2010 Teaching and Learning Conference COLT Luncheon Panel

The 2010 Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference was a great opportunity for numerous faculty members from across all the DePaul schools and colleges to have a discussion on teaching and learning. The COLT Luncheon Panel brought together those who had won Excellence in Teaching awards together to discuss some of their best practices and teaching strategies.

• Expect a lot, but also give a lot. Make your class challenging, but also ask for student feedback to gauge their comfort with the rigor.
• Structure-offer long-term goals at the beginning of the quarter and short-term goals for each class. Make these explicit
• Revision is part of the assignment process. Design assignments that incorporate opportunities for revision.
• Design your delivery to allow space for students to participate and apply their learning. Consider grading students on their participation.
• Model how you think/learn about your field; do not just deliver your content.
• Use readings that help make real world connections and offer a variety of viewpoints rather than relying solely on a textbook.
• Make students active in your classroom- Allow them to work through problems in your classroom.
• Create a classroom environment in which students are doing the thinking and the work and you act as a facilitator of their thinking.
• Give students specific feedback on aspects that will help students grow as learners; Quick and comprehensive feedback.
• We are ALL responsible for evaluating our own practice regarding teaching and learning.
• Try to be involved in the DePaul community-(e.g., become involved in distance opportunities-travel abroad with students to learn along with them).

We also used Wordle to analyze the frequency of words in the Luncheon Panel notes document (See below for the full document). Words are given a size based on their relative frequency to other words in the document.

Be sure to visit the Conference Program page for the full set of notes from the luncheon panel and presentation materials from many presenters.