Fall 2024 The Teaching Inquirer Issue 2 | |
Because every student deserves good teaching | |
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We were thrilled to have record attendance at our 7th Annual Conference for High-Impact Instructional Practices, “Designing Instruction for Better Learning,” held on August 7, 2024.
Dr. Michelle Miller headlined our event, sharing information in interactive sessions about how to help our students better retain and retrieve information.
Our attendance exceeded 150, and feedback about the conference format and content was very positive. Several attendees commented on how engaging Dr. Miller was in her talk and how useful her information and suggestions were. They also appreciated the addition of our Tabling Session (led by our General Education Institute Scholars) and our concurrent sessions’ content.
-- Dr. Alison Barton, CTE Director
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Conference Participant Quotes
“I felt I learned from all components. I loved the breakout sessions with different topics and the poster presentations. It was great to interact with everyone and learn from their experiences.”
“I LOVED having the tabling and poster sessions. It was a way to get quick exposure to some powerful work.”
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Our CTE is working this year to get meaningful follow-up feedback on how much the information learned gets used. If you attended, please watch for an end-of-semester request for your feedback about the impact of our conference content on your teaching.
And finally – we are pleased to announce that next August’s CHIIPs conference will be closer to campus, at the Brinkley Center! Please hold the date: August 6, 2025!
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“I want my teachers to know…I’m trying my best” | |
 |  | During Welcome Week, the CTE has a booth with, among other things, a dry erase paddle with the words “I want my teachers to know…” permanently written across the top. As students walk by the booth, they are offered the opportunity to complete the sentence and have their photo taken holding the paddle. This issue’s Student Voices segment is highlighting one of those students, who completed the sentence with “I’m trying my best.” This is all the more poignant to me because the student who wrote these words is first-year student Zeke Brown, who happens to be my oldest child. It’s easy for me, as someone who spent nine years in college and has been a professor for over seventeen years, to forget that those first few weeks of college can be overwhelming and frankly, a bit frightening. It took my own son going through this experience to give me new perspective on what a big life change college can be for many students. Seeing those words under my son’s face, his smile tinged with anxiety, gave me a fresh perspective on the experience of our new students and made me reflect on whether or not I have been taking into account that, what is for me another routine beginning to the year (for the 18th time) as a college professor, is not at all routine for the hundreds of new students I will see in my introductory course. It’s made me look at the students with fresh eyes and helped me remember that even if they’re struggling, they are probably still trying their best; and that’s got to count for something.
-- Dr. Patrick Brown, CTE Senior Affiliate
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+1Teaching: Time for Feedback | |
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As midterms approach, students often look for a sense of how they’re doing in your class. By now, they’ve likely completed at least one major assignment or assessment, giving them a clearer picture of their progress and areas needing attention. This is also an ideal time for instructors to reflect on the course and gather feedback from students. A mid-semester feedback discussion, which the CTE can help facilitate, offers a great opportunity to receive actionable insights and identify common themes that can be shared back with your students. Given the ongoing challenges caused by Hurricane Helene in our communities, this could be an important moment to invite students into the process of revising your schedule to accommodate recent disruptions. For more ideas on how to adapt your course and support student success during these difficult times, check out the CTE’s Emergency Course Adjustments toolkit.
-- Phil Smith, CTE Assistant Director
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Community Engaged Learning Updates | |
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Exciting things are happening among our Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) experiences as we are entering year 2 of the Quality Enhancement Plan. This semester, we have 34 courses representing over 900 students who are taking part in engaged experiences with on- and off-campus community partners. Each of these CEL experiences provides space for deeper connections among course content through dynamic applications in real-world settings. It is through deeply developed critical reflections that each student in these experiences can articulate how they are changing because of their work with community partners.
If you are interested to know more about CEL and the methods behind this high-impact teaching practice, I want to encourage you to join our CEL Symposiums and CRICLE chats. During these professional development opportunities, you will have a chance to hear from faculty colleagues who are teaching CEL experiences and learn ways to encourage our students to see their learning as an embedded part of the lives of the people of our region and beyond.
-- Dr. Scott Jenkinson, CEL QEP Director
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CEL Symposium Series
Wednesday November 6, 2024, 2:00-3:00
This CEL Symposium will host lecturer Alisa Hearl and Assistant Professor Angela Flemmer from the College of Nursing. These committed faculty members facilitate community-engaged learning experiences within the BSN Nursing program by providing opportunities for their students to discover, understand, and work to address a variety of issues that impact the overall health of our region. Come learn more about how their students are connecting their learning with the community through purposefully beneficial actions and powerful reflection.
This is a hybrid session, come to 309 Sherrod Library or Zoom option.
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CEL Circle Chats
Monday October 28, 2024, 9:00-10:00
The CRiCL Chat series will be a collection of workshops and discussions about how to implement critical reflection in a variety of class settings, with a variety of class groups, and for a variety of learning connected outcomes.
