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It’s that time of year again, time to start grading mountains of final assignments and exams. There is nothing that can dampen your enthusiasm for teaching quite like grading. Before you let those grading blues get to you, try some of these tips to help keep your spirits up while you slog through that mountain of work.

Organize the papers or exams before you grade
Sometimes it helps to organize the assignments in a way that can motivate you through the pile. Some teachers put all the assignments by stronger students first so they are more motivated to get started. Other teachers put all the stronger students at the end so that they aren’t too harsh on the weaker ones. You can also place a few stronger assignments strategically in your pile to give you a boost when you are starting to get tired.

Establish a grading method
Determine how you will mark the exams or assignments. Will you mark Question 1 for all your students first, and then continue with marking Question 2 for everyone, then Question 3, etc.? Or will you mark the full exam or assignment, student by student?

Have a Rubric
Even a basic rubric can help you maintain equity and consistency in your grading. If you haven’t already done so, determine the maximum mark value that will be assigned for each question or component of the exam or assignment. Having a general plan before you start, or even after looking over a few assignments, will help you give a more accurate grade. This can help you avoid that moment when you give two students the same grade but know that one assignment is a little better. To help you prepare a basic rubric before you start grading, ask yourself “what’s the perfect paper?” or do your own exam and use that as your rubric.

Get comfortable
Sit in a space where you feel comfortable and can work and concentrate for a long time. If you like natural light, sit near a window or set yourself up outside and enjoy the nice weather while you grade. If you work better in the morning start early; if you work better in the afternoon get your errands out of the way first and set the afternoon aside for grading.

Plan Breaks
We always criticize our students for procrastinating and cramming before exams. Try not to do the same thing with your grading. Give yourself enough time to work on a few assignments a day, or in batches. Make sure you plan to take some breaks in between, whether they are 30 minute breaks or even a full day. If you have a lot of different assignments to grade try changing between them just to get a change of pace. Plan ahead so you don’t have to cram all those exams into a one day grading marathon.

Pedagogical Development Office
Vanier College

Registration: Please email the PDO at: PDO@vaniercollege.qc.ca

PDF Flyer

2013 Conference Theme: Pedagogical Change in Higher Education: Building New Models of Learning and Teaching

Supporting Active Learning & Technological Innovation in Science Education (SALTISE) is a consortium composed of faculty from McGill University, Dawson College, John Abbott College and Vanier College, funded by a Chantier 3 institutional grant from the Ministry of Education, Sports and Leisure (MELS).

The theme of the SALTISE 2013 Annual Conference on June 10th and 11th is “Pedagogical Change in Higher Education: Building New Models of Learning and Teaching.” The conference will feature leading researchers in education, learning, and educational technology from Singapore, Spain, Canada, and our local Québec network. Our first keynote speaker, Manu Kapur, Head of the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education of Singapore, conceptualized the notion of “Productive Failure” ─ a new way of thinking about improving learning and teaching. His current research extends this line of work to the investigation of pedagogical change, which Kapur will highlight in his keynote. Furthermore, he will focus on the steps we need to take to support new approaches to learning and teaching in the 21st Century ─ i.e., the Knowledge Age.

We look forward to you joining us June 10th and 11th for two full days of workshops, keynote sessions, paper and poster presentations, and networking with your pedagogical peers!

Best wishes,
The SALTISE team

For more information please consult the SALTISE Conference webpage

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles/ freedigitalphotos.net

The final crunch is here and everyone, both students and teachers, are feeling it. The last few weeks of the semester and into the exam period is a stressful time for everyone. Many of our students are writing final assignments or preparing for final exams in most of their classes. You can help your students prepare for their final evaluations with some of the following suggestions.

Rubrics
Students always spend a lot of time and energy trying to figure out what the teacher wants in their paper, or what they are going to be asked on the exam. Giving them a rubric before they hand in their paper, or write their exam, can help them to focus their studies on what is truly important. For some tips on rubrics check out the PDO Rubrics resources.

Be available
As we get closer and closer to the due dates for final papers and exams, students are going to start having more and more questions. Try to be available to answer their questions, even after the last class. Make sure to share your office hours with your students, and try to check your MIOs regularly. As they start to study and prepare their assignments, they are going to start identifying the areas they don’t understand and will need some help to clarify those misunderstandings.

Study/review sessions
If you have the time, consider devoting one of your final class sessions to review. Designate this time to answering questions from students on the material they don’t fully understand. If you don’t have time to review during your regular class sessions, you can help students organize study or review sessions after classes have finished. Helping them find a time and a place to review as a group can help them make that study session seem more essential to their success. Consider booking a room for a study session after classes are done, since students often find it difficult to find places to meet and study together.

Practice questions
If you have a final exam for your course, consider giving students practice questions to work on. Not only will this help them to practice using the material, but it will also help them identify what is important for the exam so that they can focus their studies. You can even use the Lea or Moodle forums as a space where your students can share and discuss their responses with you and the other students, creating a virtual study space.

Time management
Students are notoriously bad at managing their time and are often left cramming material the night before the exam. Spend some time in class helping students think realistically about how much time is needed to prepare for the final exam or complete the final assignments. Then help them plan how to fit that into the few weeks we have left, instead of on the night before the final exam or assignment is due.

