It is important to help students settle into the rhythm of the semester. One way to do this is to nudge those who have missed assignments. You can easily contact students in Canvas who have missed a specific assignment using the Message Students Who function. This Canvas Guide explains how to quickly send these messages that students will receive privately. Later in the semester, you can use this same function to contact students who have struggled with an assignment as well as those who have done well in an assignment.
What Inclusive Instructors Do
Through their national, multipart study of instructors at a variety of higher educational institutions, Tracie Marcella Addy, Derek Dube, Khadijah A. Mitchell, and Mallory E. SoRelle sought to identify how participants define inclusive teaching and what practices they implement in their own courses. One of the results of this work is a comprehensive resource that introduces readers to both the theory and practice of inclusive teaching including small steps to establish and foster a culture of inclusion within courses. Addy and colleagues define inclusive teaching as teaching that promotes belonging and equity.
Inclusive instruction is the result of a mindset that values student diversity and views it as critical to learning among all members of the course. Inclusive instructors take ownership over their role in fostering an inclusive learning environment on campus, rather than viewing it as the responsibility of others on campus such as the diversity office.
An inclusive mindset provides the lens through which instructors design an inclusive course. Courses are intentionally built to foster success and equitable participation among all student and provide a sense of belonging in the discipline. These design choices can be communicated early in the semester through the syllabus.
Inclusive teaching does not end once the course is developed but impacts how the course is facilitated as well. Inclusive instructors build a learning community in the class and are transparent about not only what they expect of students, but why these are the expectations. One way to increase transparency is through implementing the TILT (Transparency in Learning & Teaching) framework to your assignments.
The IUB SoTL program within CITL is sponsoring two programs for faculty to engage with Dr. Addy and the ideas in her book; What Inclusive Instructors Do. The first is a virtual keynote on September 10, 2021. You can learn more about the talk and register on the CITL event page. This is open to faculty members and instructors on all IU campuses.
The second program is a fall faculty reading group of What Inclusive Instructors Do. Meetings will be held from 2-3:30pm on the following Fridays: October 1, October 29, & November 19, 2021. In addition to receiving a physical copy of the book, participants will have the opportunity to talk with author, Tracie Addy, during one of the meetings. If you are an IUB faculty member or AI interested in joining the book group and can commit to attending all three of these meetings, please fill out the brief application form no later than Sunday, September 12, 2021.
Welcome to IUB: Ensuring a Smooth Start to Your Fall Courses
Welcome to our new instructors at IU! We hope that you are settling in well and looking forward to meeting your students this week. In this post we share strategies and tools for making the start of the semester as productive as possible for you and your students.
Prepare your Canvas site
We highly recommend that you upload your syllabus and set up your assignments before the start of your class. Many students start planning their semester workloads early on, so providing them with assignment dates from your class right away helps them plan their time.
If you set up assignments in Canvas, the system will automatically create your gradebook, list assignment due dates on your students’ Canvas calendars, and reproduce these due dates at the bottom of the syllabus tool. You can also let Canvas take care of gradebook calculations such as dropping the lowest grades in an assignment group, weighting groups of assignments, etc.
One of our Instructional Technology Consultants can review your Canvas site and make sure that your grades are being calculated accurately. Don’t forget to publish your Canvas site and assignments, otherwise your students cannot view your site or their assignments. You can review this Canvas Semester Checklist Pressbook from our colleagues at IUPUI’s Center for Teaching and Learning. Also keep an eye out for announcements on the Canvas Dashboard. The current one shares how to enable popular tools in Canvas.
Get to know your students before the first day of class
Making your students feel like part of a community from Day One encourages commitment to the course and sets the stage for engagement and success. Several tools in Canvas allow you to get to know your students before the start of the semester:
- Learn a few student names before the first day. The People tool lists all of your students and is updated daily. Use this tool to add your AIs to your course site. Click on the Photo Roster button to view, download, and print student names and photos.
