Keynote Speaker

Dr. Thomas J. Tobin

Thomas J. Tobin is the Program Area Director for Distance Teaching & Learning on the Learning Design, Development, & Innovation (LDDI) team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His also an internationally recognized speaker and author on topics related to quality in technology-mediated education, especially copyright, evaluation of teaching practice, academic integrity, and accessibility/universal design for learning.

Learn more about Dr. Tobin.

Ellis Library offers all MU Users access to Dr. Tobin’s book “Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone“

Tia Brown McNair

Paul Hanstedt

Carolyn Stallard

Learn more about Dr. McNair.

Ellis Library offers all MU Users access to Dr. McNair’s book Becoming a Student-Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success.

Learn more about Dr. Hanstedt.

Ellis Library offers all MU Users access to Dr. Hanstedt’s book “Creating Wicked Students“.

Dr. Jim Spain – Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies
Dr. Dale Fitch, Associate Professor – Social Work
  Dr. Tori Mondelli, Director – Teaching for Learning Center

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we moved our face-to-face courses to remote instruction—in a hurry and with “good enough” as our benchmark. Now that we’re prioritizing remote instruction for our general-education and technical offerings, we have to learn how best to teach when we’re not in the same place and time as our students, ideally in a considered and intentional way.

We must now find ways to be ready to re-open for in-person learning that are safe, provide choices for instructors and students, and make students want to be back in the classroom—while also keeping the affordances and flexibility that remote instruction gave our students.

As we establish technology-mediated learning as the “new normal” across our curricula, we must find ways to interact with our students that 1) support their continued learning, 2) show compassion & flexibility for their varied circumstances, and 3) fit within our existing time and prep demands.

That last part is important. In this interactive keynote session, we’ll explore ways to shift our focus that can actually take tasks off our plates.

Particpant Outcomes:

This keynote will share three low-effort do-them-right-now design techniques that reduce student anxiety and pressure, reduce your own instructor frustrations, and allow you to focus on the interactions that you want to have with your students. We will discuss three new-normal practices for

• Access to materials, interactions, and people (in the course and beyond);
• Assessment techniques: testing, grades, and feedback; and
• Engagement strategies that make students want to come to the classroom.

Dr. Thomas J. Tobin
Program Area Director for Distance Teaching & Learning
Learning Design, Development, & Innovation Department
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Take a deeper dive and reflect with colleagues on the Keynote “new-normal” practices presented by Dr. Tobin.

Ashley Brickley
Director
Disability Center

Take a deeper dive and reflect with colleagues on the Keynote “new-normal” practices presented by Dr. Tobin.

Dr. Lydia Bentley
Associate Director
Teaching for Learning Center

Laura Foley
Instructional Designer
Sinclair School of Nursing

This session demonstrates how and why all faculty in all disciplines can leverage Adobe Creative Cloud to transform teaching and learning across the curriculum for all students. We begin by sharing low-lift, high-impact approaches to experiential learning, and then share a wide array of digital teaching practices that scaffold from simple but powerful starting points

This session will take the format of a guided-practice presentation, with the first ten minutes reserved for open idea gathering and experience documentation, the next 40 minutes formatted as information sharing among the facilitator and participants, and the final 25 minutes will be for planning and take-aways.

This session will provide multiple ways to keep participants engaged (solo, collaborative, and interactive), multiple ways to present information (slid visuals, video sharing, text-chat, spoken audio), and multiple ways to join the conversation and show skills (video, text chat, self-guided reflection). We will use active-learning techniques and provide use-them-now resources for participants. Especially by relating UDL to broader access benefits for all learners, this session’s activities serve as a model for participants to re-frame accessibility and inclusion conversations.

Dr. Thomas J. Tobin
Program Area Director for Distance Teaching & Learning
Learning Design, Development, & Innovation Department
University of Wisconsin-Madison

This session will be a freeform discussion room, focusing on what things we learned in the past year that will change our teaching forever.