Additional Resources
Teaching Tip: Helping Students Prepare for Exams
Teaching Tip: Study Card Strategy
Teaching tip: Evaluating More Fairly- Essays, Papers, Long Answers, Term Projects

Pedagogical Development Office
Vanier College

Dr Enrique Ruiz-Velasco Sánchez from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) , Mexico city, will be at Vanier College on Friday, May 17^th to facilitate  a hands-on workshop on robotics. Dr. Ruiz-Velasco Sánchez is an international leader and researcher in the world of robotics  and artificial Intelligence in education. This is a chance to be involved in active learning and to learn about  a unique model of robotics developed by Dr. Sánchez where the robot is controlled at a distance by a cell-phone.

Everyone is welcome: students, faculty and all members of the community. Please note this workshop will be presented in French with questions and comments in English welcomed. Light refreshments will be served.

When: Friday, May 17th from 12:00 to 13:30

Where: A-476

Please RSVP by Wednesday, May 15^th, 2013 to Marielle Beauchemin, the organizer of this event.

Image courtesy of Master isolated images/ Freedigitalphotos.net

Active learning approaches focus on the learner, and the things they are doing to be actively involved in their own learning and knowledge construction. Active learning doesn’t just mean having students getting up and moving around, working in groups, or even working with technology. These are some commonly used techniques in active learning activities; however, the focus needs to remain on what the student is doing with these activities to allow them to learn and construct an understanding for themselves.

Construct it for yourself

Active learning bases many of its ideas about learning on a constructivist approach to education. The central idea in constructivism is that learners build their knowledge and understanding by connecting what they are learning with things they already know or have experienced. The more opportunities that students have to actively engage and connect with the material they are learning the more chances they have to construct their own understanding of that knowledge.

Active learning is also heavily influenced by a sub-branch of constructivism known as social constructivism. As suggested by the name, social constructivism emphasizes the important role of social interactions in the learning process. These social interactions can be between peers collaborating together on the learning process; they can also be interactions with a subject expert, or teacher, who can guide the learner in their learning.

For an excellent article on constructivism, and its implications on teaching, check out the article Contemporary Educational Psychology/Constructivism: Changes in How Students Think

AL and IT

Active Learning (AL) and teaching with Information Technology (IT) are often seen hand in hand. That doesn’t mean that you have to use technology to do active learning, or that having technology in your classes means your students are engaging in active learning. A recent study (2013) done at Dawson college (l’adoption d’environnements sociotechnologiques comme moteur de changement pédagogique) has shown that having technology in a classroom isn’t enough; you need to pair that technology with active learning for it to have the greatest impact on student success. While technology can help us enhance our teaching strategies, the focus still needs to remain on the student and what they are doing to construct their own understanding.

Additional resources

For more information on active learning you can check out the following PDO Teaching Tips:
Active Learning: So Much More than Info-tainment
Active Learning in Action

For some excellent tips and tricks for incorporating active learning in your classes check out the Active Learning Webpage from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Teaching and Learning.

Pedagogical Development Office
Vanier College

Vanier College will be building two new Versatile Classrooms for the Fall 2013 semester. We would love to get some input from the community on the desks and chairs for our new active learning classrooms. Please join us during UB in the Carrefour for a showcase of our options and share with us which chairs and desks you think would be best.

Image courtesy of Ambro/ freedigitalphotos.net

Role playing can be a great way for students to learn. In a role playing scenario, students are given a particular role in an imagined situation and asked to make decisions or take actions based on their role in the scenario. The more authentic to your discipline the situation is, the better the experience will be for the students. This type of role playing allows students to get a better understanding of the actual experience of the material you are helping them to learn. The key to a good role playing session is to set up your activity so that students have to approach the topic from the perspective of another person, be it a professional in your field, a character in a novel, or a person from a different cultural background. The more they have to get involved in the topic emotionally, the better. Also, having students switch roles, with the same scenario, provides opportunities for them to experience the same situation from multiple perspectives.

Activities

• In business classes, you can ask your students to imagine that they are part of a company and they need come up with a plan to deal with a business issue that you might be covering in class.
• In literature classes, you could ask students to take on the role of different characters in the novel and have them respond to questions.
• In a history class you could ask your students to represent different figures from a historical period and have them defend their choices or argue for a different approach.
• In social science classes you could ask students to look at a current issue from the perspective of different cultural groups.
• In science classes you could ask students to represent different scientific thinkers in the field and have them analyze a situation and give their explanation for what they observed.

Resources

Article (2002): Role-Playing as a Teaching Strategy

Book Link: Effective Teaching: A Guide for Community College Instructors: Role Playing

Web resources: role playing activities from the Geosciences Department at Carleton College, Minnesota

YouTube Video: Medical Sales College Student Role-Play

Weblinks: Role playing in Education

Pedagogical Development Office
Vanier College

To register please check out the Moodle Day link at Moodlecegeps.ca

You are cordially invited to attend our third edition of MoodleDay in May, at Dawson College:

• Day: May 10th, 2013 (Friday)
• Time: 9:30 am – 3:30 pm
• Place: Dawson College (Metro Atwater), room 5B.13 (Boardroom)
• Materials: you, your appetite*, and a desire to talk all things Moodle

*A luncheon will be provided by DECclic, thanks to Québec-Canada Entente.

The final program will be available soon. We really want to keep it easy and open. Each presentation should last about 15 minutes so that we can have enough time for questions and discussion.

Rafael Scapin, Dawson host, DECclic Coordinator François Lizotte and Orzu Kamolova (DECclic – Pedagogical Advisor/ Project Manager, Anglophone Sector) will greet you from 9:30 am with coffee and bites.