Join this exciting session to learn about this year’s Good Reads selection Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers Using Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection

Learning something new—particularly something that might change your mind—is more difficult than teachers think. A new 3Rs of Relationships, Resilience and Reflection can help us lead better discussions and reach more students. Without sacrificing content, we can design courses to increase effort and motivation, provide more and better feedback, help
students learn on their own and be better able to integrate new information now and after they graduate. The case for a liberal (or liberating) education has never been stronger, but it needs to be redesigned to take into account how human thinking, behaviors, bias, and change really work. Recent and wide-ranging research from biology, economics, psychology, education, and neuroscience on the difficulty of change can guide us to redesign an education of transformation and change.

Although deeply rooted in our curriculum and society as a whole, grades have been shown to be harmful to–and unpredictive of–student learning and ability. More alarming, grades encourage students to optimize their points by taking what they perceive as the easiest path, leading to rushed assignments, to academic dishonesty, to lower motivation, and to additional barriers to learning. In an attempt to circumvent the consequences of grades, we ungrade our liberal learning introductory astronomy course. We discuss our process of implementing ungrading, summarize the effect on student performance and motivation, and provide a framework for implementation in other courses.

This presentation will explore strategies that can be helpful in obtaining faculty and institutional buy-in of new instructional technologies. As educators, utilizing technology allows us to facilitate learning and improve our student’s comprehension. Virtual reality (VR) is an immersive technology that allows students to be active and engaged in learning. We will discuss our VR implementation journey in the nursing program, including the successes and challenges. Also, we will identify resources that are essential for the effective implementation of VR.

Presentation Slides

TCNJ’s Strategic Plan has multiple priority areas that include the high impact practice of Community Engaged Learning (CEL). To advance these goals, this session asks participants to reflect on CEL with a particular focus on perceived benefits, challenges/barriers, and the resources needed to implement CEL learning experiences and scholarship. In addition, the session will share existing opportunities and funding mechanisms. Information generated at the session will be used to develop campus resources to support CEL efforts.

When college classrooms are designed as intentional communities, students learn content more deeply and learn from one another how to be better learners and thinkers. The online classroom poses unique challenges in this regard, as students are separated physically and in cases where learning is wholly asynchronous, do not have a fixed time to be together. This session will explore ways to create a community of purpose in the on-line classroom, including icebreakers, check-ins, and structures that engage students with one another personally and intellectually. The ideas presented in the session rely on simple technologies that anyone can master.

Teaching first-year students brings several challenges, one of which is helping students engage at the collegiate level in reading complicated and/or historical texts. How can we get students to read carefully? How can we teach them to think critically? In this session, we’ll strategize together and hear some tips from one instructor who is getting students to read, process, and discuss works from Plato to Angela Davis.

This session will explore how the latest technological advancements in video production, live streaming, artificial intelligence, and online courses can enhance the student experience in the most authentic ways possible. We will look beyond the hype and focus on using these technologies to keep things simple and productive.

It’s not your imagination—your students really don’t know how to write a research paper. Most research-based writing assignments require many information literacy skills and behaviors that we take for granted but that our students have not yet learned. Information literacy encompasses broad sets of norms, practices, and behaviors around information use. Expert researchers may overlook the complexity and pervasiveness of the information skills needed for researched writing. In this workshop, we will uncover these integral and often implicit information behaviors, explore the limitations of common research assignments, and develop alternative learning activities that help students better acquire research skills.

This session introduces Lion’s Quest, a novel roleplaying game the presenters developed to offer higher education instructors with a (fun!) tool for thinking about student engagement in a way that encourages collegial discussion. College students enter our classrooms with full plates having navigated a tumultuous two+ years. As instructional designers, we have been assessing how to adapt course design to leverage pandemic lessons learned and acknowledge evolving student circumstances.  Attendees will observe a simulated game round in which they navigate a course experience through the eyes of one of their students. The game, mimicking the uncertain situations that college students often face, is designed to prompt deep reflection on consideration of the whole student. It intends to provide an effective learning experience giving specific attention to leveraging instructional technology to meet the needs of a diverse range of learners.

We will provide examples of assignments and activities from three courses (undergraduate and graduate) that use secondary datasets to teach key concepts and develop skills. The session will cover the scaffolding process, supporting key concept learning, developing skills, and encouraging critical thinking about the data, its collection and analysis, and real-world applications. Attendees will be encouraged to share their experiences and problem-solve together on key issues to make this type of class successful, including technological issues and heterogenous skill levels.

This is a practical and active workshop for all faculty that distills the latest scholarship on how students learn to change into tested techniques and best practices that work. Decades of research have brought an explosion of knowledge about how human evolution has shaped the way we remember, process, and think. Better discussions and assignments require designing for the collaborative but socially conforming human brain. We will learn how to disrupt the social reasoning (what will my friends think) that alters how we see evidence, disrupts how we experience class discussion, and interrupts our ability to change.

As a result of attending this workshop, participants will be able to share how TCNJ’s Center for Global Engagement (CGE) provides broad access to meaningful global engagement opportunities as determined by global engagement outcomes through on- campus, local and international partnerships. They will be able to explain how CGE provides visa support and guidance to TCNJ’s international scholars and students. They will be able to refer students and colleagues to the CGE professionals and know how to locate information about the TCNJ’s institutional partners, Study Centers and affiliate-provided programs that CGE manages. They will be able to describe how the CGE team collaborates with faculty on faculty-led programs and facilitates faculty and staff connections with our international partners. They will also know how to access information about their TCNJ colleagues through the emerging global engagement database.