Deborah Huelsbergen
Curator’s Distinguished Teaching Professor
School of Visual Studies

This session will be a freeform discussion room, focusing on student success in and out of the classroom and the relationship that substance misuse has in students’ academic lives.

Michelle McDowell
Substance Abuse Prevention & Education Coordinator
Wellness Resource Center

Kelly Holtkamp
Program Coordinator
Teaching for Learning Center

Facilitating student engagement is a priority because engagement is requisite for learning. The past academic year has brought unprecedented challenges to our goal of supporting student engagement. I’ll share evidence-supported strategies to facilitate student engagement in your physical or digital classroom. Whether you gather with your students at a set time or teach asynchronously, making evidence supported changes will strengthen student engagement with your course content, improve student resilience and perseverance, and deepen learning.

We will discuss the importance of behavioral, cognitive and emotional engagement to deep and lasting learning. We will explore practical strategies to engage our students across varied course delivery methods. Importantly, participants will reflect on their own courses and teaching strategies to identify small, evidence-supported changes they can make to better facilitate engagement from all students.

Participant Outcomes:

Participants will:

• Describe the role of student engagement in learning and academic achievement.
• Identify teaching elements required to facilitate student engagement.
• Distinguish instructor actions and policies that will facilitate student engagement from those that will encourage disengagement.
• Address student engagement challenges specific to asynchronous instruction and distance (zoom) learning
• Reflect on current teaching strategies and commit to making appropriate changes to maximize student engagement.

Greg Cox
Assistant Teaching Professor
School of Health Professions

As passionate as we all may be about what we teach, our passion surrounding grading can leave something to be desired. However, there’s a difference between “grading” and “giving feedback”. “Grading” is an impersonal process of assigning numbers to learners’ work. “Giving feedback” is a symbiotic interaction between learner and instructor.

As opposed to written feedback, a/v feedback allows one to speak directly to learners, weaving more humanity into teaching. On the practical side, research has shown a 75% decrease in time spent grading, coupled with a 225% increase in quantity of feedback given. A/v feedback has also shown to decrease feelings of isolation, increase motivation, student retention, content retention and perception of instructor caring. Consideration of student accessibility needs will be addressed, as well as a walk-through of this process in Canvas.

Participant Outcomes:

This session will:

• Eradicate faculty fears of appearing on video in an online learning environment, particularly when it comes to giving rich feedback using this medium.
• Portray audio/video feedback as a more manageable way to grade.
• Enrich the online learning experience for students while maintaining accessibility.

Gretchen Haskell
Instructional Designer
Office of eLearning

In this session, participants will learn from experienced undergraduate and graduate-level instructors and graduate teaching assistants how to design and implement effective and engaging synchronous sessions with audience response systems and breakout rooms. By interacting in our breakout rooms during the session, participants will learn effective breakout room techniques, including annotation. Graduate teaching assistants will also provide their perspectives on leading the breakout rooms. We will conclude the session with a discussion on how to transfer these lessons to the face-to-face classroom in the future.

Participant Outcomes:

• Participants will learn how to design and implement virtual lab sessions with breakout rooms.
• Participants will learn effective breakout room techniques for students and instructors.

Pathology and Anatomical Sciences
Allison Nesbitt, PhD Assistant Teaching Professor,
Cheryl Hill, PhD Assistant Teaching Professor,
Chalachew Seyoum, PhD Lecturer,
Kristen Prufrock, PhD Lecturer,
Kaleb Sellers, MS Graduate Student,
Sean Greer, MS Graduate Student,
Eden Mackereth, Graduate Student,
John Fortner, MS Graduate student,

