Innovation and Teaching Resources

Happy New Year! 

This semester, the ITC holds office hours on Monday 2:30pm-5:00pm (even weeks start at 3:30pm) and Friday 10:00am -12:30pm. 

The small faculty lunch group continues. Three colleagues eat lunch together on Thursdays at 1pm, currently in the first booth inside the O’Reilly Family Event Center. Everyone is welcome. We wear masks and practice social distancing. Last semester, we never exceeded five people in the group. If we ever reach more than six, we can split into two groups. 

Below are six features of effective practice excerpted from Harlen’s book (2015) Teaching Science for Understanding in Elementary and Middle Schools. The features apply (or can be adapted to apply) to most disciplines and age levels. It is helpful to keep them in mind and frequently check when we plan classes. 

• Students are engaged. 
• Students have real objects to handle and talk about. 

• Students communicate what they already know about the topic. 
• Students talk. 
• Students are involved in inquiry. 
• The learning experiences have been carefully planned. 

Here is the pdf. of the first chapter if you want to read a little bit further on this topic. 

You are invited to the Drury Action Research Fellow poster session on April 8th, 3pm-4pm (one hour before the faculty meeting on the same day). It is going to be a virtual session with two stages, described below. 

 Asynchronized Presession–The posters will be available online one day before the live celebration. During this period, faculty can view the posters and send questions about the projects. Format of this presession will be announced when it comes close to the date. 

Live Celebration—On April 8th during the poster session, we will open a zoom room and celebrate the Fellows’ accomplishment on their ARF projects. We will have a short opening speech. Then each Fellow will have 10 minutes to explain their project, share what they learned, and respond to questions. 

The presenting ARF Fellows and their projects are: 

• Dr. Callie Gibson, Assistant Professor of Psychology 
  • Fostering students’ metacognitive skills to bridge the gap between faculty and student expectations 
• Dr. Brant Hinrichs, Associate Professor of Physics 
  • Promoting active participation in student-led whole-class discussions 
• Dr. Chris Branton, Assistant Professor of Computer Science 
  • Bridging gender gap in computer science courses 
• Dr. Karen Spence, Professor and Associate Dean of Architecture 
  • Enhancing knowledge and critical thinking in a project-driven class
• Dr. Sara Khorshidifard, Assistant Professor of Architecture 
  • Teaching research skills in a design-centered learning environment 

Please let me know if you have any questions regarding the Drury Action Research Fellow program. 

Now it is already one third into the semester. Have you considered doing some formative assessment in your courses? Below are eight ways of formative assessment. 

1. Observation. Observe students’ learning in class. Take observation notes, because we could forget what we have noticed, or could later distort our memory.  

2. Questioning. Ask probing questions that can help you learn students’ understanding of the material. 

3. Interviewing. A combination of observation and questioning. Sit down with a student one-on-one and learn about their thinking. Restrain yourself from teaching during the interview. The goal is to listen to your students and understand their ideas. 

4. Performance tasks. Give students real word problems to solve. See whether they can apply the knowledge. 

5. Self-assessment and peer assessment. Let your students examine their own work and each other’s. 

6. Work samples. Collect students’ work which includes their thought processes instead of solely the final answer. Evaluate their thinking.  

7. Portfolios. Allow your students to choose their best work and make a case to demonstrate learning.

8. Writing. Journals, essays, and other writing are good ways of assessment. 

I hope this helps. Have a great day. 

More on Formative Assessment. Some colleagues expressed interests in learning more about formative assessments. I am planning a workshop on this topic. It is going to be a 50-minute, hands-on workshop, scheduled on Thursday April, 29th 3:00pm-3:50pm. If you are interested, please sign up here: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=RiFn-nmU6EGpPN0AVyD9NR1X-MDdfNhHghfoqBv5ei5URDBVWFk2TzRSQ1o2MVlNOTNZMVVHOTMwUy4u. 

 

The workshop will be following the format below. 

1. An introduction of formative assessment.
2. Whole group brainstorm of ways of formative assessment.
3. Small group work—writing a piece of formative assessment for your course.
4. Peer review exchanging feedback.
5. Whole group sharing, summary, and exit evaluation. 

I will be leading the workshop. It will be primarily in person but can accommodate virtual attendees. Depending on the number of sign-ups, we will determine a place for the workshop. Please stay tuned. 

