Excellence in Teaching Program workshops feature speaker from Clemson University, Oct. 20
By: Barbara Millis
October 17th, 2006
Excellence in Teaching Program workshops on Friday, Oct. 20, 2006 feature special guest speaker from Clemson University, Dr. Linda Nilson, who will focus on visually communicating your course and reaching the 75% of students who don’t do the reading.
Register for Two GREAT offerings:
Visually Communicating Your Course to Students: The Graphic Syllabus
Extended Studies Building, CXS, Room 108
9 a.m. -12 p.m.
Your organization of topics is the basic framework, the very skeleton of your course, as well as the core of your syllabus. It also reflects your own unique organization of the field or specialty you are teaching, and as such is a piece of scholarship.
But do your students really get it? Do they see “the method to your madness”? Do they grasp “the big picture” of the field you’ve painted in words?
And do they understand at any given time in the semester what your course has accomplished so far and where it is going? Let your students actually see your course organization by portraying it graphically in an appendix to your text syllabus.
In this workshop you will develop a “graphic organizer” – that is, a pictorial diagram, flow chart, or concept map – of your course organization to distribute to your students on paper or on the web.
Not only will it make your course organization clear to students, it will provide a structure for them to integrate and remember your material. In addition, you will experience a new and creative way of thinking about a course.
Please bring one or more of your course syllabi to the workshop.
Please register for lunch as a separate event
Reaching the 75% of Students Who Don’t Do the Readings
Extended Studies Building, CXS, Room 108
1 p.m.-4 p.m.
This interactive workshop will address the common phenomenon in North American colleges and universities − students not doing the assigned reading. This issue is much more complex than student indifference or laziness.
As a participant, you will first explore and discuss the problem in all its research-based complexities: to judge the value and challenge of typical reading assignments from most students’ viewpoint, to reassess the necessity of certain readings, and to evaluate the faculty’s role in encouraging, or at least allowing, reading noncompliance.
Secondly, you will develop and select a variety of strategies for fostering reading compliance and comprehension, some of which are known also to enhance student learning and student ratings.
Linda B. Nilson, the founding director of Clemson University’s Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation, is the author of Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors, now in its second edition (Anker, 2003), and co-editor of Enhancing Learning with Laptops in the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2005).
She has published many articles and book chapters and has presented sessions both nationally and internationally on college-level teaching. She also teaches a graduate course called College Teaching.
Dr. Nilson entered the area of instructional and faculty development in the late 1970s while on the sociology faculty at UCLA. She went on to direct teaching centers at Vanderbilt University and the University of California, Riverside.
Dr. Nilson received her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in sociology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Barbara Millis, director of the Excellence in Teaching Program, can be reached at millis@unr.edu.
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