In an effort to effectively teach and support students who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), faculty should be critically reflecting on the teaching and learning experiences that they are providing in their courses. After critical reflection, faculty should identify areas in need of improvement and begin moving towards creating learning environments that center equity and anti-racism as a means to effectively teach and support BIPOC students. This session will begin with highlighting some of the course experiences of BIPOC students at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). The session will then move to an activity that provides faculty with an opportunity to critically reflect on their personal identities and biases and consider how both their identities and biases may impact the teaching and learning experience they provide in their courses. After a brief unpacking discussion, faculty will then engage in an activity that shares ways they can be intentional about creating course environments that provide BIPOC students “safer” spaces to learn by centering equity and antiracist practices.

Join us for a Hands-On Session on using Question-Based Pedagogy, an approach to providing feedback for students that gives students the reins.

Nina Ringer will provide an overview of the approach, where students begin the feedback conversation by submitting three questions with each draft. Instructors answer only those three questions. Samantha Atzeni will share stories of her experience, with an emphasis on self-assessment. Robyn Gold will demonstrate how a question-based approach helps students exchange ideas on texts to create a true Socratic seminar and how ideas that are exchanged during these seminars help students develop analytical writing skills.

We will provide the opportunity for participants to practice the method by sharing sample essays and questions and the Google sheet we maintain for students throughout the semester that tracks questions from all. The hands-on session will allow us to demonstrate the method by having participants ask questions, offer suggestions, and get a sense of how question-based pedagogy can work for them.

Teachers are models of self-regulation, openness, connection, and progress. Join our session to learn how practicing teachers from all over the globe have implemented successful strategies to create and maintain a positive classroom culture that enables ALL students to thrive. We will unpack five strategies for forming strong relationships, practicing mindfulness, and engaging in discussion of current events in a manner that enables students to look at issues from multiple perspectives and think about how they want to impact their world.

This session focuses on developing and utilizing guided notes, which are instructor-prepared handouts that outline lectures but leave blank space for students to fill in. The session discusses how to create, how to use, and when to use guided notes in intro-level lecture-discussion courses. It also showcases examples of guided notes and discusses some variations of the practice.

The U.S. Department of Education requires that all online courses for which students may use Title IV funds provide for “regular and substantive interaction” between students and instructors. In this workshop, we will look at examples of course design techniques that not only meet federal requirements but also incorporate effective strategies grounded in principles of active learning and effective digital pedagogy.

Presentation Slides

In response to the rising costs of higher education, a recent NJ statute has required public institutions of higher education to submit to the state a plan for expanding the use of open textbooks and digital materials. Although not widely known, the development and curation of quality Open Educational Resources (OERs) has grown significantly in the past 10 years. Come learn about new platforms available to search for quality open educational resources in curated indexes, how to remix and adapt materials for your classes, and how to prepare and publish your own materials as OERs so the greatest number of students benefit from your hard work, and you receive proper credit.

Presentation 1: Lessons Learned From Designing Four New Undergraduate Certificates in Spanish for Professions
Ann Warner-Ault, Regina Morin, and Isabel Maria Kentengian, World Languages & Cultures
Our presentation will discuss the creation of four new undergraduate certificates in Spanish for the Professions—Spanish for Healthcare, Spanish for Law and Justice Practitioners, Spanish for Counseling and Human Services, and Spanish for Business. The certificates are now fully approved and our first cohort of students will complete the requirements for two of the certificates this May. In our presentation, we will discuss how the idea for the certificates began, how we recombined existing classes with new classes to create the four certificates, and the steps we followed in order for the certificates to be approved. Finally, we will discuss potential road-blocks and advice for other departments who may be interested in doing this work.

Presentation 2: Lessons Learned From Designing Graduate Programs for the School of Business
Lynn Braender and Joao Neves, School of Business
This presentation will detail the pedagogical challenges of launching a hybrid MBA in the School of Business, with considerations for the level of instruction (the School of Business’ first graduate program) as well as the impact of the hybrid course design. Curricular and delivery changes the program needed to make due to COVID and post-Covid environments will be discussed. In addition, you’ll hear about the recent process of designing the MSM program that is currently under review by CSPP.

Recent scholarship in the field of teaching and learning recognizes that a more productive approach is to identify and implement course activities that align with metacognition—that is, with the way in which learners actually learn—so that students can begin to actively think about what they’re learning, and why. As Eyler argues, these “could conceivably be called ‘active’ strategies, but it is not actually the activity here that matters as much as the deep learning and understanding students develop through the implementation of the techniques.” By examining several such “active strategies” and discussing the pros and cons of their implementation, this session will invite TCNJ’s teacher-scholar community to move beyond thinking about “active learning” as techniques that ask students to “actively” move around (e.g., work in small groups, write on the board, etc.) and offer an opportunity to consider instead how metacognition may lead to more intellectually active and engaged learners, both within and outside the physical space of the college classroom.

Join Vicki Brzoza (Assistant Professor, Nursing Department, School of Nursing and Health Sciences) and Alan Amtzis (Director, TCNJ’s M.Ed.-Instruction program, School of Education) for a joint session on understanding the instructional and programmatic needs of adult learners. Dr. Brzoza will share insights on characteristics and perceptions of success for adult learners completing an Accelerated Second-degree Bachelor of Science in Nursing (ABSN) program and passing the national licensure examination. Dr. Amtzis will cover experiences of working with K-12 teachers enrolled in a TCNJ M.Ed. program, providing practical examples of what worked—and what did not—in designing a graduate program to meet the needs of adult learners.