Lack of clearly communicated expectations between faculty mentors, student mentees, and program directors can derail even the most well-meaning undergraduate mentoring relationship.  This is especially critical when working with undergraduate researchers takes valuable faculty time and is supposed to advance your own research agenda.  This session is designed for faculty in all disciplines to explore assumptions, outline common expectations, put the expectations in the context of mentoring values and methods, and learn about ways to discuss and provide feedback to undergraduate mentees.  After exploring expectations of the undergraduate research experience, participants will discuss the findings of Ten Salient Practices of Undergraduate Research Mentors (Shanahan et al, 2015).  Dr. Elizabeth King (Biological Sciences) will present a rubric of expectations she shares with students new to her research team and how it has been helpful in socializing students to be productive in an unfamiliar experience.  Additional examples of expectations and socialization ideas will be shared.  Suggestions for helping students navigate changing expectations (up or down) will be provided.  Faculty mentors will leave with information to create their own rubric of expectations intended to reduce misunderstanding and maximize student learning and research productivity.  The AAC&U considers undergraduate research to be a high-impact educational practice that is especially important to the retention and development of underserved students.

Participant Outcomes:

• Participants will explore assumptions made in mentoring relationships.
• Participants will outline common expectations.
• Participants will contextualize expectations of mentoring values and methods.
• Participants will learn about ways to discuss and provide feedback to undergraduate mentees

Linda Blockus
Director
Office of Undergraduate Research

This session explores the power of student success tools and early alert practices (such as raising kudos and flags in MU Connect) through student case studies. Participants will role play student case studies, followed by reviewing pertinent scholarship and analysis of MU’s own student data, offering a fuller understanding of early alert both in theory and in practice.

Participants will be divided into small groups facilitated by a member of the Student Success Initiatives team. The small groups will receive scenarios based on historical students’ in-class performance and will identify strategies for working with the students in their case studies. Every participant will have the opportunity to share their perspective and reflect on how they have handled similar situations in the past. Everyone will then rejoin the larger session to discuss best practices. No matter whether participants are experienced users of early alert or are looking forward to engaging for the first time, they will leave the session equipped with a better understanding of early alert and empowered to apply these evidenced-based practices in their courses.

Participant Outcomes:

Participants will:

• Gain a fuller understanding of early alert both in theory and in practice, including best practices for use, the breadth of student support networks, and efficacy from scholarship and analysis of historical Mizzou students.
• Be able to apply what they learn to their own teaching, as well as share what they learn with their colleagues across campus, allowing for more robust and effective engagement with early alert for the betterment of our students.

Chris Dobbs, Senior Program Coordinator
Renee Henderson, Senior Data Analyst
Sam Horton, Graduate Assistant
Rachael Orr, Interim Director of Student Success Initiatives
Michael Williams, Student Success Initiatives Coordinator

In our session, we want to engage our colleagues (teacher assistants, graduate instructors, professors, etc.) in conversation about evidence-based practices, innovative teaching strategies, Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, and Universal Design for Learning implementation in both in-person and virtual classrooms. We want to share our experience, challenges, and successes of teaching a socially distanced, in-person class while having online students join via Zoom during the pandemic. We will share teaching strategies, assessment practices, participation approaches that are based on the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP).

Participant Outcomes:

Participants will be able to:

1) Define UDL and its three guiding principles for Implementation.

2) Define Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and list three of its guiding principles/tenets.

3) Identify barriers that exist when you teach both online and in-person classes (e.g., having 15 students in person and 5 students on Zoom during the same class session).

4) Identify evidence-based practices to use for effective instruction in both in-person and online settings.

Lisa Goran, Associate Teaching Professor – Special Education
Nargiza Buranova, Graduate – Special Education, Ph. D
Nikita McCree, Graduate – Special Education, Ph. D
Rachel Jurgensen, Research Consultant – Special Education

Join Student Health & Well-Being in creating a campus environment where we all thrive. As students tell us they need our support more than ever, Mizzou is conducting a deep dive review of mental health and well-being on campus. During this conversation we will discuss how Mizzou joining forces with Jed Campus to assess well-being, and implement opportunities for our campus to develop environments, skills and strategies to support thriving well-being. Learn how you can join in the conversation, support students in developing skills for thriving, and connect to opportunities to enhance well-being.