Midterm Self-evaluation. Time flies. It is midterm time again. Around the middle of the semester, we would collect midterm feedback from students to adjust our class in the second half of the semester. Here are some ideas about how to do that, if you chose to do one.   

(1) Venue   

A Moodle survey either provided or self-developed.   

A mid-term exam with some survey questions on midterm evaluation.   

Student-instructor individual conferences.   

(2) Content   

General feedback on the course.   

Specific feedback on the pedagogy that you implemented this semester.   

Suggestions on the second half of the course.   

(3) Length   

If it is a self-developed questionnaire, then no more than five questions. Combine the liked-scale questions (e.g., from strongly agree to strongly disagree) with the open-response questions.    

If it is individual conferences, then schedule them with a range between 20 minutes to half an hour per student. Prepare some conversation prompts before meeting with the students. 

The ideas of formative evaluation and formative assessment are closely interrelated, although each has its own focus. The terms have some colloquial uses. 

 I hope these resources are helpful. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask. 

This is a reminder that the Action Research Fellow research symposium will be held on Thursday, April 8th at 3pm via zoom: https://zoom.us/j/6485235547.  

The day before, digital posters will be shared for faculty to view and comment. On April 8th, the fellows will present their work during the live session and colleagues will congratulate their accomplishments. 

The fellows have been working on their project in the past two or three years. They completed interviews and participated in class observation. They implemented new ways of teaching and collected data to assess that. They persevered in the difficult time of COVID-19. I invite you all to join us on Thursday to celebrate their work. 

The provost office, OAA, and deans and chairs have been supportive to the follows, and to the ARF program in general. Special thanks to Beth, Peter, and the chairs and deans who have ARF fellows in their department. Without your support, the program wouldn’t be successful. 

Here is he link to the video of yesterday’s ARF poster session: ARF poster session recording.mp4 

 One theme emerged from the fellow’s projects. There are skills that we might have expected students to come with it or pick it up by themselves in our course, and we actually need to teach them more explicitly. Such skills are like how to study (Callie Gibson), how to discuss with classmates (Brant Hinrichs), how to do research (Sara Khorshidifard), how to analyze a design (Karen Spence), and how to envision a career (Chris Branton). 

The fellows implemented new methods in their course and assessed the effectiveness. Their work certainly informed my teaching in a great deal. 

Here is the folder that holds all the posters, the videos, and the session agenda: 2021 ARF symposium 

Feel free to reach out to the fellows and ask questions. Thank you all for working on, supporting, and being interested in the Action Research program. 

Greetings from the Innovation and Teaching Center! I hope you are all getting ready to start the new semester.  

This fall, the ITC is open in Lay Hall 213 on Monday through Friday, 9am-3pm, or by appointment, except when I am teaching or attending a scheduled meeting. Attached is a schedule of mine. You are welcome to walk in and have a brief or long chat with me.  

On Wednesday August 18, we had the 2021 New Faculty Orientation. The new faculty members were just as wonderful as always—engaging, cheerful, and eager to learn.  

As an FYI, the ITC electronic resources live in two places:   

1. A Moodle Course named Innovation and Teaching Center. New faculty since 2018 are automatically enrolled in this course and have access to the resources. Not-new faculty can email helpdeskticket@drury.edu and ask to be enrolled if they wanted to.  

1. Under mydrury, log in with your Drury credential. Then go to Drury Now tab on the topà click Departments on the leftàclick Innovation and Teaching Center on the left. Some ITC materials are available there. All faculty have access to it.  

Contents in the two places overlap a bit. The Moodle ITC course has more content, covers a wider range of topics, and is updated more frequently.  

This fall, I will continue sending Friday emails (of even weeks) from ITC, sharing resources and announcing events.   

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. If anyone wants to talk about their syllabi and/or class ideas for the first couple of weeks, please don’t hesitate to contact me!  

I hope the first two weeks went well with you. Today, I would like to introduce a lesson template called the 5E template (developed by Rodger Bybee). According to the template, a lesson can consist of five stages in order, each stage being described with a word beginning with the letter E. Here it is. 

1. Engage—At the beginning, you could talk with your students something to get their attention. For example, updates, announcements, fun facts relevant to the class, or a short-and-sweet pre-assessment about the lesson topic.

