Every month TLC will post the newest and noteworthy materials on the Teaching & Learning Hub. Here is December’s list.

Announcement

Course merges are when two or more sections are combined into one Brightspace course. Some instructors prefer managing one course with combined sections than managing multiple courses, especially when the content, assessments, and due dates are the same across sections.
Email us at least two weeks before the first day of classes. Include all course sections that should be merged (course name, section, CRN#, term).

Jan 16 is the merge request deadline for Spring 2023.

Teaching Strategies & Pedagogies

• Guilt -free book club: Work toward awareness and self-reflection – Tomorrow is the last guilt-free book club session of the year! We enjoyed partnering with Wentworth’s Equity in Learning group in reading What Inclusive Instructors Do by Addy et al., 2021). Register for the Zoom session on Wednesday, December 7th at 12 pm EST.
  
• What’s Your Priceless Gift to Students – The winter holiday season can be a time of reflection and renewal. How does your love of content, students, and learning show up in your classes? Enjoy this teaching reflection invitation and article. Happy Holidays!
  
• Calls for Proposals! – Spring 2023 brings two opportunities to showcase teaching, learning, and scholarship! Save the date for the Wentworth Teaching and Learning Faculty Showcase & Reception returns on February 28th, proposal details will follow in early January. The Colleges of the Fenway Teaching & Learning Conference is March 31st, submit a proposal for a 30 minute workshop, teaching demo, or interest group discussion!
  
• The CoLab Podcast – Self-Worth Theory and Buddhist Pedagogy with Nic Voge – Josh Luckens interviews Nic Voge, who offers strategies for transforming fear and reframing failure in academic settings. He shares ways to design courses that emphasize student engagement and intrinsic motivation as central features in an experience of meaningful inquiry.
  
  Voge is a nationally recognized expert in teaching, learning, and student motivation, and the senior associate director of the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton University.

Every month TLC will post the newest and noteworthy materials on the Teaching & Learning Hub. Here is November’s list.

Announcement

• New Website – After a soft launch of our new website in August, we are proud to share our final redesign with the Wentworth community. The TLC website is now mobile-friendly, has a more intuitive layout, and features a calming teal color to reassure you that you’ll find the support you need while visiting it. We created an “FAQs” section to help you get fast answers to common questions and moved our signature professional development opportunities to prominent spots in the navigation bar. We invite you to check it out and share feedback to help us make further improvements.
  Special thanks to Lindsay Schubert for leading this project. Thanks as well to Lucy Wolski for her partnership with Lindsay during last month’s redesign.

Teaching Strategies & Pedagogies

• Tech Skills Videos – Need a quick answer for your Brightspace questions? Take a look at our Tech Skills playlist. These are short how-to videos about specific features in Brightspace and other tech tools.

• CoLab Podcast: Spoooooky podcast – In a spooky Halloween adventure, hosts Josh Luckens and Megan Hamilton Giebert are thrust into an educational encounter with the supernatural world. We feature an oracular radio drama in which a lost professor contends with ghosts, zombies, and a truth-telling student, and teaching tips are conveyed from the great beyond via Arioch Wentworth’s gramophone.
  Beware: this episode features course design and delivery strategies from a Dickensian figure who may or may not be a ghost. Their ancient wisdom is so potent that it might just help you transform your teaching practice and cast a lasting spell of engagement on your students…

Every month TLC will post the newest and noteworthy materials on the Teaching & Learning Hub. Here is October’s list.

Announcement

• Congratulations Megan Hamilton Giebert! – Megan has accepted the offer of promotion to be TLC’s New Associate Director of Learning Design Solutions.

Teaching Strategies & Pedagogies

• Class Observations – We are proud to offer class observations, a no-strings-attached opportunity to receive friendly feedback from an instructional designer about your teaching techniques and classroom learning environment. Contact us at teach@wit.edu to request one! Please include information about class session dates and times, so we can identify a partner with a compatible schedule.
• Inclusive Syllabi and Rubrics – Have you heard about the inclusive syllabus templates and rubric, available on our Equity in Learning page? These resources were designed by Wentworth’s Equity in Learning group to promote belonging, inclusion, and equity in the classroom. Please complete this brief survey to share any suggestions you have for improving these templates – your perspective and experience is helpful!
• CoLab Podcast: Universal Design for Learning – Wentworth instructional designers Josh Luckens, Megan Hamilton Giebert, and Lucy Wolski discuss strategies to implement Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in college classrooms. UDL is a framework that seeks to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn best.
• Guilt-Free Book Club – Reimagine Representation. The Guilt-Free Book Club invites you to register for the Friday, October 14th topic: Reimagine Representation. Come read with us from 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm on Zoom! (Or don’t; we’re guilt-free.) Register for October 14th.

Other Updates

• TLC Zoom Drop-In Hours – Our virtual office hours are every Wednesday from 2 pm – 4 pm.