CHIIPs Conference Materials: Past Conferences
2024 Micro-CHIIPs Sessions & Materials
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Keynote: Dr. David Clark
"Raising the bar: What works, what doesn’t, and what to do next with alternative grading"
Points, partial credit, and weighted averages are so traditional that it’s hard to imagine a world without them. But it turns out that there are some big questions about traditional grading systems: Do they show what a student has (or hasn’t) learned? Could students “get by” on partial credit – or fail a class due to the formulas we use, even though they’ve actually learned everything we could ask? What does a mashed-up average of points and partial credit even mean?
The good news is that there are better options: approaches to grading that are grounded in how humans actually learn and better represent that learning, all while upholding high standards. In this keynote, you’ll learn the basics of alternative grading, see what works (and what doesn’t), identify practical ways to fit new grading practices into your classes, and find resources to help you build a grading system that actively supports learning. -
Concurrent Sessions
Using Microteaching to Enhance Learning in Practicum, Internship, and Field Work
Presenters: R. Mathew Tolliver & Jodi Polaha
In this presentation, we will show how a clinical teaching innovation can be used in-vivo to bolster student skills in practicum, field work, and internship training experiences. In-Vivo Teaching is consistent with adult learning theory and has been show to be a preferred way of learning by advanced students. We will introduce participants to 5 microteaching skills that are components of the One Minute Preceptor (Neher et al., 1992), and discuss how to adapt microteachings to various contexts. We will provide introductory training in how to conduct microteachings vis experiential teaching methods, consistent with adult learning theory, and provide practice and feedback. We will also highlight data from our College of Medicine showing that this approach is feasible and acceptable to learners.
Presenter resources:
Microteaching for Micro-CHIIPs
Exploring Diversity in the Classroom Through Use of a Social Identity Wheel
Presenters: Caroline Abercrombie, Brian Cross, & Alicia Williams
Social Identity Wheels are powerful tools guiding self-exploration revealing the interconnectedness of multiple facets of one’s identity. Identity wheels have been applied to areas from social justice to professional development of educators. Attendees will explore the ways we identify ourselves and others, examine which identities form the core of how we think of ourselves and others, and reflect on how the interconnectedness of these identities affects the way we approach our lives and our colleagues. We will describe the use of a social identity wheel to generate student engagement around discussions of diversity including guidance on the prebrief and debrief of the activity. Attendees will participate in small group discussions about their own social identity wheels. We will share how this experience can been used in in-person, online, and asynchronous settings. The grading rubric for the activity will be shared. Attendees will have several handouts to use to guide the use of this tool in their own classroom.Presenter resources:
Social Identity Wheel Participant Worksheet
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Plenary Workshop: Dr. Alison Barton
An Introduction to High-Impact Teaching Practices
Presenter: Alison Barton
At ETSU, we have been hearing about the General Education renewal initiatives. One aspect of the renewal proposals is to ensure that all General Education courses include “high impact teaching practices.” But what does this mean?
In this session, I will provide an introductory overview of the many ways we can include high-impact teaching practices in our instruction – in big and small ways. You might discover that some of what you do is already included in our collection!
And a spoiler: These methods are great for ANY class you are teaching – not just for General Education! Come for a helpful refresher or see if you pick up a new idea or two to feather into your Spring classes.Presenter resources:
2023 Sessions & Materials
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Keynote: Dr. Jessamyn Neuhaus
Picture a Professor: Classroom Strategies for Counteracting Stereotypes about Faculty
What does a professor “look like?” According to most TV shows and movies, college professors are middle-aged or elderly White cisgendered able-bodied men. This powerful and powerfully limiting stereotype about the embodied identity of college faculty is reinforced over and over in the popular imagination, and significantly shapes student biases and expectations about academic expertise and authority in every subject and modality. Furthermore, stereotypes about faculty’s identity are linked to assumptions and biases what effective college teaching itself looks like, namely, the ultra-charismatic Super Professor lecturing nonstop to a spellbound audience, magically imparting knowledge to students who can learn everything they need to know just by sitting there and being entertained. Teaching and learning in real life rarely looks like this, yet the Super Professor appears over and over in pop culture and even in some otherwise excellent scholarship of teaching and learning.
In this talk, I draw on the work collected in Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning to encourage college educators to fight the Super Professor myth and counteract gendered, racialized, and other assumptions and stereotypes about what a professor “looks like.” I’ll discuss some overarching, empowering pedagogical and pedagogical learning practices these authors utilize, and then summarize some specific classroom strategies that can effectively disrupt biases about college faculty while increasing student learning.