2. Explore—Then you could provide with your students the topic of today and open to discussion, or to a hands-on exploration. The key to this stage is to make it open and broad. Listen to your students and observe what they are doing.

3. Explain—This is usually you as the instructor’s part. You could do a mini-lecture, relating what the students have brought up in the previous stages, and boiling down to some key points you want students to learn in this class.

4. Elaborate—Here you could collaborate with your students to extend the topic, by talking about more examples and also counter examples. One difference between this stage and the exploration stage is that exploration often allows students to wander, but elaboration is focused on the core ideas.

5. Evaluate—Last but not least, you could use some low-stake assessment to evaluate how students learn. I personally have been using exit slips and they have been very effective.  

There is also plenty of resources online about the 5E template if you google it. 

I hope this is helpful. Thank you for reading. Always let me know if you have any questions.

Several faculty members asked about the exit slips, since I mentioned it multiple times. J 

Technically speaking, in classroom settings, an exit slip is a piece of note that each student writes and submits to the teacher before they leave the class. What is in it can vary. The teacher can set up the writing prompts on the exit slip. I have used exit slips as a reflection tool for my students, and a formative evaluation tool for myself. I ask three questions to my students: 

• What do you learn?
  • Asking students what they gain from this class session. 

• What do you wonder?
  • Asking students what they want to learn more. 

• (Optional) what do you already know?
  • Asking students what is repetitive (so I know I either need to skip the topic or need to teach it more deeply, etc.) 

 I started using exit slips in the Spring of 2020, when I had a class of 37 students. Back then, I had students write their exit slips on a piece of paper and physically hand it in. I used it to keep track of class attendance. Later in that semester, because of COVID-19, I had to move classes online.  I changed to use the “Chat” feature in Moodle. The writing prompts were the same.  

Before leaving the class, students logged in Moodle, entered the chat room, and typed in their responses to the three prompts. Using the chat feature, students could see each other’s responses so their ideas were naturally shared. It functioned like a brief class discussion forum. Sometimes, students even responded to each other. I realized this additional benefit. When classes were back to face-to-face, I continued using the Moodle Chat feature for exit slips. The exit slip now is a major, formative, self-evaluation tool for me. I believe it is also a cognitive reminder for students of what they learn in each class. 

If you google search “exit slips,” there are more ideas and templates online. If you are interested in talking more about it, feel free to email or call me. The ITC has just installed a big, attached-to-the-wall screen– for better discussion (Yay!). 

It is midterm time again. Around the middle of the semester, we could collect midterm feedback from students to adjust our class in the second half of the semester. Here are some ideas about how to do that, if you chose to do one.   

(1) Venue   

An online survey either you find from somewhere, or self-developed.   

A few survey questions attached to the midterm exam (but the survey questions should not be graded so that you can get students’ relatively honest response).   

Student-instructor individual conferences (I found this one very helpful when you have a small class, or you are new in teaching the course).   

(2) Content   

General feedback on the course.   

Specific feedback on the pedagogy that you implemented this semester.   

Suggestions on the second half of the course.   

(3) Length   

If it is a self-developed questionnaire, then no more than five questions. Combine the liked-scale questions (e.g., from strongly agree to strongly disagree) with the open-response questions.    

If it is individual conferences, then schedule each one between 15-10 minutes. Prepare some interview prompts before meeting with the student. 

In this recent couple of semesters, I collect midterm feedback by asking my students to write an extended “exit slip” (see my last ITC email) of one full page. Since they have been writing the exit slips weekly, they are almost all very comfortable providing their feedback about the course. 

I hope these ideas are helpful. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask. 

Getting students to talk meaningfully is often a challenge. On some occasions, students do not talk because they do not know how to. When there is such a situation, giving them some tool to start with might help. Here is a handout of some accountable talk starters I have used to scaffold students. It might not always work, but sometimes it does. So, maybe give it a try.

Have a good Halloween weekend! 

The past ITC teaching resources newsletters can be found here: https://mymaildrury-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/ycao_drury_edu/EveqUrShJBFBjUjHpB28JHQBijvHbZoxLqnv1UMNv-xX6Q?e=cmnRIf 

This is a warm greeting from ITC! As the new semester starts, the ITC has scheduled the first ARF combined meeting. 

