The Teaching Commons offers a series of workshops for course directors who would like to enhance an existing course, or create a new course design. The sessions provide you with thorough, creative and practical strategies for developing your course. The focus will be on facilitating a learner-centered learning environment that promotes deep and active learning.
We can also offer specially scheduled or adapted workshops for groups of 6 or more.
For offerings in French at Glendon College, please follow this link.
Course Design Intensive
This is an intensive workshop to get you started designing or updating your course. We take a hands-on approach as we learn, discover, and discuss principles of course design, assessment and feedback, active learning and engagement strategies, and provide you with the resources you need to design great courses.
All sessions will run from 9:30am to 3:30pm. *We will break for 1 hour for lunch.
Date: December 6, 2018
Register for the Course Design Intensive
Date: July 23, 2019
Register for the Course Design Intensive
Date: December 5, 2019
Register for the Course Design Intensive
Inclusive Course Design
This session focuses on considerations for pedagogical practice that provides equal opportunities for learning as the student body becomes more diverse. In the first part of the workshop, we will discuss the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) developed to pro-actively meet the needs of learners with their varying abilities, talents and learning styles. An evolving case study will be presented to help participants apply some of the principles of UDL. In the second part of the session, we will look at the accommodation approach to inclusion, i.e., the removal of barriers and provision of accommodation based on individual requests. The workshop is designed to be interactive and will provide opportunties for questions and discussion.
December 12 from 10 am - 12:30 pm in DB 1012: Register here
Using LEGO in the Classroom
This workshop is designed to showcase new and innovative ways of using LEGO as a teaching tool in your classroom. LEGO is a powerful tool to help develop skills and demonstrate understanding beyond our traditional text-heavy learning activities while also overcoming some common challenges in unlocking our students’ creative potential.
Using a variety of interactive activities, participants will learn new strategies for incorporating LEGO into lessons teaching creativity, communication, and problem solving, as well as using these versatile building blocks for gathering formative assessment data. Participants will also learn from the facilitators’ experiences as both learners and teachers using LEGO in the classroom while discussing tips for how to use LEGO as an important classroom resource.
Please register early if you would like to attend as space for this session is limited.
Dates
Tuesday, July 30, 2019 | 1-3pm | DB 1014
Register for Using LEGO in the Classroom
Wednesday, January 30, 2019 | 1-3pm | DB 1014
Register for Using LEGO in the Classroom
The Interactive Lecture: An Active Learning Workshop
This workshop introduces participants to the Interactive Lecture as a technique to promote active learning, i.e., learning by doing.
In contrast to traditional lectures, during which instructors deliver content for periods varying between 45 and at times up to 120 minutes and pause only occasionally to ask students for questions, during interactive lectures instructors tend to begin with a puzzle or a question, and subsequently stop every 15 or 20 minutes to present yet other puzzles, questions, demonstrations, or points of debate for students to discuss in small groups and later share their thoughts with the larger group.
Research shows that students tend to remember a greater amount of content and engage in critical thinking more frequently when lectures are interactive rather than traditional. As learning goals are achieved, the classroom environment becomes more inclusive and the pleasure of learning is enhanced.
Attendees will be introduced to this pedagogical approach through participation in an interactive lecture on interactive lecturing, including a range of techniques such as think-pair-share, free writes, anonymous polls and on-line games. They will also receive a packet of information material to facilitate the implementation of this pedagogical approach in the classroom.
Date: Tuesday, February 26 | 10-11:30am | DB 1014
