2017-18 Teaching Circles

Topic Group: Fostering Engagement in the Classroom
Circle Contact: Yuan Yuan Kang (Lecturer, Natural Sciences) 
Circle Contact Info: kangy@uhd.edu, 713-222-5378
Additional Members: Rachna Sadana, Adriana Visbal, John Kelly, Creshema Murray 

Circle Description: 

Circle Lead: Léonie Karkoviata (Finance & Management Information Systems) 
Circle Contact Info: karkoviatal@uhd.edu
Additional Members: Renée Edwards, Greg Roof

Circle Description: 

Class activities designed to foster active learning and encourage student engagement were the focus of this learning circle. The Teaching Circle project provided a way to encourage classroom instructors to try a different method of teaching.

Circle Artifact(s): https://tinyurl.com/2018tckarkoviata

Circle Leads:  Windy Lawrence & Lucas Logan (Arts & Communications) 
Circle Contact Info: lawrencew@uhd.edu 
Additional Members: Ashley Archiopoli, Felicia Harris, Elizabeth Hatfield, Abby Koenig, Lucas Logan

Our teaching circle’s goal was to help foster active engagement in our math 1310 classrooms, and to evaluate the effectiveness of such teaching practices. During the 2017-18 academic year, the circle created a series of faculty workshops and a survey that workshop participants completed at the end of the semester. Faculty interested in the workshop series attended an initial overview meeting to discuss current course objectives, the workshop goals and requirements, along with the semester’s scheduled workshops, each focusing on one specific in-class activity. Each of the circle members presented one of the workshops utilizing manipulatives purchased by a previous innovative course improvement teaching circle. The hour-long workshops allowed participants to complete the activity as a student, and discuss improvements along with various activity options. Participants were given the option of taking a classroom set of these manipulatives with the activity sheet for use in their current course at the end of each workshop. Each participant who completed at least 3 of the 6 workshops, and completed at least one of the activities in the classroom along with a survey of the experience received a small stipend. The survey indicated that these faculty will continue to utilize the activities in the future as they felt the activities encouraged discussion and concept understanding while adding an element of enjoyment to the lecture. Additionally, the workshops allowed faculty teaching this math course time to discuss and share information that will improve the overall quality and depth of their instruction. Through this teaching circle’s funding, the resulting workshops and the beneficial discussions, the circle members were able to determine the additional manipulatives and support necessary for these faculty to continue this active engagement in the classroom, making our teaching circle a great success!

Circle Artifact(s): https://tinyurl.com/2018tcbeane

Circle Leads: Sujata Krishna (Natural Sciences) & Windy Lawrence (Arts & Communications) 
Circle Contact Info: krishnas@uhd.edu
Additional Members: Carlos Bohorquez, Rachel Dickson, Erin Hodgess, Christina Hughes, Rebecca Morales 

Circle Lead: Candace TenBrink (Management & Insurance Risk Management) 
Circle Contact Info: tenbrinkc@uhd.edu 
Additional Members: David Maldonado, Sedef Smith, Dietrich von Biedenfeld

Circle Description:

Experiential learning has long been used as a learning method in the hard sciences as tangibly shown in the many labs scattered within college campuses. However it is still relatively scarce in the soft sciences (Hoberman & Mailick, 1994). The overarching goal of this teaching circle is to promote pedagogies that leverage experiential learning in business education. Two assumptions underpin this project:

• If we integrate our course material in a way that brings knowledge life, students will not only increase their understanding of class material but they will also be able to implement and utilize the prospective functional tool kit that professionals use in the post-college corporate environment.
• If we put students in active roles in the learning process, we can enhance their desire to learn the class material.

This teaching circle, therefore, has 3 specific objectives: (1) Design and execute experiential learning tasks that bring knowledge to life and put students in active roles; (2) Evaluate students’ progress, outcomes, and interest in learning as they participate in and complete these tasks; and (3) Present ‘lessons learned’ from this project to our colleagues at the Davies College of Business and the wider UHD community. 

This teaching circle will represent the collective efforts of a team of three business faculty with specializations in strategy, business law, and supply chain management and one staff member with a specialization in teaching and learning. 

This TC project enabled us to learn about, apply, and analyze experiential learning.

Circle Artifact(s): https://tinyurl.com/2018tctenbrink

Circle Lead: Maria Bhattacharjee (Urban Education) 
Circle Contact Info: bhattacharjeem@uhd.edu 
Additional Members: Irene Chen, Judith Harris, John Kelly, Dana Smith

Circle Description:

The goal of our Teaching Circle (TC) was to improve student success at UHD through practice and promotion of teaching excellence. Our TC had representation from each of the units in the Collage of Public Service (CPS). Four members teach service-learning courses that are curriculum driven. Our group wanted to have conversations about the requirements for our courses, the amount of time expended by faculty and the students executing the projects, the benefits of the projects to the students (academically and personally), to the faculty, to the partner institutions, and to UHD. During the fall 2017 semester, the TC met monthly to discuss the goal for the project. and collect the artifacts for the final report. 

