New Workshop Series: Bring Your Best Ideas

This spring semester, we’re introducing a new series we’re calling, “Bring Your Best Idea,” a format designed to leverage the breadth of innovative ideas and teaching expertise on this campus. For this series, we invite you to bring your best idea on the topic of the day to a lively, collaborative, and fast-paced sharing session. Each participant who has an idea to share will have two minutes to describe it. No slides please, though a one-page handout to pass around is fine. After 20-30 minutes of sharing ideas, we’ll shift to Q&A and discussion. Whether or not you have something to share, you’ll leave these sessions with a bunch of new ideas you can try in your own teaching.

Our first topic for this new series will be “Strategies and Techniques for Inspiring Discussion.” Perennial challenges in holding in-class discussions include:

• Preparing students to discuss

• Keeping the conversation on topic

• Engaging and sustaining broad participation

• Handling difficult or emotional topics

• Managing discussions in large classes

• Making sure the discussion has a take-home point and students get it

If you have a good practice for addressing one of these challenges, or some other issue related to inspiring discussion, and you can describe it for your peers in 2 minutes or less, please come and share. If you don’t usually have discussions in your class or have often wondered how other faculty manage them, come and learn! Lunch will be provided.