Making Multiple Choice Exams Fair, Meaningful, and Valid
TLC Seminar Room (TECH 112)

Facilitator: Robert Pred, TLC Faculty Fellow

Please join us for a hands-on workshop on designing questions that your students will perceive as fair and meaningful. The questions we design will assess your students’ deeper, conceptual understanding of the course material. We will discuss how to utilize feedback from the Measurement and Research Center (MARC) in order to construct multiple choice exams that assess learning outcomes in a valid and defensible manner.

Helping Students to Learn More and to Do Better
TECH 111

Universal Design for Learning:  A Framework for Inclusion
Ambler Campus, Learning Center, Room 202

Facilitator: Amy Weigand

Each Temple student brings a unique combination of abilities, background, learning preferences and challenges to the classroom. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) provides a conceptual framework for creating learning opportunities and assessments that are flexible, accessible, and inclusive of all students. Participants in this workshop will learn the fundamentals of UDL, strategies for using it in their courses, and helpful resources for continuing their development of inclusive teaching.   

Can We Talk? Structuring and Facilitating Class Discussions
TLC Seminar Room (TECH 112)

Facilitator: Carol Philips

The most productive class discussions require that students articulate their ideas, arguments, and questions about course material, as well as engage and negotiate the diverse perspectives of others. In this workshop, participants will learn about and directly experience two methods of structured discussion proposed by Stephen Brookfield in his book The Skillful Teacher (2006). These methods, which can be used in large classes or small groups, are designed to encourage participation as well as develop students’ ability to listen and respond to others.

Book Group on Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks
TLC Seminar Room (TECH 112)

Faciliator: Pamela Barnett

In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks—writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual—writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to transgress against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal.

bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom?

Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself.

—Routledge, 1994 book jacket

The Interteach Format: Facilitating Students’ Consistent Preparation, Attendance, and Active Participation.
TECH 111

Facilitator: Philip N. Hineline, Professor, Psychology, CLA

The Interteach Format is a whole-course arrangement organized around one-to-one discussion between students.  Its objective is to enable more (if not most) students to do as the best students always have done:  They consistently prepare for class, they integrate the course material by examining cross-relations between topics, and they actively participate during class.

• Here’s a way to get the students to tell you what they are finding difficult or interesting, which makes for easy and well-focused lecture preparation.
• Here’s a way to position yourself mainly as helpful coach, rather than as information dispenser.
• Here’s a way to provide consequences for the students to always come prepared–consequences that arise from normal conversation rather than from coercive arrangements.

View this session online

Eric Mazur's Peer Instruction: How Could It Work in Your Classroom?
TECH 111

Facilitators: TLC Staff

Participants will view a video that follows Mazur as he teaches an introductory class. He explains his methods, why he uses them, and discusses the improvement in student learning outcomes that he, and others, have documented. Following the video, we will discuss our own responses to his pedagogy and how we might use some of Mazur's methods in our own classrooms.

View Mazur Video