CUNY graduate students are often assigned to work as teaching assistants or lab instructors in support of large lecture classes. These assignments come with both opportunities and challenges for both the instructor and students. This workshop is designed to support teaching assistants and lab instructors in navigating their roles, and to aid in the development …
Category: Teach@CUNY 2020 Summer Institute
Bridging Lecture and Lab
Science courses are typically split between lecture and laboratory instruction. Lecture is used to provide students with foundational, structured knowledge, and labs allow students to make direct observations and develop specific scientific skills within the discipline. The division between these two experiences is often heightened when the lecture and lab components of the same course …
Using Backwards Design: A Practical Guide to Creating Assignments
This workshop walks participants through the principals of backwards design and how they can be used as a framework for developing any assignment across disciplines. This easy step by step breakdown of using backwards design is accompanied by additional resources for assignment design and the option for scheduling individual and small group synchronous check in …
A Critical Approach to non-F2F Language Teaching
Face-to-face language courses tend to use in-class time mostly for lecture and language practice. Such instructional modes are difficult when, as in our current public health crisis, teaching and learning must be done online. What are the specific challenges for teaching language courses at CUNY in an online format? To be fully effective, language instruction …
Using Photography in the Classroom: Centering Student Participation and Creative Expression
As we prepare to teach in online and hybrid classrooms in the fall semester and beyond, the challenges of maintaining student engagement and lifting up student voices require attention as we design and adapt syllabi and assignments. Assignments that ask students to take photographs engage students in important skills and practices such as documenting, archiving, …
Cultivating Participation & Engagement
Students’ participation and engagement are key measures not only of motivation, but they also provide a way to formatively evaluate and summatively assess their learning. Facilitating participation and understanding engagement comes with some particular challenges in online/hybrid courses. This workshop will provide a space for participants to think through what participation can mean in an …
Reframing the Final Paper: Alternative & Creative Assignments
Writing is a central aspect of academic life. As instructors, we regularly assign essays, compositions, proposals, annotated bibliographies, and final papers. There are, however, alternatives or accompaniments to these written assignments that may accomplish similar goals, or facilitate additional ones. Podcasts, zines, timelines, and other creative assignments allow students to produce artifacts with audiences beyond …
Activating Linguistic Diversity in the Classroom
CUNY’s classrooms are famously diverse, a reality reflected in the vast number of languages spoken by undergraduate students. Have you thought about how this language diversity will impact your teaching, and specifically how they how language dynamics impact classroom communication? How do we as instructors (especially international students and non-native English speakers) address the politics …