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Concurrent Session I
Creating Fearless Classrooms: Designing Spaces where Students Can Embrace Risk
Dr. Amy Johnson
All learning requires risk. Learning requires us to identify what we don’t know and to admit (at least to ourselves, but often to others) that we don’t know something, that we don’t have a skill, or that our abilities need sharpening. More importantly, we often have to ask for help in order to learn efficiently and effectively. Because of this risk, classrooms (and all learning spaces) are places of vulnerability and can leave students feeling exposed and insecure. As educators, it is our duty to create classrooms (in person and online) that emphasize purpose, invite participation, and honor students holistically – as people and as learners. In this session, we will use ideas from Amy Edmondson’s Fearless Organization, Ken Bain’s Super Courses, Kelly Hogan and Vijy Sathy’s Inclusive Teaching, and Donna Mejia’s Chapter in Picture a Professor to design psychologically safe learning spaces that cultivate a high-functioning community of learners. Together, we will explore ideas that can help our classrooms be spaces of courage, compassion, and creative thinking.
Enhancing Student Outcomes through Community Engaged Learning: Addressing Student and Instructor Biases and Challenges
Dr. Melanie B. Richards (Panel chair), Dr. Stacey Cunningham, Dr. Rebecca Fletcher, Dr. Pamela Mims, Deidra Rogers
Community engaged learning (CEL) is a pedagogical approach that connects classroom learning to real-world experiences. In many courses, CEL provides opportunities for students to apply theoretical knowledge to practical settings, develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and gain professional experience that can lead to increased employment opportunities. Despite its potential benefits, incorporating CEL in the classroom faces several biases and challenges, both from students and professors.
This panel presentation and workshop aims to address these biases and provide strategies to mitigate challenges for professors who wish to explore CEL inclusion in their courses. Specifically, a panel of instructors using this approach in the classroom will discuss the potential biases that students and professors may have regarding CEL, and work to mitigate these through their shared experiences and a hands-on workshop with attendees. -
Concurrent Session II
"It was good. I learned alot." - Deepening Critical Reflection for Reluctant Student Populations
Dr. Scott Jenkinson
Deeply felt and internalized critical reflection is central to making meaning out of what we learn. When we ask students to link that which they have experienced to what we are talking about in a course our hope is that they can articulate that bond in an intention way that propels their thinking even further. But what can we do to support that depth of connection when our students are reluctant to share? As well, could the ways in which we are going about seeking those deeper connections be alienating our students? In this session we will explore mechanisms for asking better reflective prompts, how to model reflective practices ourselves, and how to provide constructive feedback to support students who share more to limited reflections. How can we move our learns beyond, “It was good. I learned a lot” to bigger and broader connections?
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Does "Presence" in My Online Course Exist at All?
Dr. Melessia D. Webb
Presence contributes to learning - especially in online learning environments. Without presence in an online course, learning may become boring, non-directed, or ineffective, and students and educators may experience feelings of isolation. Presence provides a more effective learning community where participants are seen as “real people”. Before one can ensure presence exists in an online course, we must understand the three types of presence as described in the Community of Inquiry Module: cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence, along with the components or elements of each. In addition, understanding different strategies to create cognitive, social, and teaching presence and effectively implementing each, along with the challenges and solutions, is instrumental in delivering a successful online course. Creating a Community of Inquiry (CoI) through the implementation of cognitive, social, and teaching presence, provides learners and educators a positive learning experience.
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Concurrent Session III
Who’s Afraid of AI?: Building Assignments that ChatGPT Would Fail
Dr. Kimberly Tweedale
Are you worried about ChatGPT? It seems like everyone in higher education is concerned that AI-based writing technologies will fundamentally change the way we teach—especially the way we teach through writing. This session digs into these concerns, considering how the potential changes to our teaching might be productive instead of catestrophic. In this session, we will learn how to build better assignments that human minds can complete more effectively than curent AI models. We will engage with our perceptions of both ChatGPT and our students and offer concrete strategies for crafting assignments that not only thward the AI, but also actively support student learning. Finally, we will work to re-write several assignments and discuss how we can use the panic caused by emerging AI to create new opportunities for learning.
Can You See It? Using the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) in Teaching and Learning
Dr. Jennifer Adler
Pictures are not just worth a thousand words – they can also unlock powerful insights into cognitive and metaphorical connections. This session will introduce the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET), a research tool designed to elucidate how people understand (or "frame") a topic by analyzing visual images. ZMET can help teachers and students apprehend biases that influence how we experience and understand the world. In ZMET, investigators ask participants to collect pictures representing their thoughts and feelings about a topic and then interview them about their image sets. This session will showcase diverse uses of ZMET and how its principles can be adapted to the classroom. Participants will also engage in a modified ZMET exercise to experience this powerful technique firsthand and leave with practical and creative strategies for implementing ZMET. Join us to explore the power and possibilities of ZMET-informed practices in the classroom.
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Plenary Workshop: Dr. Neuhaus
Getting Useful Student Feedback on Teaching
This workshop is based on “Figuring Out Student Feedback on Teaching: Reducing Potential Professional and Personal Harm to Faculty,” my open access bonus chapter in Picture a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning. After a brief review of some of the many ways that poorly designed, implemented, and interpreted student evaluations of teaching can exacerbate inequitable teaching conditions and harm all faculty, we’ll examine three specific strategies that we can use in our own individual classes to elicit formative student feedback on teaching and to advocate for more evidence-based, equity-minded evaluation of teaching efficacy on our campuses.
