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Teaching Events

Teaching Commons Conference 2024

Join us for the Teaching Commons Conference 2024 – Cultivating Connection. Friday, May 10.

Registration and more information

TEACH Conference 2022 Concurrent Sessions

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Concurrent Sessions 9:00 - 10:15

SEALs: Sustainable Engaged Accountable Learners

9:00-10:15 – Workshop – Paul Brest East

Michael Gisondi & Leo Aliaga – Emergency Medicine

The development of lifelong learners is among the most challenging goals for educators. Two important scholarly works can inform our understanding and approach to lifelong learning and curriculum design: L. Dee Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning and Cutrer et al.’s Master Adaptive Learner conceptual model of skill acquisition. By applying these guides to teaching and learning, three important characteristics of lifelong learners are evident: sustainability, engagement, and accountability. These are abbreviated “SEALs,” for sustainable engaged accountable learners. This workshop will challenge small groups of participants to work in teams to design learning activities aimed at fostering SEALs in their respective disciplines. Bring your laptops... you'll need them!

The Life Model: A Sustainable Vision for Agency, Belonging, and Wellbeing in Our Classrooms

9:00-10:15 – Discussion/Demo/Collaboration – Jacobson Sorensen Hall 123

Amy Larimer, Drew Krafcik, & John Barton – Architectural Design Program, Civil and Environmental Engineering

What does it mean to prepare students to live a meaningful life? Can our classrooms promote agency, belonging, and wellbeing? As educators and administrators, what are our roles and responsibilities? For the past 7 years, Stanford Architecture has been responding to these questions to create the healthiest architecture program in the country and the healthiest academic program on campus. This session will explore how The Life Model© pedagogy serves to un-do the toxic, performative classroom culture that exists in our institutions and begin to heal previous educational trauma through a new path forward. Participants will learn tangible skills to cultivate genuine belonging, foster inclusion and anti-racism, and promote mental health and wellbeing while maintaining academic rigor.

Promoting Love of Learning

9:00-10:15 – Workshop – Jacobson Sorensen Hall 138

Nicholas Santascoy – Center for Teaching and Learning

Have you ever been concerned about students who seem worried only about their grades? Would you like your students to show more interest in the content of your course? Sometimes students are not clear enough on the course expectations to feel confident. And they may not focus enough on the benefits of the learning to feel the intense curiosity you wish for them. In this workshop, you will briefly learn about research and strategies to promote your students’ love of learning. Then you will develop a detailed plan for applying your chosen strategy in your course.

The Art of Leading Discussions for Sustainable Learning

9:00-10:15 – Workshop – Jacobson Sorensen Hall 142

Andrea Taylor – Graduate School of Business, Teaching and Learning Hub

Have you wanted to up your game in facilitating inclusive discussions to increase student engagement with your course learnings? Though facilitating discussions can feel more challenging than teaching through traditional lectures, educational research has shown that active learning increases student success. In this workshop, we’ll discuss typical challenges around teaching with classroom discussions. We’ll face those challenges by exploring facilitation frameworks and begin cultivating the agility needed to manage content while soliciting diverse interaction. Participants will have an opportunity to begin working on a plan for approaching a discussion they may hold in their own class.

Concurrent Sessions 1:55 - 2:40

Mapping the Food System: Farm-to-table in your Hometown

1:55-2:40 – Discussion/Demonstration – Paul Brest West

Carlos Seligo – Center for Teaching and Learning & HumBio

Christopher Gardner asks his students to map the food system of their hometown for Healthy/Sustainable Food Systems. Since 2014, when his TA Jennifer Hartle and ATS Carlos Seligo came up with a way for the students to use Google to make and share maps and showcase these with Google Earth Pro in-class presentations, they have made over 100 maps. In the process students discover, not only the system that provides their food but also how class and race, food banks and markets, restaurants and farms are separated and spaced in different rural and urban environments across the planet. Seligo will demo a few maps and teach you how to easily implement a mapping assignment for your own students!

Dynamic Assessments in Chemistry — A Different Challenge for Every Student Every Time

1:55-2:40 – Discussion/Demonstration – Paul Brest West

Nick DeMello – Chemistry & Stanford Online High School

A good test is never used more than once. We challenge students by asking for an answer, but if we ask the same question twice we risk making the answer seem to be the purpose of the question. We risk training students to value remembered answers more than developing the critical thinking which discovers them. So we invest creativity and effort to build new challenges each semester. A more sustainable solution is to replace questions with small programs that adapt each time they are run. Then linking transforming questions not as a static test, but as a dynamic challenge that produces an equivalent, credible, unique assessment—a different test for every student, every time. We will present some simple strategies and our own applications of dynamic chemistry assessments using Canvas quizzes. Then invite discussion to hear other perspectives on the value of what we call bumblebee assessments.

Exploring Positionality – Building Better Community

1:55-2:40 – Workshop/Collaboration – Paul Brest East

Paitra Houts – Haas Center for Public Service

Neida Ahmad – Graduate School of Education; Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE)

Jennifer Cohen – Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education

Many of our students encounter difficulties understanding the inherent complexities of the new environments and relationships they find themselves in, including how their various identities and positionalities, including being a Stanford student, influence how they engage in these new experiences. Understanding themselves and their new surroundings through this lens can enrich the learning experience. In this workshop, you will learn and provide feedback on new tools designed to help students, staff, and faculty explore their positionalities. Positionality refers to how one’s own relationship to power in different contexts influences, and potentially biases, our understanding of and outlook on the world.

