From Award-Winning OU Faculty

Expressing your teaching philosophy in 10 words can be a short but powerful way to reflect on your teaching values and practices. We asked the recipients of Oakland University’s 2022 Teaching Awards to share their Teaching in 10 Words, plus a little more on those 10 words. Learn more about the awards, which are coordinated through the Senate Committee on Teaching and Learning.

Fostering Engagement and Collaborative Problem Solving with Team-Based Learning

Sarah Lerchenfeldt, Teaching Excellence Award

Effective teamwork often leads to successful outcomes. For this reason, I became interested in the Team-Based Learning (TBL) instructional method, an evidence-based pedagogical strategy that increases student engagement through collaborative learning. There are several reasons why I utilize TBL. It not only helps students improve their critical thinking skills and clinical reasoning related to pharmacology, but also helps students improve their communication and interpersonal skills. I also use TBL because it more easily allows me to collaborate with a diverse set of educators from various backgrounds and expertise to create integrated modules that are more meaningful to clinical practice. I have used horizontal and vertical integration of course material to help learners make important connections between the basic and clinical sciences. During these sessions, I encourage students to develop their higher-order thinking skills with challenging, real-life scenarios and guide them to focus on developing skills and practices that enable lifelong learning.

Use Variety in Instruction to Motivate Students and Maximize Learning

Dennis Burin, Excellence in Teaching Award

My Global Human Systems class has many broad topics that elicit strong opinions and creative solutions. Topics include immigration, world population, religion, and politics.  Getting to know the students initially helps to build rapport and create an atmosphere conducive to sharing and respecting each other’s viewpoints. During my lectures I am constantly asking questions to check for understanding and, just as important, foster critical thinking skills. I teach the material as unbiased as possible and try to teach both sides of an issue and then have the students share their opinions and potential solutions. I also tie in current events to all topics, use discussion forums in Moodle to get everyone involved in the discussion and view these discussion forums in class (focusing on the less vocal students), and use short video clips to enhance instruction. I believe that using variety in your instruction keeps students motivated and enhances learning.

Keeping Students Engaged Online: Importance of Organization, Scaffolding, and Humor

Sandra Troxell-Smith, Online Teaching Excellence Award

Engagement and interest in online learning can be a struggle for both faculty and students alike, particularly in asynchronous courses. While the flexibility of the asynchronous format has obvious appeal, students often struggle with the “open” schedule. To combat online course fatigue, my Moodle pages follow a very specific layout, with scaffolded lessons, fresh course material, and explicit expectations appearing each week. A standard Moodle page structure allows students to focus on the material, rather than struggling to parse out what’s due when. I also share my own personality with my students by incorporating things like punny t-shirts and memes into my lectures. Humor helps students connect to and engage with the material, and allows me to build a virtual connection with them over something other than just academics. Students feel supported by the consistent weekly Moodle structure, and are interested to see what eye-roll worthy bits are coming up next!

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Normally learning in the classroom starts with delivery: reading before discussion, lecture before practice, review before testing. When might it be advantageous to flip this order? By asking students to demonstrate knowledge before you have delivered course content via lecture, text, or instructional video, students can better appreciate the gap of knowledge before and after reviewing the course content. By going through the active experience of learning without all of the answers, students are more aware of what they do not know, learn through mistakes, and develop curiosity. Consider when and how you can throw students into learning by starting with hands-on experience before content delivery.

How to Start with Experience

While mistakes are a normal part of much of the everyday learning students do, they may be uncomfortable with problem-solving without all the tools and information they rely on their instructors to provide. Communicate to students that this is part of the learning design and that they are not being penalized for not knowing all of the answers but being empowered to work through that which they do not yet know.

Updated from the original teaching tip published on 10/29/2017. 

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About the Author

Written by Christina Moore, Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oakland University. Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC. View all CETL Weekly Teaching Tips. 

Should instructors offer extra credit? Some believe it makes students lazy and more likely to want to make up material only after they have missed it. While extra credit can certainly have this effect on students, well-designed extra credit assignments can have a range of benefits instead. I always use extra credit in my courses rather than scaling grades, dropping the lowest grade, or assigning ad hoc assignments at the end of the semester to boost students’ grades. I apply several strategies when creating extra credit to make it a meaningful and enriching part of students’ experience in my courses.

Benefits

Well-designed extra credit assignments have the following benefits for students and the instructor.

• Students engage with the material beyond the assigned coursework, which helps reinforce their understanding of concepts taught in class.
• Students have more agency in working toward the final grade they want to achieve. Rather than taking action myself to boost student grades, I give students the opportunity to improve their course performance if they wish.
• Assigning extra credit enables me to avoid the dreaded question, "Can I do anything to improve my final grade?" The few times I am asked for more lenience, I have a fair answer: "All students had the same opportunities for extra credit during the course. There is no 'extra' extra credit." The ball is in the students' court; I am just the recordkeeper.
  

Strategies

I use the following strategies to create effective extra credit assignments.

• All students are given the same opportunities for extra credit so that everyone has an equal chance to improve their grade. This is stressed on the syllabus and throughout the course.
• Extra credit point values can be flexible. Mine are based on the nature of the assignment and the amount of extra credit the class needs as a whole.
• I assign extra credit regularly during the semester rather than waiting until the end of the semester. Students have an opportunity to submit extra credit at predictable intervals, which helps them keep their interest in the course and avoid anxiety about their final grade.

Types of Extra Credit

A wide range of work can be assigned as extra credit – it's really up to the instructor's imagination! My extra credit assignments fall into two categories:

• additional problems – I assign these in my linguistics courses to give students more practice with difficult concepts and methods of analysis.
• engaging applications – I create fun assignments that apply ideas covered in class. Basically anything goes as long as it’s relevant for the course! I have assigned Moodle surveys, interviews of individuals in the student’s social circle, discussion forums with thought-provoking questions, reflections about online videos or articles, and educational activities on websites that tie into course themes. (Consider using H5P in Moodle to create some of your extra credit activities. e-LIS has H5P help documents to assist you, or contact the e-LIS ID team for a one-on-one consultation.)

Conclusion

Viewing extra credit as a positive component to include in your course opens up a useful additional avenue to increase student learning. Methodically and creatively designing extra credit that fits with course themes is an excellent way to give students supplementary practice with course material and further opportunities to see applications of course material in the real world. Extra credit assignments might even take more effort than regular homework, but if they are well-designed, students will be happy to do them!

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About the Author

Helena Riha teaches Linguistics and International Studies. She has taught over 3,300 students at OU in 16 different courses and is currently developing a new online General Education course. Helena is the 2016 winner of the OU Excellence in Teaching Award. This is her thirteenth teaching tip. Outside of the classroom, Helena enjoys watching her sixth grader design his own Lego creations.

Edited and designed by Christina Moore, Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oakland University. Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC. View all CETL Weekly Teaching Tips.