2017-18 Teaching Circles
The following eleven Teaching Circles were funded. Interested in applying for a Teaching Circle? Be on the lookout in early Spring for the next call for applications! Descriptions and artifacts forthcoming. Here are our circle leads presenting their projects:
Topic Group: Fostering Engagement in the Classroom
Circle Contact: Yuan Yuan Kang (Lecturer, Natural Sciences)
Circle Contact Info: [email protected], 713-222-5378
Additional Members: Rachna Sadana, Adriana Visbal, John Kelly, Creshema Murray
Circle Description:
Circle Lead: Léonie Karkoviata (Finance & Management Information Systems)
Circle Contact Info: [email protected]
Additional Members: Renée Edwards, Greg Roof
Circle Description:
Class activities designed to foster active learning and encourage student engagement
were the focus of this learning circle. The Teaching Circle project provided a way
to encourage classroom instructors to try a different method of teaching.
Circle Artifact(s): https://tinyurl.com/2018tckarkoviata
Circle Leads: Windy Lawrence & Lucas Logan (Arts & Communications)
Circle Contact Info: [email protected]
Additional Members: Ashley Archiopoli, Felicia Harris, Elizabeth Hatfield, Abby Koenig, Lucas Logan
Our teaching circle’s goal was to help foster active engagement in our math 1310 classrooms,
and to evaluate the effectiveness of such teaching practices. During the 2017-18 academic
year, the circle created a series of faculty workshops and a survey that workshop
participants completed at the end of the semester. Faculty interested in the workshop
series attended an initial overview meeting to discuss current course objectives,
the workshop goals and requirements, along with the semester’s scheduled workshops,
each focusing on one specific in-class activity. Each of the circle members presented
one of the workshops utilizing manipulatives purchased by a previous innovative course
improvement teaching circle. The hour-long workshops allowed participants to complete
the activity as a student, and discuss improvements along with various activity options.
Participants were given the option of taking a classroom set of these manipulatives
with the activity sheet for use in their current course at the end of each workshop.
Each participant who completed at least 3 of the 6 workshops, and completed at least
one of the activities in the classroom along with a survey of the experience received
a small stipend. The survey indicated that these faculty will continue to utilize
the activities in the future as they felt the activities encouraged discussion and
concept understanding while adding an element of enjoyment to the lecture. Additionally,
the workshops allowed faculty teaching this math course time to discuss and share
information that will improve the overall quality and depth of their instruction.
Through this teaching circle’s funding, the resulting workshops and the beneficial
discussions, the circle members were able to determine the additional manipulatives
and support necessary for these faculty to continue this active engagement in the
classroom, making our teaching circle a great success!
Circle Artifact(s): https://tinyurl.com/2018tcbeane
Circle Leads: Sujata Krishna (Natural Sciences) & Windy Lawrence (Arts & Communications)
Circle Contact Info: [email protected]
Additional Members: Carlos Bohorquez, Rachel Dickson, Erin Hodgess, Christina Hughes, Rebecca Morales
Circle Lead: Candace TenBrink (Management & Insurance Risk Management)
Circle Contact Info: [email protected]
Additional Members: David Maldonado, Sedef Smith, Dietrich von Biedenfeld
Circle Description:
Experiential learning has long been used as a learning method in the hard sciences as tangibly shown in the many labs scattered within college campuses. However it is still relatively scarce in the soft sciences (Hoberman & Mailick, 1994). The overarching goal of this teaching circle is to promote pedagogies that leverage experiential learning in business education. Two assumptions underpin this project:
- If we integrate our course material in a way that brings knowledge life, students will not only increase their understanding of class material but they will also be able to implement and utilize the prospective functional tool kit that professionals use in the post-college corporate environment.
- If we put students in active roles in the learning process, we can enhance their desire to learn the class material.
This teaching circle, therefore, has 3 specific objectives: (1) Design and execute
experiential learning tasks that bring knowledge to life and put students in active
roles; (2) Evaluate students’ progress, outcomes, and interest in learning as they
participate in and complete these tasks; and (3) Present ‘lessons learned’ from this
project to our colleagues at the Davies College of Business and the wider UHD community.
This teaching circle will represent the collective efforts of a team of three business
faculty with specializations in strategy, business law, and supply chain management
and one staff member with a specialization in teaching and learning.
This TC project enabled us to learn about, apply, and analyze experiential learning.
Circle Artifact(s): https://tinyurl.com/2018tctenbrink
Circle Lead: Maria Bhattacharjee (Urban Education)
Circle Contact Info: [email protected]
Additional Members: Irene Chen, Judith Harris, John Kelly, Dana Smith
Circle Description:
The goal of our Teaching Circle (TC) was to improve student success at UHD through practice and promotion of teaching excellence. Our TC had representation from each of the units in the Collage of Public Service (CPS). Four members teach service-learning courses that are curriculum driven. Our group wanted to have conversations about the requirements for our courses, the amount of time expended by faculty and the students executing the projects, the benefits of the projects to the students (academically and personally), to the faculty, to the partner institutions, and to UHD. During the fall 2017 semester, the TC met monthly to discuss the goal for the project. and collect the artifacts for the final report.
During the spring 2018, the team distributed the collected artifacts from the fall
semester among the TC members. The preliminary analysis of these artifacts seems to
indicate that students benefited personally and professionally from participating
in the community engagement opportunities offered in the courses, faculty considered
the engagement with community an effective way to teach their courses, have opportunity
for research, and participate in the solution of issues affecting their community.