At the meeting, the newly accepted Fellows, Dr. Karen Spence and Dr. Sara Khorshidifard, will introduce their projects to the 2019 Fellows. The 2019 Fellows will share their data with the group and receive feedback. The whole group will have a rich discussion on innovative teaching. 

 As working with the active Action Research Fellows, the ITC is also developing means to reach out more faculty about innovative teaching. We have been work on organizing a reading group, but not limited to faculty’s physical participation. By that we mean to start a Podcast program inviting people to talk about their experience of innovative teaching and broadcast it to a bigger audience. This way faculty can also “participate” asynchronized. We will be seeking institutional as well as external grant to support this project. Emma Ruzicka, the Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations, and the ITC are closely working together seeking and applying for resources.  

We are also building a website for ITC so that all the information will be hosted in one place. 

 The ITC continues holding office hours Friday 9-noon. You will receive irregular newsletters from us. Scheduled one-on-one consultation sessions are offered. Whenever you want to chat about teaching, we are all here for you. 

Below you will find resources about our students that may help us prepare our classes.  

1. Students of Generation Z (born between the mid-90s and 2010) are unique in that they grew up with technology and social media. Some call them digital natives. They are also experiencing the pandemic. The following article offers helpful ways to engage students of Generation Z: https://www.pearsoned.com/engaging-gen-z-students/. 

2. Despite differences in generations, college students share some common developmental features. Gradually, we want to learn more about college students’ development so that we can anchor our understanding of students of different generations in theories and more stable models, as this resource does: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Student_Development_in_College/IxoLrybGeCIC?hl=en&gbpv=0. 

3. Some of us have non-traditional students in class who may work regularly in the day, and/or have families. Here is an article that speaks to non-traditional college students. It may also help us as their teachers. 

  I hope these resources are informative. In the fall semester, the ITC will continue holding office hours on Friday 9am-noon. We will also be available to schedule individual consultations. For all meetings, walk-in or scheduled, we are available via zoom: https://zoom.us/j/6485235547  

I hope the first three weeks of the semester went well with you.

I heard from several faculty that teaching a hybrid group (part of the student are on zoom and part are in the classroom) has been challenging. It’s been hard to pay attention to both platforms at the same time. It’s been especially challenging when the instructor is trying to organize a whole group discussion involving both the online students and the “floor” students.  

One way to handle this challenge could be to have one student in the classroom sign in zoom and moderate the online discussion, using the chat feature in zoom. The online students can have their discussion in the chat window. The moderating student can participate with them, and speak for them to the people in the classroom when it is time to share as a whole group. The moderating student can also explain to the online group when important information was transmitted through zoom but not as clearly as it was in the classroom.  

I’ve had a wonderful student moderator in a class of this past Wednesday. I worked out perfectly.    

I hope it helps. If you have other questions, I am happy to talk it through with you and figure it out together. 

Flipped Classroom Workshop 

The ITC will host a Flipped Classroom Workshop on Thusday, October 8th at 3pm (an hour before the faculty meeting) via zoom: https://zoom.us/j/6485235547. The content of the workshop, with timelines all in pm, is as follows: 

1. Ying Cao (3:00-3:10) 

• What is flipped in a flipped classroom?  

1. Desmond Villalba, Physics (3:10-3:30) 

• “My students are more actively engaged! —Flipped physics has been a useful approach for me, as it allows more space for students to think about, discuss, and solve problems in real time.” 

1. Callie Gibson, Psychology (3:30-3:50) 

• “I am now a professor/YouTuber. —In my flipped classroom, students watch lecture videos of my channel outside of class. In our face-to-face meetings, we engage in discussions and activities that apply what they have learned.” 

1.  Ying Cao (3:50-3:55) 

• A live Q&A session.  

I will be monitoring the live chat while Desmond and Callie are talking. Please log in zoom to join us and have a conversation about ideas of innovative teaching.  

Midterm Self-evaluation 

It is the time of the semester that we would collect midterm feedback from students to adjust our class in the second half of the semester. Here are some ideas about how to do that, if you chose to do one. 

1. Venue 

• • A Moodle survey either provided or self-developed.
  • A mid-term exam with some embedded survey questions of evaluation.
  • Student-instructor individual conferences. 

1. Content 

• • General feedback on the course.
  • Specific feedback on the pedagogy that you implemented this semester.
  • Suggestions on the second half of the course. 

