasts as an assessment tool in the Higher Education classroom. The intended outcome of this environmental scan is to see what the evidence suggests as best practice for designing and facilitating Podcasting assignments. My sources are varied, from Blog […]
How we scaffolded critical reflection
We ((And by we, I mean my co-instructor Dr. Erin Aspenlieder and I.)) made a significant change in the way we “taught” critical reflection in UNIV*6800: University Teaching, Theory and Practice in the fall of 2013. To measure the success of our change, we asked students rate their confidence in their ability to reflect critically on […]
Greet, Get, Give, Gauge & Go: a Framework for Student Consultations
As an instructor, it might be tempting to measure the success of student visits by how quickly you can provide a correct answer—but excelling at this particular metric might come at the cost of a student building their own ability to answer similar questions in the future. The 5G framework ((The 5G framework draws its […]
Thinking about York University’s religious accommodation case from the perspective of course design and delivery
New this semester, alumni of UNIV*6800, University Teaching, Theory and Practice are reconvening to form a community of practice (CoP). It is exciting to see former students again while also having the opportunity to discuss issues related to teaching and learning in higher education.
“Teaching” Critical Reflection
Thinking about critical reflection has been “front of mind” over the past few days, primarily because Natasha and I are presenting a workshop at this year’s Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) annual conference focused on just that. More specifically, the workshop focuses on a “disorienting dilemma” we’ve faced as course instructors for UNIV*6800, […]
Five things a TA should do in their first lab, seminar, tutorial or class
1. Whatever approach you’re going to take in your classroom, model it. If you plan to use discussions, case studies or experimental work, model some component of it on your first day. You want students to understand that these approaches are important to their success in the course while also letting them know that they’ll […]