Workshops
Designed to help faculty with planning and thinking creatively about teaching.
This year, workshop offerings will be guided by a specific theme. There is significant interest at colleges throughout the country in how to effectively teach students of this current generation, often named “Generation Z.” Whether you subscribe to such categorization, it is true that for the past several years many of our students have been exhibiting behaviors and characteristics that pose a singular challenge to teaching them. We encourage you to attend any or all of these workshops to share your own strategies and learn from others how to be a better teacher for our students.
- To register, please email the center with your request. If you have any questions about the workshops in general or particular workshops that interest you, please contact us.
CTE workshops are not lectures, so come prepared to work on issues in your own teaching, reflect on your teaching goals, and get some practical takeaways that you can apply in your courses. Here is your slate of teaching workshops to help you build and maintain momentum in your teaching this semester!
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Upcoming Workshops
Browse through the scheduled workshops below and contact the center if you plan to attend.
Reminder emails will be sent the day before any scheduled workshop.
Finding Meaning in the COS
- Location: 301 Feinberg
- Thursday, Sept 6 at 1 p.m.
This is a workshop on how to interpret and respond to course opinion surveys. The purpose of this workshop is to give you the tools to understand the elements of the student surveys that are most relevant to efficacy in teaching and suggestions on how to address those elements in a productive way and sustained way.
Student Engagement: Two Parts
A common source of frustration for faculty these days is the passivity of students in the classroom. I share this frustration. It is very demoralizing to walk into a classroom with a passion for one’s discipline and feel as though that passion and energy is disappearing into a black hole of disinterest. At the very least, it makes teaching less enjoyable, and at worst, there is the concern that our students are not learning. What engages or engaged you as a student? You don’t have to be an entertainer to keep students’ attention and encourage them to work in your class. Students tend to be more engaged with course materials and activities when they clearly see the relevance to their own interests, when they are appropriately challenged, and when they have a clear sense of what is expected of them and how they will be assessed.
These two workshops address the core structure of a face to face classroom: the lecture, and the assignments and activities. We will work together to understand how to construct and deliver lectures that engage and instruct, and how to design complementary assignments and activities that reinforce the instruction in a manner that takes into account the characteristics of Generation Z.
- Part 1: Lectures
- Location: 301 Feinberg
- Monday, Sept. 10 at 4 p.m.
- Part 2: Activities and Assignments
- Location: 301 Feinberg
- Thursday, Sept 20 at 11 a.m
Hotshot: Victoria Reynolds — Motivation & Assessment
- Location: ACC Meeting Room #1
- Sept 19 at 1 p.m.
Augmentative and alternative communication refers to any mode of communication that replaces or supplements speech, such as sign language, a text-to-speech app or a communication board. It is an important area of speech pathology practice, yet students traditionally find it a difficult area to master. Further, while the issue of physical accessibility is widely-known in the community, communication accessibility is not. I've tried to solve the problem of student engagement by recruiting them to a social justice cause, all from the comfort of their own classroom, and with a little help from some friends.
Joining the Common Problem Project
- Location: ACC Meeting Room #1
- Wednesday, Sept 26 at 11 a.m.
The Common Problem Project, which has been running for three years now in collaboration with three other SUNY campuses, Oneonta, Oswego, and Cortland, has been re-infused with a new, NSF grant award. Right now, we are completing the last year funded by the SUNY Improvement Grant, and we will have a number of faculty participating in the fall. The next round will have faculty specifically from STEM partnering with Humanities faculty/classes. Course development would take place in the fall of 2018 (for which faculty will receive a stipend) and the collaborative teaching will begin in spring, 2018.
I will be holding an information session for any faculty interested in participating. The project entails faculty partnering to engage their students with a common problem, providing them with the opportunity to use problem-based learning techniques and to work together to solve a problem from the unique perspective of their disciplines. I believe this pedagogical experiment can be a way to really address multiple facets of the challenges we face with this generation of students.