1. Length 

• • If it is a self-developed questionnaire, then no more than five questions. Combine the liked-scale questions (e.g., from strongly agree to strongly disagree) with the open-response questions. 
  • If it is individual conferences, then schedule them with a range between 20 minutes to half an hour per student. Prepare some conversation prompts before meeting with the students. 

Faculty Lunch Group 

A small group of faculty members have been having Wednesday lunch together for several weeks. We gather at the outdoor plaza by the O’Reilly Family Event Center, any time between 11:30am-1:30pm. It has been a pleasant experience for us, because of the beautiful weather, the smiling faces/eyes, the various foods, and the conversation around foods. We would like to welcome anyone interested to join us, even for a short period of time, or a quick stop-by. 

Our Wednesday, small group faculty lunch has acquired the permission to use a luxury suite inside the O’Reilly Family Center. If the weather is cold, we eat inside. Either way (inside or outside), face-covering and six-foot social distances are maintained. If you come but do not see us outside, come in the stadium from the lower level; go upstairs to your right-hand side; look forward at the first booth from the entrance, you should see us (Ioana, Jo, and me are always there!) 

Below are some resources for creating learning activities. The information includes some human natures that affect learning, and some suggested steps of a learning activity. The content was based on a chapter in Reeves book Where Great Teaching Begins. The chapter was presented by two students in an education curriculum class, and they happily granted the permission to share the slides. The full presentation slides are attached to the end of the list. 
 

Natural ways of learning 

• Humans are social.
• Language is a tool.
• Humans like moving.
• Allow discoveries.
• Humans are creative beings.
• Humans are competitive.
• Humans enjoy telling and enjoying stories. 

Steps of a learning activity 

• Activating prior knowledge.
• Providing new information.
• Connecting new information.
• Monitoring learning.
• Closure. 

 
 

A small group of faculty members has been discussing ideas on conducting an oral exam in our courses. We collected some resources from different places. I created a folder hosting the materials and will share it with you. The recourses in the folder include:  

• A short guide to oral assessment  
• An oral exam evaluation sheet, on general content  
• A grading rubric for oral exams (midterm and final) in an upper-division history course  
• A grading criteria/rubric for both individual and group oral examinations  

Oral exam guides 
 We figured that we need to adapt the resources to be useful to a particular course. For example, I used a checklist rather than a rubric to grade my oral interviews with students. It seems to work well.  

If you would like to follow this email and share your experience on this topic, please feel free to jump in.  

I hope you all had a good winter break. Welcome back! 

Office Hours 

The ITC will host the same regular office hours, Friday 9-noon, from the third week of the semester (Feb. 1st). For Week 1 and 2, office hours are by appointment. 

Action Research Fellows 

Last fall, we accepted four action research fellow proposals: 

• Chris Branton will be studying about reducing gender gap in computer science;
• Callie Gibson will be exploring ways in which students could learn metacognitive skills;
• Brant Hinrichs is interested in looking at social dynamics of large student discussion groups; and
• Janis Prewitt will investigate how to teach business ethics more effectively. 

Congratulations to our first cohort of Action Research Fellows!! 

Their proposals are available on the ITC webpage.

We had the kick-off meeting before the fall semester ended. Feel free to reach out to the Fellows if you are interested in talking about their projects. 

January Workshop 

The January Workshop for developing My Drury Fusion Themed Certificates was successful. A lot of wonderful ideas came up at the workshop. We used Fink’s framework of curriculum design for significant learning and it inspired very good discussion. Fink’s paper, A Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning, and our presentation slides, Innovation in Teaching, are also available on the ITC website. Feel free to check them out.

Thank you for reading this newsletter. I wish you a good start of the new semester. And stay warm! 

How time flies! I hope you are doing well. 

Mid-term Resources 

Soon we will being thinking about entering student mid-term grades. It could be stressful for both professors and students. There is this article Helping Your College Student Make Sense of Midterm Grades I found helpful. Feel free to check it out

Midterm is also a good time to self-evaluate the course. If you are thinking about doing something like that but not quite sure about how, here is a general introduction about mid-term evaluation

If any of you, faculty here at Drury, had done mid-term before and are willing to share your thoughts, feel free to reply-all to this email or send it to me. 

