Recently, I had the opportunity to observe a class. The instructor was engaging and engaged, the students were paying attention, taking notes and actively participating in Top Hat questions peppered throughout the session. As the end of class neared, within earshot, one of the students turned to another and said, “I just wish I knew how it all pieced together.”

If you designed your course with Constructive Alignment (View CELT's Basic Course Design : Aligning Course Objectives with Class Assignments webpage), you know that your course goals are linked to your teaching and learning activities, to classroom assessments and evaluation, to course learning objectives, and ultimately to course learning outcomes. Even if you used this backward design process, your students might still struggle with really grasping the bigger picture of how your lesson fits within the course, or even how the course fits within the major and, perhaps their future careers. There are a number of strategies that you can use to help the students make sense and find the purpose in the everyday class session. These include:

 

Begin a class session with the “big picture.” In many courses, the material is taught chronologically or through a sequence of steps. The sequential nature can lead to an approach where students pay attention to the individual steps, but fail to understand the broader narrative. Before an upcoming lesson, consider how the day’s material fits into the context of your subject matter. Explain to the students how this material links to previous material covered and how the lesson will look forward to upcoming content. 

 

Reduce the complexity of visuals.  If you use graphs, visuals, images in your course, show the image in its most basic form and then build it up gradually to show the complex illustration. Add labels to the image as you build it up to explain the purpose of each element of the visual, graph, or image.

 

Help students find meaning. Is there a way to relate the subject to something students already know either through previous content learned or to a current day topic? Demonstrating the relevance and importance of your topic helps students make meaning and thoughtfully consider (and hopefully realize) why it is important to gain the knowledge through their attendance, their participation inside and outside of class, and through ongoing practice. 

 

Happy Week 9 of the fall semester,

 

Sara Marcketti, Director

Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching

Reference: Fry, H., Ketteridge, S., & Marshall, S. (2009). A handbook for teaching and learning in higher education: Enhancing academic practice / edited by Heather Fry, Steve Ketteridge, Stephanie Marshall. (3rd ed.). New York ; London: Routledge.

 

Miller Faculty Fellowships have provided funding to over 800 faculty to improve the undergraduate teaching and learning experience at Iowa State University. The Miller Faculty Fellowship Program provides recipients with opportunities to enhance their scholarly work in the undergraduate academic programs of the university and to develop innovative approaches to enhance student learning. Recipients will have up to twelve months to meet the goals of their Fellowship project.

The deadline for Miller Faculty Fellowship proposals for the 2019-20 academic year is Monday, Dec. 10.  Program and application details  are online. Questions may be directed to CELT at  celt-miller@iastate.edu

Faculty and staff who received a CELT funded scholarship of a teaching and learning (SoTL) grant are eligible for the CELT Presenter Grant. The CELT Presenter Grant provides eligible faculty and staff with the opportunity to present their SoTL research findings at a teaching and learning higher education conference. Faculty and staff SoTL grant recipients (SoTL Scholars or Miller Faculty Fellowship) are encouraged to present their research at a conference that supports the dissemination of teaching strategies (e.g., The Teaching Professor Conference), Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (e.g., ISSOTL), disciplinary conferences, (e.g., an education track within your disciplinary conference) or are focused on teaching within a specific discipline (e.g., NACTA – North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture). The Presenter Grant Program supports delivery of an accepted or invited presentation, poster, or panel.

For travel that will be completed between January 1 and June 30, apply by December 15. Learn more from the CELT Presenter Grant Program webpage .

Disability Awareness Week (October 29-November 2) is a series of events aimed at educating the Iowa State University community about the wide variety of disabilities, bringing awareness to the barriers faced by many of these individuals, and advocating for a more accessible ISU. For a full list of activities, please visit  Student Accessibility Services Disability Awareness Week website .

To ensure that your online course is accessible for all of your students is to download CELT's Universal Design Checklist for Your Online Course (PDF) .

Prefer a Print version? To view the Teaching Tip as a printable document with the web addresses, download the CELT Teaching Tip (PDF) ( http://bit.ly/2IVU0UY)