- Name Coach allows you and your students to record names. This tool allows students to record the pronunciation of their preferred name. Consider creating a Name coach assignment in Canvas.
Plan your first days of class
Often we are so focused on getting ready for the start of the semester that we do not spend enough time thinking through the activities of the first day of class. Here are some suggestions:
- Visit your classroom and practice with its technologies. If you cannot visit it, search the Classroom database to see photos of your room and read about the resources available in it. This will help you plan some activities for the first day and the rest of the semester.
- Request automatic recording of your in-person classes so that students can review materials after class or catch up if they were absent. Learn more about and fill in the Kaltura Lecture Capture request form in the Knowledge Base.
- Set up Zoom rooms for meeting with your students early in the semester, holding online office hours, and for students who might need to attend class remotely. Learn more about using Zoom at IU in the Knowledge Base. If you will have students attending class in-person and online, read this Quick Guide filled with tips for Engaging Remote Students in Classroom Learning.
- Read our Quick Guide about Teaching While Masked for tips on warming up your voice and projecting without straining your voice.
- Communicate your expectations of students and review a few key points from the syllabus, but don’t read through the entire thing. Set the tone and give them some highlights, but let them deal with the details on their own.
- Engage your students in activities that give them a sense of why your course might be important to them, and what your typical class looks like. If you plan on having them actively engage in learning, let them practice that on the first day.
Read some more first day strategies on our website. CITL staff continue to write Quick Guides to Teaching about pressing teaching topics. You can also access Quick Video Guides on Teaching and Technologies from our colleagues at IUPUI’s CTL.
Hopefully these suggestions help as you start your teaching career here at IUB. Please contact us with any questions related to your teaching. We are happy to schedule a meeting with you. Also plan to attend some of our upcoming events.
What Will You Keep This Fall? Susan Siena on More Frequent Tests
In my last video in this series, Dr. Susan Siena from the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs talks with me about moving from a few higher-stakes exams to more frequent, lower-stakes ones. Susan has evidence that students see better connections between exams and the course content, due to the more immediate assessments, and the number of D’s and F’s have gone down. The more frequent tests also allow students to learn about how to take an exam and improve their test-taking skills, an important factor in 100- and 200-level classes.
If you have something to share—or know of a colleague who does—let me know, and we will set up an interview. To see all our “What Will You Keep”? videos, look for the WWYK tag in our blog.
What Will You Keep for Fall? Sapna Mehta on Alternative Assessments
In this episode of WWYK, I talk with Dr. Sapna Mehta from the Department of Biology, and she shares how she has transformed an upper-level class in two ways—by taking a hybrid approach and by replacing all her exams with weekly scaffolded exercises that lead to a final project. That final project is also one of their own choosing. This episode is a bit longer than most, but we covered a range of topics that overlap—alternative assessments, hybridizing a class to focus class time on application activities, and engaging students by giving them self-determination over their final assignment format and topics. I had fun in this conversation, hearing how Sapna layered these strategies to truly transform her class. And she’s not going back.
If you have something to share—or know of a colleague who does—let me know, and we will set up an interview. To see all our “What Will You Keep”? videos, look for the WWYK tag in our blog.
What Will You Keep this Fall? Michael Morrone on Google Docs to Promote Student Engagement
In this week’s WWYK episode, I talk with Michael Morrone, one of our first class of Teaching Professors, from the Kelley School of Business, and the Director of FACET. Michael shares how he uses Google Docs to structure class activities and enhance student engagement both within activities and across the semester. His approach is also interesting in that it makes students’ learning visible to them, letting them go back and see what happened in each class.
A few related links for topics we mention during our conversation:
- Using Google Docs in Zoom breakout rooms
- Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs)
- Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) framework
If you have something to share—or know of a colleague who does—let me know, and we will set up an interview. To see all our “What Will You Keep”? videos, look for the WWYK tag in our blog.