The Lego Workshop Lisa Endersby, Teaching Commons A new year is often a time to reflect, as the turning of the calendar pages prompts us to consider our past achievements and future goals. At the Teaching Commons, one area for reflection that motivates us in January and throughout the year is the possibility of innovation […]
Problem Based Learning – The Maastricht MOOC Justin Podur, Faculty of Environmental Studies In Fall 2017, Maastricht University in the Netherlands offered the second round of its Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in Problem Based Learning (PBL). As an instructor who has attempted to use PBL in the classroom, I took the course because I […]
Debunking the Myth of Learning through Experience with the Subway Emergency Exercise By Geneviève Maheux-Pelletier & Lisa Endersby On October 25, York University participated in a massive mock emergency exercise in preparation for the opening of the new subway station. Around 200 York university students, faculty and staff participated in the event. As educational developers with the Teaching Commons, […]
October 2017 Journal Club Blog Yelin Su, Teaching Commons In October, the Teaching Commons hosted the October meeting of the Journal Club discussing Turning Student Groups into Effective Teams. This article by Barbara Oakley et al. provides practical guides to instructors on designing and managing student team work in higher education. It has been widely accepted […]
It’s not all about play! Reflections on a LEGO Workshop Lisa Endersby and Celia Popovic, Teaching Commons Concepts of creative play and hands-on learning have become staples of our teaching conversations. More broadly, our understanding of active, participatory learning has grown to encompass expectations that our students will and should engage with us during class […]
Teaching Commons Journal Club – Launch of Year 2 Lisa Endersby, Teaching Commons The Teaching Commons hosted the launch of the second year of the Journal Club in mid-September. Our discussion of Making the Connection Between Research and Reality: Strategies Teachers Use to Read and Evaluate Articles (Shearer, Lundeberg, & Coballes-Vega, 1997) was an interesting exploration of […]
Musings on preparing for a new course: the use of Twitter as a course tool Alice Kim, PhD, Teaching Commons What I love most about teaching is the feeling I get when my students get excited about the course material and when I can see that the material is resonating with them. What I hate […]
Breaking Boundaries I: 10 Things Post-Secondary Educators Should Know When Working with Students with Autism Raymond Peart, ASD Coordinator (Raymond Peart): rpeart@yorku.ca Below are 10 things to consider when working with students with ASD: Every student with autism is different – just as every other student without autism is different. Students with ASD tend to present […]
Teaching Wheels James Andrew Smith, Lassonde School of Engineering There are typically two ways to get feedback on teaching: through anonymous student feedback and through your colleagues on the tenure and promotion committee. But both of these mechanisms are based on faulty assumptions that the feedback will always be objective and fair. While I’ve seen […]
It’s not about your teaching but about their learning: Increasing student engagement through the jigsaw classroom Prof. Claudia Chaufan, MD PhD School of Health Policy and Management/Global Health Program York University “Student engagement refers to the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning or being taught, which […]