Anytime, if you would like the ITC to help unpack student responses and develop a plan for next steps, please don’t hesitate to contact me. 

Updates on ARF 

• During February, I conducted the first round of individual interviews with our faculty research fellows. The fellows shared really valuable thoughts on curriculum, teaching and learning.
• In March, I will observe their classes. 
• In April, I will conduct the second interview with each fellow reflecting the class observed.
• Early May, the fellows will gather together and discuss about refining research questions and developing a plan for data collection in the fall. 

Feel free to talk to the fellows about their project. If you have any questions or thoughts on the Action Research Fellowship program, please also come and talk to me! 

NFO Activities 

If I have not mentioned our New Faculty Orientation, I should be blamed. 

Fifteen new faculty joined Drury last fall (2018). Since last August, we have been meeting bi-weekly to get to know each other, know about Drury, discuss teaching, share our thoughts and struggles, and get together afterwork and have fun. 

This semester we continue meeting bi-weekly. Experienced faculty were invited to join the meeting and shared their experience on certain topics. 

Because we are doing the NFO, we received a small amount of grant ($300) from the POD network (the Professional and Organizational Development network) to serve coffee and refreshment at the meetings. Coffee does help a lot! 😀 

Thank you! 

I want to thank the people who came to the center and talked with me about their ideas of teaching; who sent me resources when they came across something useful from the internet; and who gave suggestions about ITC in enhancing the culture of innovative teaching. Anything you give to me, I use it. The ITC is enriched by all of your participation. Thank you so much. 

Interpreting Student Feedback 

I would think most of you have received student feedback of your courses, one way or another. How to interpret and respond to student feedback can be puzzling. Questions we may wonder: 

• To what extent I should adapt my course to students’ suggestions?
• What are the meanings in my students’ feedback? 
• Do they complain because I have them do work? 
• Will they like me more if I just give them an “easy A”? 

 Is there a more objective way, or ways, of evaluating my course, so that I can combine with student feedback and better understand my teaching? 

These questions are worth answering, but there is unlikely readily answers to them. The answers are very much case by case, depending on more detailed information. 

So, if you want to talk to someone about your puzzles and wonders, the ITC is here for you! I can not promise that I have all the answers ready for you, but I would promise you a better understanding of the status, and some possible plans to try, after we talk together. 

Action Research Fellow Updates 

I am pleased to announce a new member of our ARF fellows: Dr. Jennie Long, Associate Professor in Criminology, has joined the ARF project. She will be studying best practices in advising. 

For the cohort, we have conducted the exploratory interview with all the Fellows. We have almost observed everybody’s practice (class or advising session). Next, we will schedule the reflective interview with each Fellow, talking about the class observed. 

Good job, Fellows! 

Congratulations on making another wonderful year! Our students will appreciate the high-quality Drury programs we provided–if not now, it will be one day.  

I hope the resources you received from ITC was helpful. Please let me know how I can make things better. I am in Springfield until end of May, and would be happy to grab a cup of coffee and meet with any of you to chat about anything!  

Thank you for supporting my first year. I am very grateful. 

Greetings from Ying in ITC! It is cool here and I am ready to chat with you about teaching.  

ITC programs 2019-2020 

The ITC is up and running from the week before semester starts. This semester, we have the following programs: 

1. New Faculty Orientation for 19-20—pre-semester workshop followed by biweekly meetings.
2. Office hours: Friday 9-noon. Everyone is welcome to walk in. Newsletters will hit your email inbox.
3. Action Research Fellow: Second phase for cohort started in 2018. Possibly send out the call for next round.
4. One-on-one consultation by appointment.
5. Faculty symposium relating faculty research to teaching. This program is incubating. You are welcome to ask questions, and send me ideas and suggestions.

Learning about students: Millennials and Gen Zers 

Special reading for school start: We are having a combination of Millennials and Gen Zers on campus. Although some of us may consider them same generation, they would rather distinguish from each other and claim who they (and the other group) are. I found this blog article Gen Zers vs. Millennials in the Workplace (click here) an interesting read. There is narrative both in the article and in the divided comments (laughing or angrily offended). The article may not provide us an accurate answer, but it does post good discussing prompts. 

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect ITC point of view. 😀 

It is hard to believe that we are at the end of week 6 and Monday of week 8 is when we will enter student midterm grades. It is again of the time of understanding how our students are doing so for in the course and what need to be done to be successful by the finals. 