2022 Sessions & Materials
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Keynote and afternoon workshop materials: Kevin Gannon
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Concurrent Session I
Radical Adventures with Ungrading
Dr. Susan Epps
Do your students seem more focused on grades than on learning? Are you willing to consider you might be contributing to this? Are you willing to step out of your comfort zone to try something radical and scary as h*ll?
Our systems require that we record a final grade for our classes, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be radical and do something different to get there! Bring a copy of a current syllabus and your own radical hope to this session, led by a former devotee of “points for everything,” and find out how “ungrading” can change your classroom!
Relationships, Relevance, and Rigor: Designing Learning Environments that Inspire Hope and Engage Minds
Dr. Ginger Christian
This session will build a bridge from theory to practice and apply real-world connections to engage post-secondary students in online and face-to-face learning environments. Session components will highlight the importance of change theory, the rigor/relevance framework, SAMR model, and trauma-informed practices to design classroom experiences that invite students to have access to social emotional learning resources during the implementation dip and emotional challenges that often accompany syllabus week and academic goals. Participants will evaluate components of identified frameworks, review real-world SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) examples, and apply innovative high-leverage practices to engage both the hearts and minds of students to increase student participation and academic outcomes.
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Concurrent Session II
The Breaking Bad Classroom: The Wonderful Chemistry of Mixed Up Active Learning
Dr. Laurie Schroder
This session will present an argument for creating student objectives that are non-cognitive, and instead are based on meeting students where they are, respecting who they are, and encouraging them to discover their potential. It will demonstrate the connection between Bloom's Taxonomies in the Affective and Cognitive domains and Fink's Taxonomy of Significant Learning, and present a framework for creating classroom environments that encourage students to develop "life skills" - collaboration, cooperation, goal setting, use of resources, giving and receiving feedback, and problem solving among them. We will explore the strengths and challenges of different active learning and teaching strategies, and present an a la carte approach that empowers instructors to meet the needs of students with the right elements of the right strategy at the right time, whether or not that happens within a specific structure. Faculty will draw connections from their goals for students, through activities, to outcomes.
Fostering a Sense of Belonging in Class
Dr. Ginni Blackhart
Humans have an innate need to belong and, according to self-determination theory, a sense of belonging, along with feelings of competence and autonomy, result in greater motivation across several contexts, including within academic settings. In this session, we will first discuss empirical evidence demonstrating the importance of a sense of belonging for students not only at the institutional level, but also within individual courses. Next, we will discuss research showing the importance of fostering a sense of belonging for students who may not feel they belong at college (e.g., first-generation college students, students who identify as racial and ethnic minorities). The remainder of the session will focus on demonstrating and discussing activities that increase belonging in class, such as collaborative learning activities and discussion, and how these activities are beneficial to student learning beyond increasing belonging.
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Concurrent Session III
Radical Reflections: Short-, medium-, and long-term tools for connecting more meaning to what you teach.
Dr. Scott Jenkinson
Our goals as teachers are to connect what we teach to our student’s lived experiences, both in the moment they first encounter those ideas and hopefully days, months, years, decades later when they are engaging in their unique life pursuits. In this session, we will explore the defining characteristics of reflections and engage examples that can be used in various time frames, class sizes, and course modalities. These intentional, purposeful, and systemic reflections built into a course’s overall structure have the radical opportunity to support critical and inclusive moments for developing linked meanings with our content. Specific moments for deep reflection are an intentional part of building the radical praxis of hope that brings life and vitality back into learning. This interactive session will offer you a chance to consider more ways to add more deeply considered reflections into your courses.
Radical Reflection Examples and Framework
Radical Reflection Participants pages
Creating a Culture of Caring: Transforming the Learning Experience through Ungrading
Dr. Ginger Christian and Dr. Jill Channing
Ungrading is a term to describe an assessment technique whereby educators provide diverse types of formative assessments rather than assigning grades to every assignment. The purpose of ungrading is to de-emphasize students’ focus on receiving a grade and increase students’ focus on a growth mindset and learning. Also, instructors who utilize ungrading often incorporate a relationships first model, self-assessments, one-on-one conferencing, and peer feedback. During this session, participants will learn how to establish positive and caring relationships and specific ungrading strategies and will engage in application activities where they develop ungrading policies and assignments, as well as adapt ungrading strategies for existing assignments and courses.
Creating a Free Online Course for Incoming First-Years: GNST 100-OL at Emory & Henry College
Dr. Lauren Harding and Carleigh Blaylock
This session will provide insights and advantages of a “College 101” 1 credit hour course targeted at first generation students.This tuition-free course will be offered during a summer term before the student arrives on campus. The course topic is different from a freshman seminar course in that it covers the basics of how to be a college student and invites faculty and staff from different departments to guest lecture. Topics covered include accessing university LMS, checking your student account, resources available to support students, the hidden agenda of the academy, and so much more! The course design is completely virtual to allow access for all students and will be 100% accessible.
The presenters will use the “Menti poll” to ask questions of the audience and provide time for some group discussion for participants to ask questions and collaborate! Wireless internet and projector screen required.