Teaching Strategy Tip #42

Statement of Academic Integrity

Students and all others who work with information, ideas, texts, images, music, inventions, and other intellectual property owe their audience and sources accuracy and honesty in using, crediting, and citing sources. As a community of intellectual and professional workers, the College recognizes its responsibility for providing instruction in information literacy and academic integrity, offering models of good practice, and responding vigilantly and appropriately to infractions of academic integrity. Accordingly, academic dishonesty is prohibited in The City University of New York and at New York City College of Technology and is punishable by penalties, including failing grades, suspension, and expulsion. The complete text of the University policy on Academic Integrity may be found in the catalog.

City Tech’s Academic Integrity Policy Manual

Source: http://fc.short.cm/CityTechAcademicIntegrity

Teaching Strategy Tip #38

Fostering Class Discussion

Principles of good discussion, as specified by Brookfield and Presskill (2007), are to be used under the following appropriate conditions:

  • When multiple perspectives on content are possible
  • When applications of content to real life settings are being considered
  • When students already have grasped the essentials or basics of what is being discussed, the ‘grammar’ of the activity
  • When there is a genuine openness about where the discussion might lead.

Further, the chances for good discussion are raised when:

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Teaching Strategy Tip #23

Anticipate the next session’s topic

Strategy: At the end of a class session early in the semester, the instructor informs the students that they will be asked to write, at the beginning of the next session, responses to questions regarding understanding and agreement.

Process: At the beginning of a class session, students are asked to write two entries on index cards or sheets of paper:

  • Question 1: Something they did not understand in the reading
  • Question 2: Something they disagreed with in the reading

Source: http://fc.short.cm/AnticipateTheNextSessionsTopic

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Teaching Strategy Tip #29

Review with Exam Wrappers*

Strategy: Exam Wrappers direct students to review their performance (and the instructor’s feedback) on an exam to adapt future learning.

Time: Allot time for individual review and general discussion in the session after an exam

Materials: Returned exams
Questionnaire (“exam wrapper”) with three questions

Process:

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Teaching Strategy Tip #16

Explain Goals for Performance*

Strategy: Providing explicit goals and criteria for performance

Objective: Prevent students from misinterpreting criteria or misunderstanding goals in what they need to do and learn

Process:

  • Provide concrete or directive instructions:
    • Recognize when a key concept is at issue
    • Explain the key concept to solve problems or understand a process
    • Explain the key concept to a particular audience
  • Create a rubric and share it with students.
    • Include the levels of the quality of work produced and
    • Extend students’ knowledge of the qualities associated with good work

Source: http://fc.short.cm/ExplainGoalsForPerformance

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Teaching Strategy Tip #31

Fostering Learning Through Interaction

Adsit (2011) provides tips for lectures that are engaging, informative and participatory.

Audience Engagement and Interactivity
Audience attention wanes after 12-20 minutes. Design your class sessions with “activity breaks” to allow your students to process, review and apply the material that you present.

You might:

  • Ask a question or pose a problem to be solved individually
  • Have students work in pairs or trios on a problem or discuss a question
  • Use a video or film clip to illustrate the topic
  • Present a case study for discussion

Source: ​http://fc.short.cm/FosteringLearningThroughInteraction

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Teaching Strategy Tip #34

Writing

Many students are afraid of writing and are afraid of the freedom that an assignment predicated on their interests might suggest (Bean, 2011). A reason for students’ reactions is that they are concerned about exposing themselves as not being proficient writers. This is a concern not only for students whose first language is not English but also for those whose first language is English. Scaffolding assignments to provide practice and improve performance can be encouraged in multiple ways through formal and informal writing. Further, scaffolding writing assignments allow students to learn more critically as they improve their work.

Informal writing, also called exploratory writing, or expressive writing “is the kind of exploratory, thinking-on-paper writing we do to discover, develop, and clarify our own ideas. Exploratory writing is typically unorganized and tentative, moving off in unanticipated directions as new ideas, complications, and questions strike the writer in the process of thinking and creating. Examples of exploratory writing include journals, notebooks, marginal notes in books, nonstop freewrites, reading logs, diaries, daybooks, letters to colleagues…memoranda to myself” (Bean, 2011, pp. 120-121).

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Teaching Strategy Tip #7

Become a Critically Reflective Instructor*

Strategy: Obtain feedback from students on their engagement in the course

Time: (1) About ten minutes of class time
(2) Depending on the number of students, the results may take some time to enter, code, and tabulate, creating categories of responses. The results can also be grouped in broad categories and use stick-counting to tabulate the results, picking out exemplar quotes.

Materials: The [PDF] Critical Incident Questionnaire poses five questions to be answered without having students write their names. The questions are:

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Teaching Strategy Tip #40

Designing Tests

Key concepts to designing tests (Reed, 2002) include. Good test questions:

  • Address course objectives, material taught in class, and important skills and concepts
  • Provide complete, consistent, and unambiguous instructions
  • Present only one correct answer when only is called for
  • Are easy for all students to understand
  • Do not emphasize the trivial and do not ‘trick’ the students
  • Have the correct answers randomly arranged throughout the test for multiple-choice tests
  • Don’t provide signals or cues to eliminate incorrect answers
  • Highlight a negative word, such as not, to avoid confusion
  • Give students the opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned, not memorized; and
  • Are used to review and reinforce learning (Reed, 2002, p. 31).

Source: http://fc.short.cm/DesigningTests

Teaching Strategy Tip #45

Planning a Place-based learning visitTeaching tip #45

Click to view PDF with information on effectively using site visits.

Also, visit CUNY Arts to see the many New York City cultural venues available to students for free or discounted admission.
http://www1.cuny.edu/sites/cuny-arts/free-access/