Teaching Day

Panelists

• John Helveston, Assistant Professor of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, SEAS
• Michael Massiah, Associate Professor of Chemistry, CCAS
• Hurriyet Ok, Professorial Lecturer of Computer Science, SEAS
• Heather Stebbins, Assistant Professor, Electronic & Computer Music, Corcoran School of Art and Design, CCAS

Room 702, International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) Labor History Research Center  

How can you involve students more fully in the assessment process? Our colleagues in STEM and social science fields will share ideas including student-designed projects, alternative minimum grading, and contract grading. After hearing about each panelist’s approach to assessment, we will discuss how these approaches affect instructors’ workload and how to communicate these practices to students.

Jessica Tillipman, GW Law School, Assistant Dean for Government Procurement Law Studies

Maddy Kadish, Director of Instructional Design, LAI

Room 219

The benefits of active learning are well-documented, but executing experiential activities remains challenging for many instructors. GW Law’s Government Procurement Law Program has had years of success integrating experiential activities and role play into their online and in-person courses to support students’ development of negotiation, presentation, and analytical skills. This session provides tips and examples of these approaches that can engage students in a wide range of disciplines.

Sylvain Guiriec, Associate Professor of Astrophysics, CCAS

Room 218A

On-boarding non-science students in astronomy in creating a professionally-formatted space-science magazine. Measuring the speed of sound with a cell phone, balloons, commercial video-editing software, and some ingenuity. These are two examples of the infinite potential of the GW-Adobe Science Education Initiative. Together these learning activities focus in on bolstering digital learning and fluency through doing science with Adobe Premiere Pro and disseminating scientific findings with Adobe InDesign.

Sarah-Kay Hurst, Teaching Assistant Professor of French, CCAS

Room 219

How can we use research-driven principles from cognitive psychology such as retrieval practice to amplify learner engagement and enhance long-term retention? We will discuss specific techniques to create a captivating classroom experience, as well as explore ways to vary and create engaging activities that couple the empirical benefits of memory-enhancing techniques with the pedagogical advantages of active and cooperative learning. 

Holly Dugan, Associate Professor of English, CCAS

Noah Bickford, Instructional Designer, LAI

Room 218A

How can professors encourage students to map their skills and interests when dealing with challenging course material? And is it possible to assign creative projects like this in a large, first-year lecture including first-year GPAC courses? In this presentation, Holly Dugan and Noah Bickford discuss how they worked together to develop a creative commonplacing assignment that draws on the best features of analog commonplace books while also updating it for use in new kinds of classroom environments, including online courses and large-scale lectures. They'll discuss how digital commonplace books allow students to understand the reading, apply insights to new applications, evaluate their own relationship to course themes and create a tool that helps them navigate and achieve their own scholarly goals.

Maranda Ward, Assistant Professor of Clinical Research and Leadership, SMHS

Room 219

How can you design a research process to measure difficult-to-evaluate teaching and learning questions? Dr. Ward will describe the process from conception to publication using an example from her inclusive teaching work. She will share how she used integrated assessments to measure and compare the development of ethnocultural empathy in two different student populations: undergraduates in a face-to-face program and adult learners in an online continuing education program.

Alexa Alice Joubin, Professor of English, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Cultures, CCAS

Room 218A

There are multiple ways to facilitate inclusion regardless of whether it’s online or in person. Prof. Joubin will discuss her usage of contract grading, collaborative annotation, and her open-access online textbook, Screening Shakespeare, an open educational resource (OER), in her classes.

Joshua Gleason and Ben Horn, Instructional Technologists 

Caitlin Savoldelli, Accessibility Instructional Designer

CREATE Digital Studio, 1st floor of Gelman Library

Want to get the scoop on how to make truly engaging video content for your students? It’s never been easier! Join the CREATE Digital Studio in updating your production skills to make purposeful, interesting videos for your class, videos showcasing your research, and more. 

Carol Hayes, Assistant Professor of Writing, CCAS, and Writing Center Director

Phyllis Ryder, Associate Professor Writing, CCAS, and Writing Center Deputy Director

Room 221, The GW Writing Center

What types of writing support do you want for your students? Using a sample student document, we will discuss big-picture issues, sentence-level issues, and assessing documents from multilingual writers. After clarifying your goals for writing support, we will discuss what you can do to help your students get that support from the Writing Center. 