Each month will have two meeting opportunities (one in-person and one online) in which the same content will be explored.
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CTE Teaching Micro-Awards | |
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We are pleased to roll out a new set of micro-awards to recognize teaching excellence for a variety of instructor roles and a variety teaching contexts/approaches!
Our Center now offers 6 faculty awards, with 2 awards announced each year on a 3-year cycle.
The awards for this academic year (2024-2025) are for Large-Class Teaching and Online Teaching. Upcoming awards in the cycle include (2025-2026) Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, New Faculty, and (2026-2027) Adjunct Faculty, Problem/Project-Based Learning.
Deadline for nomination packets is November 15. Winners are pre-notified and then announced at our Exceptional Teaching: Get Inspired spring event (February; date TBA). Winners receive $500 and up to $1000 toward conference travel to present on their teaching in the following fiscal year.
We will also annually award up to 3 teaching awards for Teaching Associates who have direct teaching experience at ETSU and demonstrate significant evidence of instructional professional development and reflection. Nomination packets for the TA awards are due by January 15, and winners will be pre-notified and announced at our Exceptional Teaching: Get Inspired event.
Learn more about eligibility, nomination packet requirements, how to submit nominations, and award packages on our website.
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Welcome New CTE Affiliates | |
Our Team keeps growing! We are grateful for our new CTE Affiliates: | |
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Brianna August-Rae
Communication Studies and Storytelling
Amanda Frasier
Curriculum and Instruction
Deidre Johnson
Student Services, College of Medicine
Lori Meier
Curriculum and Instruction
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Affiliates and Associates work with the CTE to develop and deliver instructional support to colleagues in a variety of possible ways. See our website to learn more. | |
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We also welcome our new Graduate Assistant, Norbert Ogar. Norbert is a doctoral student in Public Health. He will be focusing on outreach and community building with the graduate teaching assistants on campus. Welcome, Norbert!
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Susan Epps, CTE Faculty Associate
Put the F**king Phone Down by Josh Misner
In a strangely timely manner, the book Trevor Chapman had recommended arrived on the Sunday after Hurricane Helene hit the East Tennessee area and I had been doom-scrolling on my phone for almost three days. I want to hang out with Josh Misner, author of Put the F**king Phone Down, not just because I love that he uses curse words so well, but because he has written the book I really need to be reading right now. As I find myself responding to the buzz of my phone like I'm one of Pavlov's dogs (a comparison he makes himself), it has become clear that I need to put my own f**king phone down. Misner's humorous take on our addictions to our phones is countered with what life can be like when we step away from it.
In each section, he gives the reader homework, okay, mindfulness activities to help us experience paying attention to things other than our phones. Like Misner, I can get impatient at stop lights (especially when there's no traffic at 5:45 a.m. and I just want to get to my hot yoga class). He challenges us to step away from our view of stoplights as an impediment and to see them as "a momentary relief from the chore of driving." Basically, to just BE in the moment. I tried it and OMG - I noticed the shape of the trees at the light at the intersection of University Parkway and Lamont Street. At the light at University Parkway and State of Franklin, I saw how pretty the clouds were as they hovered below Buffalo Mountain. And when I sat at my computer to write this, I put my phone to the side face down and vowed not to look at it until I had finished and hit send. It's a start and I'm not saying I'll never doom-scroll again, but if Misner can help me get some of those hours back in the future, I'm happy to put the f**king phone down!
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Trevor Chapman, CTE Faculty Associate
Generative AI in the Classroom: Can Students Remain Active Learners? by Rania Abdelghani et al.
Ask any of my colleagues in the Biology Department or at the CTE and they’ll tell you I am a huge advocate of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the classroom, maybe annoyingly so. I am also a proponent of active learning, as most of us at the CTE are. A recent preprint by Rania Abdelghani et al. entitled “Generative AI in the Classroom: Can Students Remain Active Learners?” challenges the idea that AI and active learning are inherently compatible.
For example, generative AI (GAI) such as ChatGPT offers students an easy way to answer questions, rather than encouraging them to do some serious searching on the web or in textbooks. Students also have difficulty questioning AI's accuracy when it confidently provides incorrect answers to questions. Additionally, their confidence can be artificially inflated by encouragement when they come to incorrect conclusions.
In short, it can negatively impact exploration and critical thinking skills, major tools involved in active learning. To negate some of these, the authors discuss some solutions, such as training students to prompt or teaching metacognition and critical thinking skills. We can also create activities that are impossible to complete without actively engaging in the learning process. For example, I have students use AI to generate literary art about biological concepts and then critique said art, a task that requires serious critical thinking. While AI might lead to passive learning or even misinformation without guidance, we can use it to create great active learning opportunities for our students if we approach the task mindfully.
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Find all kinds of teaching books for check-out in our CTE Teaching Collection -
Room 441 Sherrod Library!
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