Integrating Research and Communication Learning Outcomes into the Classroom and the Curriculum

1:55-2:40 – Workshop/Demonstration – Jacobson Sorensen Hall 123

Rajan Kumar – Material Science and Engineering & Center for Teaching and Learning

Undergraduate capstone, design, field, and laboratory courses emphasize hands-on learning as a way for students to develop critical skills that extend beyond the classroom. But what happens when these courses can’t be offered in person? How do instructors continue to help students pose technical questions, design experiments, analyze data, and communicate their knowledge? In this session, we will explore how the pandemic drove changes in the Materials Science and Engineering undergraduate curriculum and how research and communication learning objectives can be integrated into both in-person and remote classrooms.

Honor Code Best Practices

1:55-2:40 – Workshop – Jacobson Sorensen Hall 138

Cat Sanchez & Alyce Haley – Office of Community Standards

This session will begin with a brief introduction to the Honor Code (HC) and the student conduct process on campus. Afterward, the group will work through a few scenarios on effectively communicating expectations around unpermitted aid and assignment/exam rules. Participants are asked to bring a syllabus from their class to use as an example during small group breakouts. The session will end with time for a general Q&A.

Learning Experiences that Keep Students Coming Back

1:55-2:40 – Discussion – Jacobson Sorensen Hall 142

Emily Schell – Developmental and Psychological Sciences

Mae Bethel – Graduate School of Education, Office of Innovation & Technology

In this new world, Zoom has provided affordances to support students who otherwise may not have been able to engage in the course material (due to illness or extenuating circumstances). However, have you noticed that your students are not coming back to in-person classrooms? In this roundtable discussion, we will share strategies on holistic and choice-based approaches to learning that will get your students excited to come back to our in-person learning communities after a tumultuous two years. We hope that you can join us to discuss creative approaches to encourage attendance and engagement.  

Concurrent Sessions 2:50 - 3:35

No Tidbit Left Behind

2:50-3:35 – Discussion – Paul Brest West

Josh Weiss & Mae Bethel – Graduate School of Education, Office of Innovation & Technology

We have gained so much knowledge these past two years. But have you struggled to disseminate what’s important – and, if you do, where do you put it? The problem is how to find, retain, and distribute the information in a way that is useful for your faculty and staff. At the GSE, we have found a possible three-part solution. Through our Teaching Resources website, with a chatbot, and Canvas pages, we have been able to archive and centralize content for the community to access on-demand, and to compound this wisdom over time for various audiences and needs.

Collaborative Inking: Engaging Groups with iPads

2:50-3:35 – Workshop – Paul Brest West

Kristin Arguedas & Kenji Ikemoto – Center for Teaching and Learning, Academic Technology Solutions Lab

Do you use an iPad and Apple Pencil for digital inking? Are you looking for new ways to engage your students and your team? Join the Center for Teaching and Learning’s ATSL team as we explore collaborative inking. Learn about available whiteboarding apps and the iPads for Teaching and Learning Program while participating in an interactive workshop experience. Sign up early to reserve an iPad and Apple Pencil or bring your own!

Close Reading the Classroom: Reflective Observation for Educational Insight

2:50-3:35 – Workshop – Paul Brest East

Cassandra Volpe Horii – Center for Teaching and Learning

Lee Shulman, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education, Emeritus, wrote: “Classroom teaching…is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced, and frightening activity that our species has ever invented.” Learning to perceive and interpret classrooms by practicing a “close reading” approach outside of class time can help make teaching less frightening and more fulfilling–complexity, nuance, and all. We’ll use contemporary photographs of higher education classrooms as the subject of reflective observation. Through guided looking and discussion, you’ll expand your perspectives on teacher/student roles and engagement, emotion in the classroom, and space and technologies.

Fundamental Lessons from the Pandemic: Transforming Teaching and Learning at Stanford

2:50-3:35 – Discussion – Jacobson Sorensen 123

Lisa J. Anderson & Cindy Berhtram – Stanford Digital Education

A forthcoming report out of Stanford Digital Education, titled “Opportunities for Educational Progress from Stanford’s COVID-19 Experience,” seeks to highlight the power of the Stanford community in adapting to the crises in education imposed by the pandemic. This interim report will explore t whether and how higher education institutions can rethink traditional teaching pedagogies and embrace new and sustainable digital methodologies in order to achieve more meaningful, engaged, and inclusive learning. In this session, co-authors Lisa Anderson and Cindy Berhtram invite participants to contribute to the report by sharing how their teaching and learning practices shifted during emergency pandemic teaching.

Psychological Safety in the Classroom

2:50-3:35 – Workshop – Jacobson Sorensen 138

Christina Wodtke – Computer Science

Amy Edmondson’s work has shown the value of Psychological Safety at work. How can we apply those lessons to classrooms so our students are comfortable enough to ask questions, take chances in the work and even… disagree with us? Join us if these are the answers you are seeking!

Is Contract Grading Sustainable at Stanford?

2:50-3:35 – Workshop – Jacobson Sorensen 142

Lauri Dietz – Introductory Seminars

Kathleen Tarr – Program in Writing & Rhetoric

Have you tried contract grading? Have you not tried it yet but are curious to learn more? Then, join us for a conversation about the promises and challenges of implementing contract grading at Stanford. Contract grading, a form of labor-based assessment, rewards a student’s commitment to learning as a process as much as or more than a student’s performance on specific products at specific moments in time. At its best, contract grading can promote students’ intrinsic motivation and create more equitable and inclusive learning environments (Elbow, 2008; Inoue 2019). But, contract grading can feel against the grain of Stanford undergraduate culture. To what extent are students ready for this cultural shift?