Participant Outcomes:

• Participants will be able to engage students in discussion about well-being
• Participants will be knowledgeable about campus resources supporting well-being and be able to make referrals to appropriate supports.
• Participants will be able to connect with and participate in opportunities to help the community thrive.

Christy Hutton
Associate Director
Health Promotion and Wellness

Although stressful, the 2020 pivot gave MU instructors the opportunity to experiment with new online teaching techniques and technologies. In looking back over the last year, the question often arises, “how do we know that they worked?”  Using evidence-based practices helps us design, explore, test, and document new techniques and technologies, and allows us to keep the best of these strategies to make our classes more inclusive, authentic, and equitable–regardless of modality.

During this session, we will define evidence-based instructional practices and introduce participants to the resources around evidence-based teaching provided by Lumen Circles. Although there are dozens of these types of practices, this session will specifically focus on the following practices, which Lumen Circles describe as “Tags”: Inclusiveness, Differentiated Instruction, Multi-modal instruction, Community Building, and Scaffolding. Participants will get practice identifying which current teaching strategies they are currently using that are validated by research and should therefore be preserved.  They will also have an opportunity to brainstorm how current practices may be modified for multiple delivery modalities.

Participant Outcomes:

By the end of this session, participants will be able to…

• Explain and identify evidence-based teaching practices.
• Recognize evidence-based teaching practices in an existing lesson plan.
• Name additional evidence-based teaching practices for future development.

Bethany Stone, Teaching Professor, Biological Sciences & Faculty Fellow, Teaching for Learning Center;
Heather Hunt, Associate Professor and eLearning Strategic Initatives Fellow – Biological Engineering;
Dorina Kosztin, Teaching Professor & Associate Chair – Physics & Astronomy;
Mark Kuhnert, Associate Teaching Professor – School of Health Professions;
and Danna Wren, Senior Director of Academic Technology – Office of eLearning

Join Dr. Tia Brown McNair on the topic of her new, co-authored book: Becoming a Student Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success. In this session, Dr. Brown McNair will share several strategies and techniques designed to promote a learning-centered campus for all students to flourish. What steps toward transformation are you ready to take?

Participant Outcomes:

By the end of the session , participants will be able to:

• Explain what the concept “student ready college” signifies
• Become aware of exemplary practices that promote inclusive student success
• Reflect on one’s own path as an educator-leader to foster inclusive excellence

Dr. Tia Brown McNair
Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Student Success;
and Executive Director for the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Centers
Association of American College and Universities (AAC&U)

This workshop explores the “wicked problems” our students will face upon graduation—and what it takes to create wicked students capable of tackling these challenges. Participants will explore both day-to-day pedagogies and assignments that help to develop this kind of thoughtful agency in their students—all of their students, not just those at the top-tier.  Participants will leave this workshop with a renewed sense of the greater mission of education and some ideas about how to better engage students—and themselves—in that mission.

Participant Outcomes:

Dr. Paul Hanstedt
Director
Houston H. Harte Center for Teaching and Learning

Lunch Break

Do you dread grading? Is your energy depleted by pointless arguments over “points”? Have you ever wondered if there are alternatives to traditional grading practices? If so, this session is for you!

I will share my own journey in moving from traditional to Standards Based Grading (SBG) practices (Marzano, 2019) and an Assessment For Learning (AFL) approach (Chappius & Stiggins, 2020). I will invite participants to begin or continue their own journeys toward these meaningful, research-based, and equitable assessment practices.

In this session, participants will reflect on their current grading practices and what they may wish to change. I will describe SBG and AFL, share why I switched to these practices, and explain how I have applied them in my own work as a Teaching Professor in the College of Education. I will cover creating rubrics using a proficiency/mastery scale; incorporating work habits/dispositions; fostering student self-assessment; and arriving at final grades. I will explain how SBG and AFL increase equity in grading and help to create an inclusive classroom.