During the spring 2018, the team distributed the collected artifacts from the fall semester among the TC members. The preliminary analysis of these artifacts seems to indicate that students benefited personally and professionally from participating in the community engagement opportunities offered in the courses, faculty considered the engagement with community an effective way to teach their courses, have opportunity for research, and participate in the solution of issues affecting their community. The feedback from the partner institutions was also very positive. Because of these partnerships, the institutions could provide additional services to their constituencies without additional personnel or monetary cost incurred. Our TC is currently in the process of getting approval from the UHD Committee of Human Subjects to process the remaining archived data to publish an article about the importance of offering curriculum driven service-learning courses to higher education students. The dynamics of the group were excellent. Four of the TC members will continue meeting during the fall of 2018 to seek different venues for publication and explore opportunities to work together in community engagement projects. See appendix for the project application.

Circle Artifact(s): https://tinyurl.com/2018tcbhattacharjee

Circle Lead: Houston Brown (Natural Sciences) 
Circle Contact Info: brownhs@uhd.edu
Additional Members: Franklin Beckles, Maria Benavides, Elene Bouhoutsos-Brown, Hamida Qavi, Eszter Trufan

Circle Lead: Olin Bjork (English) 
Circle Contact Info: bjorko@uhd.edu
Additional Members: Creshema Murray, Rey Romero

Circle Description:

The goal of our teaching circle was to collaboratively write and submit an article on strategies for assessment of service learning and community engagement (SLCE) projects in language and communication disciplines. After some research and meetings, we determined that this topic was too broad and that we needed to narrow our focus. We each had different ideas for the direction our article should take, but we ultimately settled on the topic of ethics and student agency in SLCE projects in the disciplines of technical communication, communication studies, and foreign language translation. We then generated ideas and material for a panel of three papers on this topic to be delivered at the 2018 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference in Birmingham, AL. We plan to use these three papers as sections in a future article on the topic. Over the course of the year, thinking, reading and talking about ethics and agency helped us refine the SLCE projects that we conduct in our own courses and even come up with a plan to integrate our three projects in the fall 2018 semester. Two of us applied to designate the courses in which these projects will take place as service learning courses, which is not something we would have done individually without each other's support and encouragement.

Circle Artifact(s): https://tinyurl.com/2018tcbjork

Circle Lead: Connie Kang (Natural Sciences) 
Circle Contact Info: kangy@uhd.edu 
Additional Members: Gabriela Bowden, Meghan Mihard, Sanghamitra Saha, Luz Vela

Circle Description:

The goals of the teaching circle were to assess and improve student learning in the central dogma of biology by implementing common theme activities and applying assessment instruments across sophomore, junior and senior level courses. Through a collaborative effort, each course has developed an activity using Lac operon or insulin as an example of gene expression and regulation. In addition, we have adopted a Concept Inventory (COI) on the central dogma of biology to assess the effectiveness of our teaching strategies across several biology courses. From our results, we conclude that the COI instrument is a valid tool to assess knowledge and competency in core concepts and can be potentially useful for curricular mapping and assessment. This is the first time we apply such an instrument to our biology courses and we have gained valuable insights into our course structure and student learning. The goals of this teaching circle have been largely accomplished. More importantly, our TC activities have served as diagnostic practices and provided insights on the weakness of our student learning and needs for improvement in pedagogy.

Circle Artifact(s): https://tinyurl.com/2018tckang

Circle Lead: Sam Sen (Natural Sciences) 
Circle Contact Info: sens@uhd.edu
Additional Members: Georges Detiveaux, Heather Goltz, Djuana Lamb

Circle Description:

The primary goal of our Student Engagement Teaching Circle (SETC) is to leverage technology to engage passive learners and, ultimately, increase overall student engagement, interaction, and learning acquisition. As faculty members, we see that it is often a challenge to get students engaged in online and classroom environments by actively responding to question prompts, joining classroom discussions, and making meaning of the learning material by summarizing their understanding verbally. Research findings suggest that when students are actively involved in the learning process, it leads to increased student learning and persistence, higher grades, and more thorough questioning (Felder, 1992; Bonwell & Eison, 1991). Instructors in all fields are experimenting with a variety of tools to deliver information, present lectures, conference with students, and provide feedback on written and visual projects. (Thompson & Lee, 2012). We recognize that students readily utilize available technology in their personal lives, as well as in efforts to coordinate the perfect class schedule and obtain vital insights into professor ratings in hopes of landing the right mix to ensure academic success each semester. We wanted to capitalize on the use of technology as a medium to increase student engagement and learning acquisition. External factors outside the control of the team precluded our multi-disciplined team of Dr. Heather Goltz, Ms. Djuana Lamb-Morrison, Mr. Sam Sen and Georges Detiveaux (informal member) from implementing some of the tools/technology “wish list” that was set forth in our proposal, but I believe that our learnings individually and as a group overall were substantive and sustainable - skills we can use to bring incremental value into our classrooms going forward. For maximum impact, Heather, Djuana and I took a “divide and conquer” approach as it pertains to related aspects of focus under the same umbrella of utilizing technology to increase engagement and learning. Their takeaways are contained in this folder.

Circle Artifact(s): https://tinyurl.com/2018tcsen