I often find it is useful to collect some midterm feedback from students at this time of the semester. I have also heard creative and thoughtful ideas from our colleagues about what they do to self-evaluate. If you are also considering a mid-term information gathering, here are some ideas that I hope would help. 

Venue 

• A self-designed Moodle survey deliberate to collect midterm feedback
• Built-in survey questions in your mid-term exam
• Face-to-face individual conferences 

Content 

• General feedback on the course
• Specific feedback on the pedagogy that you implemented this semester
• Suggestions on the second half of the course 

Length 

• If it is a questionnaire, then no more than five questions would be good.
• Other than liked-scale questions, it is useful to include some open-response question to allow students type in their ideas.
• If it is face to face, half an hour per student sounds about right. 

I hope this is helpful. Feel free to chime in. Have a wonderful Friday! 

The ITC holds a mission of helping faculty become better in teaching. To teach better should also implies to enjoy more when we teach. In reality though, teaching gives us headache from time to time. This may be especially true when we care, which is a good thing. Here comes the dilemma: we are frustrated from time to time because we care; we do not want frustration but we do not want to become indifference. It makes us wonder: is there a solution? 

The answer is Yes. However, the solution is not that the ITC (or anybody else) comes in and tell you how to teach, because nobody knows your class more than you do.  

The true solution lies in each individual of ourselves, through the process of identify the issue—formulate a question—develop an intervention—collect data to assess—and come up with an action plan to implement in the next cycle. That is what we call Action Research. 

Whether you conduct Action Research formally (meaning you are aiming at publication) or informally (meaning you simply do it), Action Research is the true magic to solve the problems in teaching. 

The ITC initiated the Drury Action Research Fellowship program in the fall of 2018, and we accepted the first group of Fellows starting 2019. The 2019 Fellows’ projects are on-going. We expect to hear their results in May of 2020. Last Tuesday, we announced the call for applications for the second round of Action Research Fellows. This group will begin in 2020, so the two groups will have an overlapping semester (Spring of 2020). There could be exciting and productive conversation between Fellows in different stages. The Call-for-applications is attached again in this email. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. The deadline is Nov. 15th. Please apply even when you have a tiny bit of thought on doing something different with your class. The project is financially funded up to $1,000 for each Fellow. 

For those of you who are open to learn more about Action Research, the ITC is planning a reading group on the topic. We are going to use Norton’s book Action research in teaching and learning, A practical guide to conducting pedagogical research in universities as a guidance. The book cover and a blurb of the content are attached below. Google Books has it online till Chapter 4. Feel free to check out more content of the book. I have researched several books and decided to use this one. 

Our plan is to send out a survey soon about faculty interest and availability. We primarily plan on getting people to meet on campus and have live discussions. In the meantime, we are developing a radio channel (e.g., a podcast) to make the discussion available for people who are not physically there. I would love to have colleagues to co-organize and co-host the channel with me. Please email me if you are interested! 

Thank you for your attention! Please do not hesitate to send me any ideas you have to make the ITC more helpful. 

Last but not least: Have a good weekend with an extra hour! 

You could call this a not-yet-officially-launched ITC newsletter. We are working on getting there. 

Friday Office Hours 

ITC winter office hours is Friday 10-noon, starting today. We have a brand new water kettle, a brand new coffee maker, and a rich storage of tea and coffee. Thanks to OAA, and especially to Marline, to send all these in fairly quickly. All faculty members are welcome to stop by, hold a cup of hot drink, and have a chat about teaching. 🙂 

ITC Virtual Site in MyDrury 

The site will hold faculty resources for teaching and learning. Currently it has the presentation slides of the workshops ITC has given: 

• Assessment—Tying Learning Outcomes to Your Course
• What Is Innovative Teaching?
• How to Best Tutor?
• The progress of the Drury ARF project:
• Drury Action Research Fellowship—Call for applications 

And last but not least, a link to Stacy Mallory’s (Drury’s instructional designer) blog about online and blended courses. It has a special column called Do you know Moodle can do that? I am sure you are going to become addicted to it, soon. 

Finally, thanks to those of you who applied for the first round of Drury ARF program. We are reviewing the proposals and the decisions will be sent by Nov. 15th.