Participant Outcomes:

Participants will learn (or learn more about) the following:

• What are SBG and AFL, and how do they differ from traditional grading practices?
• Creating rubrics based on a proficiency/mastery scale
• Incorporating work habits/dispositions into assessment
• What about final grades?
• The role of student self-assessment in SBG and AFL
• How SBG and AFL can enhance diversity, equity and inclusion efforts

They will also explore, in their own discipline and teaching context:

• What standards or learning targets would be relevant in your discipline?
• How would work habits/dispositions figure in?
• What kind of final grade rubric would you need?
• What challenges or resistance might you face to SBG and AFL in your discipline?

Rosalie Metro
Assistant Teaching Professor
Learning, Teaching and Curriculum

Last year, an unprecedented pandemic, COVID-19, disrupted societies around the world. At least temporarily, it shut-down society. Face-to-face commerce as well as social interactions and activities moved to fully online. Educational activities, for instance, transitioned into the virtual space in a very short period of time. In that space, an equitable academic experience requires equal reliable access to internet, unfortunately there is no equal reliable internet access. One of the best methods to overcome this challenge is the Hy-Flex teaching method providing students with the choice to switch modality each unit, week, or session without “learning deficit”. This presentation outlines the elements required for adopting this modality and the results of its adoption last fall. In addition, this presentation will not only challenge the audience to choose some Hy-Flex elements for their courses, as appropriate, but will show how to easily implement them.

Particpant Outcomes:

Participants will:

• Gain knowledge about the hybrid+flexible method of teaching to provide for equitable access;
• Determine elements of this method that can be easily adopted into their courses;
• Get guidance on this adoption.

Jamille Palacios Rivera
Assistant Teaching Professor
Applied Social Sciences; and

Have you ever wanted to help enhance your students’ creativity? Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 TED talk warns “How Schools Kill Creativity.” IBM’s 2010 survey of 1500 CEOs rated creative thinking as the most desirable leadership ability of the 21st Century, since “successfully navigating an increasingly complex world will require creativity.” Way back in the twentieth century, Theatre Professor Suzanne Burgoyne realized that by teaching theatre, she was training students to improve skills that the US education system discouraged and inhibited.

For our Celebration online presentation, we plan to show a film we made that demonstrates exercises, leads participants in doing exercises, and in discussing how the technique “exercise” our creativity muscles. In 2019, Business Times prophesied that within 3 years, “more than 120 million workers globally” will be replaced by artificial intelligence and “Behavioral skills, such as . . . communication, creativity, and empathy.”

Participants will:

• Identify assumptions they make when approaching creative problems.
• Practice unlearning habits and opening their minds.
• Practice outlining as many different solutions to the problem as they can create (FREQUENCY), drawing as many different versions of the solutions as they can imagine (FLEXIBILITY), creating new and innovative solutions to the problem (ORIGINALITY), and sketching in as many details as possible (ELABORATION).

Suzanne Burgoyne
Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emerita;
Director, Center for Applied Theatre and Drama Research; and

Josh Saboorizadeh
Associate Director, Center for Applied Theatre and Drama Research

The sudden move to online learning hastened conversations about effective lecturing. Whether live or recorded, online or in person, research shows shorter, interactive lecture videos lead to better understanding and retention.

Faculty presenter Angie Hull will describe her well-received fall 2020 instructional delivery adjustments for a live online course on public policies and processes. To teach this dense topic to a diverse group of students (including some who come from a field outside of government and others who speak English as a second language), she has used Zoom’s chat function to send links or documents that scaffold her lectures, fill in knowledge gaps, and provide other ways for students to engage with the materials. If a student doesn’t understand a definition, they can click the Senate’s glossary for more information. If they struggle to picture the process in action, they can watch a linked video explanation after class. She has also created and used “Quick Listens,” short lectures that tie key ideas together and provide structure without bogging down students with long watch times.

Instructional designer presenter Kris Wingo helps faculty in several disciplines design accessible, engaging lectures. He’ll briefly mention accessibility considerations for lectures, such as captioning and color choices, and also share the research on how lectures like Angie’s – interactive and short – increase student engagement and support Universal Design for Learning.