Hotshot: Erika Guay — 10 Things to do with a Gen Ed Class
- Location: ACC Meeting Room #1
- Oct 2 at noon
Feeling stuck with your gen ed class? Not sure what new things to try? Come to this workshop to learn 10 new hands-on ideas to keep your class fresh.
Generation Z: Two Parts
My experiences with class visits and consults in the past two years have confirmed what I have seen in my own students: passivity, addiction to technology, lack of social skills, and more. Of course, this is a generalization, as is the labeling of any group. As much as I am reluctant to lump this generation into one category, it does appear that generation Z (roughly 2005–2018) has certain characteristics, both weaknesses and strengths. This is not an issue unique to Plattsburgh; there is a flurry of literature that seeks to identify and address the concerns these characteristics raise for teaching these students in college. These two workshops will seek to identify what the characteristics and concerns (and potential strengths are, and to construct strategies to address them.
- Part 1: Identifying the Issues
- Location: 301 Feinberg
- Tuesday, Oct 2 at 2 p.m.
- Part 2: Strategies to Address the Issues
- Location: 301 Feinberg
- Wednesday, Oct 10 at noon
Problem Based Learning
- Location: 301 Feinberg
- Tuesday, Oct 16 at 11 a.m.
In PBL classrooms, rather than spending time memorizing blocks of information, students learn the basics by working on problems. PBL give students the opportunity to learn content through analysis and application. As a learner-centered pedagogy, PBL is a prime candidate for a teaching technique that encourages students to take responsibility for their learning in a process of intellectual struggle with their peers. In this way, they learn autonomy, resilience, and how to interact positively with others. This problem-based learning workshop will offer both the theoretical foundations for PBL, as well as specific techniques for implementing it in your classroom. Beware: this is not for the faint of heart. PBL requires that, to some extent, you step aside and let learning happen without you running interference.
Hotshot: Wendy Gordon — Making Group Work Work
- Location: ACC Meeting Room #1
- Oct 23 at 2 p.m.
I taught a problem-based seminar with a series of group-based assignments. It was essential to have student groups that “worked” and also to keep students out of the trap of joining only with superficially similar students. This workshop will share my strategy for group construction and demonstrate the tools I used to develop and maintain successful groups.
Moodle Design for Student Engagement
- Location: 213 Feinberg
- Thursday, Oct 25 at 9:30 a.m.
While it is perfectly acceptable to use Moodle in a basic formatting fashion, don’t you wish your sites had some personality and style? If you consider your course site to be an extension of your own teaching and classroom, why not make it as inviting and accessible as possible? In this workshop I will show you how to make your Moodle course as efficient as possible and give it a shine that welcomes your students to the process of learning outside of the classroom.
OER: Open Educational Resources, Becky Kasper, CTE, Malina Thiede, LITS
- Location: 213 Feinberg
- Thursday, Nov 8 at 2 p.m.
Open educational resources (OERs) are freely available and openly licensed teaching and learning materials that include everything from full textbooks to quiz banks to student study aids. SUNY Plattsburgh is participating in a state funded effort to increase OER adoption at public universities in the state with a program to be announced this spring. In this workshop you will learn how to use OERs and why their use makes strong pedagogical sense.
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Faculty Hotshots: Successful Classroom Secrets
We think our faculty have something pretty great to share with you, let us know if you would like to present your successful classroom secrets with them.
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Faculty Learning Communities
Each semester, a group of interested faculty will meet monthly to discuss a selected reading. Faculty may sign up by responding the the CTE’s email communications regarding upcoming FLCs at the beginning of the semester. Reading materials are provided free of charge with the intention that the faculty attend the scheduled group meetings.
For the 2018 Fall semester, the CTE will host two new Faculty Learning Communities, in keeping with our theme of understanding our newest generation of students.
The first FLC is based on the book Generation Z Goes to College by Seemiller and Grace. This book is a data-driven look into the characteristics of Generation Z students compiled from 15 colleges.
The second FLC is based upon Daniel Pink’s 2006 book A Whole New Mind. Pink writes an easy to read narrative of the importance of the right brain thinking for the future.