The feedback from the partner institutions was also very positive. Because of these
partnerships, the institutions could provide additional services to their constituencies
without additional personnel or monetary cost incurred. Our TC is currently in the
process of getting approval from the UHD Committee of Human Subjects to process the
remaining archived data to publish an article about the importance of offering curriculum
driven service-learning courses to higher education students. The dynamics of the
group were excellent. Four of the TC members will continue meeting during the fall
of 2018 to seek different venues for publication and explore opportunities to work
together in community engagement projects. See appendix for the project application.
Circle Artifact(s): https://tinyurl.com/2018tcbhattacharjee
Revision to Methodology for General Chemistry
Text and Learning System Selection: A Coordinated Approach with the Laboratory
Circle Lead: Houston Brown (Natural Sciences)
Circle Contact Info: [email protected]
Additional Members: Franklin Beckles, Maria Benavides, Elene Bouhoutsos-Brown, Hamida Qavi, Eszter Trufan
Circle Lead: Olin Bjork (English)
Circle Contact Info: [email protected]
Additional Members: Creshema Murray, Rey Romero
Circle Description:
The goal of our teaching circle was to collaboratively write and submit an article
on strategies for assessment of service learning and community engagement (SLCE) projects
in language and communication disciplines. After some research and meetings, we determined
that this topic was too broad and that we needed to narrow our focus. We each had
different ideas for the direction our article should take, but we ultimately settled
on the topic of ethics and student agency in SLCE projects in the disciplines of technical
communication, communication studies, and foreign language translation. We then generated
ideas and material for a panel of three papers on this topic to be delivered at the
2018 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference in Birmingham, AL. We plan
to use these three papers as sections in a future article on the topic. Over the course
of the year, thinking, reading and talking about ethics and agency helped us refine
the SLCE projects that we conduct in our own courses and even come up with a plan
to integrate our three projects in the fall 2018 semester. Two of us applied to designate
the courses in which these projects will take place as service learning courses, which
is not something we would have done individually without each other's support and
encouragement.
Circle Artifact(s): https://tinyurl.com/2018tcbjork
Teaching Genetics Concepts Collaboratively through
Coherent Alignment Across Multi-Level Courses
Circle Lead: Connie Kang (Natural Sciences)
Circle Contact Info: [email protected]
Additional Members: Gabriela Bowden, Meghan Mihard, Sanghamitra Saha, Luz Vela
Circle Description:
The goals of the teaching circle were to assess and improve student learning in the
central dogma of biology by implementing common theme activities and applying assessment
instruments across sophomore, junior and senior level courses. Through a collaborative
effort, each course has developed an activity using Lac operon or insulin as an example
of gene expression and regulation. In addition, we have adopted a Concept Inventory
(COI) on the central dogma of biology to assess the effectiveness of our teaching
strategies across several biology courses. From our results, we conclude that the
COI instrument is a valid tool to assess knowledge and competency in core concepts
and can be potentially useful for curricular mapping and assessment. This is the first
time we apply such an instrument to our biology courses and we have gained valuable
insights into our course structure and student learning. The goals of this teaching
circle have been largely accomplished. More importantly, our TC activities have served
as diagnostic practices and provided insights on the weakness of our student learning
and needs for improvement in pedagogy.
Circle Artifact(s): https://tinyurl.com/2018tckang
Circle Lead: Sam Sen (Natural Sciences)
Circle Contact Info: [email protected]
Additional Members: Georges Detiveaux, Heather Goltz, Djuana Lamb
Circle Description:
The primary goal of our Student Engagement Teaching Circle (SETC) is to leverage technology
to engage passive learners and, ultimately, increase overall student engagement, interaction,
and learning acquisition. As faculty members, we see that it is often a challenge
to get students engaged in online and classroom environments by actively responding
to question prompts, joining classroom discussions, and making meaning of the learning
material by summarizing their understanding verbally. Research findings suggest that
when students are actively involved in the learning process, it leads to increased
student learning and persistence, higher grades, and more thorough questioning (Felder,
1992; Bonwell & Eison, 1991). Instructors in all fields are experimenting with a variety
of tools to deliver information, present lectures, conference with students, and provide
feedback on written and visual projects. (Thompson & Lee, 2012). We recognize that
students readily utilize available technology in their personal lives, as well as
in efforts to coordinate the perfect class schedule and obtain vital insights into
professor ratings in hopes of landing the right mix to ensure academic success each
semester. We wanted to capitalize on the use of technology as a medium to increase
student engagement and learning acquisition. External factors outside the control
of the team precluded our multi-disciplined team of Dr. Heather Goltz, Ms. Djuana
Lamb-Morrison, Mr. Sam Sen and Georges Detiveaux (informal member) from implementing
some of the tools/technology “wish list” that was set forth in our proposal, but I
believe that our learnings individually and as a group overall were substantive and
sustainable - skills we can use to bring incremental value into our classrooms going
forward. For maximum impact, Heather, Djuana and I took a “divide and conquer” approach
as it pertains to related aspects of focus under the same umbrella of utilizing technology
to increase engagement and learning. Their takeaways are contained in this folder.
Circle Artifact(s): https://tinyurl.com/2018tcsen