Workshops

The mission of the Distinguished Teaching Academy (DTA) is to foster and reinforce a culture of teacher-scholars committed to promoting teaching and learning excellence and to facilitate the enhancement, recognition and celebration of teaching and learning at ASU.

Many students “get by” without actually reading the assigned course readings. Come and find out what the barriers are to reading (both student and teacher created) and how to create learning activities that encourage students to read more for your class! You will leave with easy to implement strategies to use immediately.

This workshop introduces you to CATS, a quick way of understanding student learning between lecture and test. Most CATS take very little time to design, administer, and review. You can select the ones that fit your teaching style during the workshop.

This session is a must for faculty who spend hours grading papers. The workshop activities will help you change your grading focus from grader to reader.

This session is for you if you want guidance on designing an effective, comprehensive syllabus that student will regard as a resource for their learning. In the workshop, you will see the syllabus from a student’s point of view. You will be able to communicate your expectations and the links between the class objectives and the learning activities students will undertake. Bring your syllabus with you.

Blackboard 8 offers many upgrades that will help you track student learning. The version also helps you to design, evaluate, and give feedback within the BB environment without producing paper. A basic knowledge of BB is useful for this workshop.

Through the ASU Libraries you can access thousands of e-journals, hundreds of research databases, millions of books, and bibliographic management tools such as RefWorks. Join us for a hands-on session that will help you locate all your necessary library resources and services, including identifying your assigned librarian. In addition we will provide a brief introduction to RefWorks and demonstrate how you and your students can benefit from its use.

This session demonstrates how to design rubrics or grading tools that make life easier for you and the students. Rubrics allow you to make your expectations clear to students so that they can also evaluate their work. You will be introduced to a number of online resources for finding rubrics to model your evaluations.

This session is for faculty who have already worked with Blackboard extensively or completed the Blackboard I workshop earlier. This workshop will focus on the bells and whistles of BB8.

Many resources you will need at ASU are readily available on line at the Faculty center. Here you can get your class roster, send early warnings to students in trouble, and check out your options for professional development. This will be a hands on session.

Student response systems or clickers are an effective way of engaging students in large classes. Clickers allow for instant feedback on student understanding of lecture concepts. They also encourage student learning by scaffolding knowledge.

Your classroom at ASU will have students with many different learning styles, from many ethnic and religious backgrounds, and with very differing world views, especially when it comes to the process of learning. This workshop will help you think through assignments that will draw upon these strengths.

We all know that student demographics are changing rapidly. Your classroom will be populated by students wired both inerrancy and externally. Come to this session to discuss how you can use technological thinking to enhance your course.