Participant Outcomes:

Participants will:

• Share their lecture challenges, and prepare for answering those challenges with ideas from and questions to presenters.
• Learn live or recorded, online or in person lecture and instructional deliver strategies for Universal Design for Learning and Equitable Access.

Angie Hull
Associate Teaching Professor
Truman School of Public Affairs; and

Kris Wingo
Instructional Designer
Office of eLearning

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is an exciting, interdisciplinary field that explores and shares the effectiveness of our assessments, activities, and course design with the scholarly community. Our own classrooms are unique opportunities to both test teaching and learning strategies and share them with others. But with the increasing pressures on educators, it can be difficult to know where to start.

In this workshop, we will walk through a simple and pragmatic process of crafting a scholarly project around your class. Using a published SoTL project on helping students read and overcome difficult texts as our guide, we’ll go behind the scenes of teaching and learning scholarship and explore ways you could take a similar SoTL approach to your classrooms.

You’ll walk away from this workshop with (1) a handy assessment-type grounded in SoTL research on exploring difficult texts and (2) a step-by-step process to crafting your own SoTL project. In the end, you’ll be ready to turn your classroom into a publication.

Participant Outcomes:

At the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Explore a simple series of steps to conduct Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) projects
• Experiment with the Difficulty Paper, a new assessment type applicable across disciplines
• Brainstorm and discuss ideas for a SoTL Project in their classroom

Dr. Jonathan Cisco
Associate Director
Teaching for Learning Center

Mathematical and conceptual models are foundational for research and teaching across the life sciences, and there is a growing call to incorporate more quantitative and computational training into undergraduate curricula across majors. However, a central challenge for instructors teaching quantitative topics in non-math courses is the need to manage issues such as vastly variable mathematical training or negative emotions towards mathematics among students. Such math anxiety can interfere with students’ abilities to processes mathematical problems and hampers student success across STEM disciplines. One key approach for effectively quantitative concepts in non-math courses is to incorporate active learning strategies that allow students to directly interact with mathematical models, rather than relying solely on traditional lecture- or textbook-based instruction.

This workshop will begin with an introduction to EcoEvoApps, an R package and website we built that provides freely available webapps with which students can interactively explore various fundamental theoretical models in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. I will also describe our community-centered efforts that make it easy for members of the EEB community to contribute to the growing app ecosystem. To illustrate the value of these apps for teaching quantitative concepts in EEB, I will present results from student surveys in two Fall 2020 undergraduate Ecology courses that integrated the apps into homework exercises. We found that completing active learning exercises in which students directly visualize the consequences of manipulating model parameters leads higher student confidence and interest in quantitative topics. Finally, I will also introduce how participants can use the “Shiny” package for the R programming language to easily create such interactive apps for their own classrooms.

Participant Outcomes:

After this presentation, participant will

• Know how to design and build interactive webapps to help students explore the outcomes of mathematical/conceptual models in their own field.
• Be able to identify opportunities to collect data on student understanding of these mathematical/conceptual models by frequently issuing short, low-stakes student surveys.

Gaurav Kandlikar
Post-Doc.
Biological Sciences

Complete task-based activities and puzzles in this meta workshop experience.
Learn escape room best practices for use in asynchronous and synchronous online instruction.
Use what you learn to design activities for your own digital instructional spaces.
Escape the session through room design.
0 (Zero).

For a preview of escape room best practices, solve this puzzle: 

http://bit.ly/XXXX-X

What letters or numbers should replace the five X marks? Use capital letters only. 

Learning Outcomes:

Participants will be able to:

• Generate student curiosity around lesson instructions through incorporation of hidden information.
• Identify specific advantages of escape room design for pedagogy.
• Recognize the potential of digital escape rooms for supporting curriculum.
• Modify digital escape room templates to strengthen presentation of specific course topics.
• Expand student engagement with course content through application of escape room design practices.
• Individualize escape room design and implementation
• Reflect on experience participating in an escape room activity to anticipate potential student reactions.

Carolyn Stallard
Adjunct Instructor
Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College