Leah Richardson, Research and Instruction Librarian for Special Collections

Brigette Kamsler, University Archivist

Jen King, Collections Coordinator & Manuscripts Librarian

Room 702, International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) Labor History Research Center  

Join us for a hands-on opportunity to explore rare books and archival materials as objects for teaching and learning. Participants will experience several different active-learning approaches used in primary source instruction and gain a greater understanding of the student experience, as well as explore ways in which object-based learning in the Special Collections Research Center can enhance student learning. Participants need only bring wonder, curiosity, and a willingness to engage. 

Time: 10-10:20a

Marc Spencer, Assistant Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology, School of Medicine and Health Sciences

In light of the global coronavirus pandemic, we have had to make drastic changes in the way we teach human gross anatomy to medical students. The shift in pedagogical techniques has illuminated the necessity to focus on the anatomical basis of clinical presentations. Through the use of pre-recorded videos, worksheets, outlines, and formative assessments, it is possible to deliver a thorough anatomical learning experience to students regardless whether they opt for a fully virtual or hybrid-track curriculum.

Time: 10:20-10:40a

Declan Cullen, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences

I will discuss how I use music in my World Regional Geography classes to build community and generate discussion.

Time: 10:40-11a

Kevin Knudsen, Director, Academic Commons; Megan Potterbusch, Data Services Librarian; Laura Wrubel, Software Development Librarian; Libraries and Academic Innovation 

The instructional continuity period has caused us all to rethink how we go about communicating and creating learning communities in a virtual environment. There are a number of communication platforms available, but evaluating and choosing the right one to suit the needs of you and your students can be daunting. This lightning talk will cover two tools being used at GW to augment teaching, communication, and community development: Slack and Microsoft Teams. The presenters will address why they selected these tools, how they use them, and some considerations for making the right selection for you.

Time: 11-11:20a

Ayman El-Tarabishy, Teaching Professor and Deputy Chair, Department of Management, School of Business and Management

Upon the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, professors in the GW School of Business MBA program teamed together to turn a crisis into a teaching moment, capturing a real-time case study. We took advantage of the virtual nature of the course by introducing new technologies, such as web conferences, and by enhancing the course structure so that students were charged with creating and host an online conference. The students were able to reach out to a national and global audience, making the class a platform for students to learn together. The students truly took the lead in imagining and producing the digital conference, from inviting speakers to moderating the day and summarizing the event in a publication. 

Time: 11:20-11:40a

Saniya LeBlanc, Associate Professor, School of Engineering and Applied Science; Russell Korte, Associate Professor, Human and Organizational Learning, Graduate School of Education and Human Development  

Using interviews of industry professionals, we determine the skills and knowledge students will need in their careers.  We will describe how class activities and assessments are designed to prioritize these competencies, and content knowledge is the platform rather than the end learning goal.  

Time: 11:40a-12p

Anna Helm, Associate Teaching Professor, International Business, and Director, Center for International Business Education and Research (GW-CIBER), School of Business

How can faculty bring balance to materials and approaches used in the classroom? This presentation showcases the implementation of an online international business simulation as a way to prepare students for the real world. The focus is on the journey of making this web-based, quantitatively oriented, artificial business reality more accessible to students by infusing liberal learning into the experience. 

Time: 2-2:20p

Arturo Sotomayor, Associate Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Security Policy Studies Program, Elliott School of International Affairs

How can faculty and staff facilitate connections between multiple students who are sharing similar learning experiences across a distance? My presentation will focus on remote community-building activities and events I have organized as Faculty in Residence and Program Director of an MA Program at ESIA. In particular, I will emphasize collaborative work that involves multiple programs and audiences, such as speakers' series, panels, and learning/socializing experiences. 

Time: 2:20-2:40p

Diane Harris-Cline, Associate Professor of History and Classics, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences

An open-ended creative alternative to multiple-choice quizzes or three-page papers, Padlet functions like a Pinterest board that students can easily curate with select articles, e-books, videos, and their own video or audio recordings. Students can pool short written responses or discussions on one group Padlet for spontaneous reflections. Students like the colorful interactivity and ownership of their Padlets; using them has prompted students to read more Blackboard materials and integrate the ancient world with the modern one. 

Time: 2:40-3p

Kathryn Michele DeVeau, Assistant Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology, School of Medicine and Health Sciences

Neuroanatomy is already a difficult science for students to understand since it pushes students' spatial abilities with unfamiliar, complex objects. With the loss of in-person labs, we have had to find ways to continue to engage students and help them build three dimensional neuroanatomical maps. With whiteboard reviews, short didactic videos, clinically oriented reviews, and supplemental visual atlas references, we have been able to tailor the learning experience to the online environment. Most of all, making the videos personable by adding in pets and funny jokes keeps the students more engaged even in difficult topics such as neuroanatomy.