.png)
2022 Events
Leading Difficult Conversations in the Classroom
Tuesday, November 15, 2022
Given the fraught nature of this moment in history, how can we have some of the difficult conversations necessary for preparing our students for the complexities of life after graduation? Are there ways to have these conversations that are both civil and productive without whitewashing realities that demand our attention? What's more, are there ways to structure our classes so that our students understand not just how to have a productive conversation, but why-and further, that allows them to understand how, they might move into the world as deliberative, thoughtful ambassadors for meaningful, powerful change in a nation desperately in need of such citizens?
Wicked Conversations Part 2: Exploring Wicked Teaching
Thursday, October 20, 2022
As a means of priming everyone for the work of the General Education Implementation Committee, the Harte Center ran a series of informal sessions on wicked problems and their implications for course design, teaching, and student work. This second session explored the implications of bringing a wicked world into our classrooms: if our students are to have the competencies and capacities to solve these problems, what does that mean for our teaching? For our day-to-day practices? For the assignments we give students?
Creating Opportunities for Effective Peer Response in Our Classes
Tuesday, October 11, 2022
We all know that peer-to-peer instruction can be incredibly powerful. Done well, students will learn both from receiving feedback and from providing it. Done poorly, it can leave both students and instructors frustrated. This session was designed to provide some core concepts for faculty interested in bringing peer responding-for papers, for posters, for oral presentations, for anything, really!-into their classes. Attendees come away with useful tips, but also with a sense of the range of possibilities available to them as they seek to implement this powerful learning tool.
Finding the Balance: Supporting Student Well-being and Student Learning
Thursday, September 29, 2022
The pandemic taught us many lessons about higher education, one of which was to pay attention to the well-being of our students, many of whom are struggling much of the time. As the world shifts to a "new normal," how do we balance that need with our desire to ensure that our carefully-designed courses are challenging and impactful, that student learning isn't undermined by any number of uncontrollable personal circumstances? This highly interactive workshop-co-sponsored by the Harte Center, the AIM program, and University Counseling- explored a number of complex scenarios as a means of prompting all of us to find solutions that meet all of the needs of our students, reflect our individual work in the classroom, and achieve the mission of a liberal arts college.
Wicked Conversations Part 1: What the Heck IS a Wicked Problem Anyway?
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
As a means of priming everyone for the work of the General Education Implementation Committee, the Harte Center ran a series of informal sessions on wicked problems and their implications for course design, teaching, and student work. This first session took a 10,000-foot view: what is a wicked problem? What wicked problems will our students face? What wicked problems exist in our disciplines and fields-and what does it mean to bring those problems into our classrooms?
Growth Mindset: Harnessing Resilience and Success
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
Leveraging the Power of Science to Harness Resilience and Success
Monday, April 11, 2022
Sarah Rose Cavanagh: Energizing and Motivating Students to Learn in Uncertain Times
Tuesday, March 22, 2022
Historically we have constructed our classrooms with the assumption that learning is a dry, staid affair best conducted in quiet tones and ruled by an unemotional consideration of the facts. The pedagogical world, however, is beginning to awaken to the potential power of emotions to fuel learning, informed by contributions from psychology and neuroscience.
In this interactive presentation, Sarah Rose Cavanagh will argued that if you as an educator want to capture your students' attention, enhance their motivation, harness their working memory, bolster their long-term retention, and encourage habits related to good mental health, you should consider the emotional impact of your teaching style and course design. To make this argument, she brought to bear empirical evidence from the study of education, psychology, and neuroscience. The presentation concluded with practical examples of activities and assignments that capitalize on this research that could be implemented in your next class.
Link to Resource Guide (must log in with W&L credentials)
"Epistemic Vexation:" Leading Students to Embrace "Not-Knowing" in Quantitative Classes
Our young people are experiencing an epidemic of mental health problems. College students report anxiety during the processes of assessment, feedback, and grading more than any other aspect of the learning experience, and these feelings of anxiety seem to emerge especially in quantitative fields. How can we craft learning experiences that stimulate but also support? How can we lead students to not only tolerate the experience of not-knowing but to embrace it?
In this interactive workshop, Sarah Rose Cavanagh argued that we first need to build vibrant learning spaces where students feel that they belong, where they feel it is safe to take risks, where they can take on new challenges, and where we model open, curious behaviors for them.
We will brainstormed and discussed strategies for building such spaces, with a focus on our assessment, feedback, and grading practices that launched us on a path of resilience and achievement, students need to learn in environments that are both compassionate and challenging.
Link to Resource Guide (must log in with W&L credentials)
Nobody is Neutral: What It Means to be "Objective"
Teacher/Scholars
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
What does it mean to "bring ourselves" into our scholarship? What happens when we as teachers and scholars "bring ourselves" into our research and into our classrooms? How might this approach - which challenges unexamined notions of academic neutrality - open different avenues for teaching our students deeper methods of historical rigor and inquiry?
Rethinking Our Writing Assignments from the Student Perspective: An Interactive Workshop
Friday, January 28, 2022
Ever hand out a paper assignment, ask "Any questions?" only to be met with silence-and then spend the next two weeks answering e-mail inquiries about this very same assignment? Or, ever get a stack of papers from your students and wonder "Did they even read the assignment?" What's going on here?
This workshop was designed to answer those questions and gave the inside track on how to ensure that your assignments are designed and written to avoid student confusion and maximize student learning.
Led by Carter Chandler (Writing Center Peer Consultant, UG class of 2023) and Judy Strang (Writing Consultant, Harte Center for Teaching and Learning), this workshop will presented a student's perspectives on common assignment prompt problems and provided practical approaches for better writing assignment design. Through this discussion and small group work on participants' assignments, this workshop shed light on the cognitive and creative facets of any writing task in any class at any level. In other words? This is a workshop that helped all of us better help our students.