The 13th annual Teaching and Learning Conference at Elon University held Aug. 18 at Koury Business Center was jointly sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning and Teaching and Learning Technologies.
The best practices for reaching students and helping them develop in the classroom and through their coursework continue to evolve, as do the technological tools professors use to accomplish those tasks.
And in recent years, the body of evidence and scholarship around teaching and learning has continued to grow, said Deandra Little, director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning and associate professor of English at Elon. That surge in scholarship provided organizers with a framework and challenge for the 13th annual Teaching and Learning Conference at Elon, held Thursday, Aug. 18, — helping nearly 300 college and university faculty members sift through and use that evidence as they help their students become more engaged.
“There’s a national trend now to think about evidence-based and evidence-informed teaching practices,” Little said. “The range of topics for this year’s Teaching and Learning Conference reflects the ways that different disciplines and different contexts define evidence and begin thinking about what that evidence means.”
Jointly organized by the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning and Teaching and Learning Technologies at Elon, the conference is an opportunity to offer new scholarship, share best practices and introduce new teaching technologies to faculty across multiple disciplines and institutions.
The roughly 280 attendees representing 40 different higher education institutions absorbed insight from morning and afternoon plenary sessions at Koury Business Center along with two sessions of workshops and presentations by Elon faculty as well as faculty from other North Carolina schools. New this year were lunchtime “unconference” sessions — discussion groups with the topics selected from suggestions by attendees offered and voted on between morning sessions.
“We wanted to make sure we were setting people up for success in terms of being able to connect with each other and keep the learning process going during lunch,” Elon’s Michael Vaughn, instructional technologist with Teaching and Learning Technologies.
In his morning plenary session, Dan Willingham with the University of Virginia offered a framework to help professors determine whether to try out new technologies and teaching practices, and if they do, to assess how whether those innovations are having an impact on students and their ability to learn. Willingham, a professor of psychology, has focused his research on applying cognitive psychology to college and K-12 education, and said that though considering the evidence behind a new teaching method or technology is important, the lack of a large body of evidence shouldn’t keep instructors from trying new things.
“You can’t not adopt things if there’s no evidence, or you just won’t do anything,” Willingham said.
That said, faculty should begin with a set of goals and a timeframe for determining whether what they are trying is working, Willingham said.
“If you don’t plan in advance, you’re more likely to selectively see things that indicate it’s working out well,” he said.
Little said the annual conference at Elon began as an opportunity to share new scholarship about teaching and learning with the college’s own faculty, but has expanded through the years to include attendees from other colleges and universities. This year’s conference features a larger number of faculty from other institutions as leaders of workshops, such as “Urban Legend or Practical Pedagogy: Return of the Teaching Ninjas” by Alyssa Archer, Candice Benjes-Small and Susan Van Patten of Radford University in Virginia.
“During the past 13 years, the attendance beyond Elon has increased, and we’re trying to make sure the presenters reflect that,” Little said.
The goal of the conference is to address larger, long-term areas of scholarship and research, but also to offer attendees with practical ideas that a professor can introduce into their classes in the short term. No doubt attendees at the afternoon plenary session, headed by Elon faculty members Todd Lee and Kristina Meinking, left Koury Business Center with direct insight into how the pair had shifted their approach to teaching to very different subjects — calculus and Latin.
Students taking Calculus II from Lee, professor of mathematics, and taking Latin from Meinking, assistant professor of classical languages, have shared classroom space, with both professors using a new course structure that has “flipped” classrooms, includes low-stakes testing and has students working at their own pace. With “flipped classrooms,” traditional lecture content is delivered outside the classroom through video, audio or other platforms, while the time in class focuses on working more directly with the professor or with fellow students on the application of that knowledge.
“We are trying to do more than, particularly with Calculus II or Latin, just memorizing a bunch of things,” Lee told the crowd. “There are skills to be learned beyond that, and they need to hang those skills onto a larger scaffold to enrich that scaffold and understand the bigger picture.”
For Meinking’s Latin class, students adopt their own pace as they work their way through the semester’s content. Their time in class is spent largely in small groups as they work to understand grammatical constructs in Latin as laid out in a Latin-only reader they progress through throughout the semester, Meinking said.
“This allows students to spend more time on something they might struggle with and less time on something they might pass right through, and it makes it OK to not get something right away,” Meinking said.