CETL Weekly Teaching Tip: 2/16/2015

Resources for Getting Students to Peer Review each other's Work

Next CETL Cafe Conversations

NPR Piece on First Gen Students and Their Experience

by Ken Sagendorf, CETL Director

I hope you made it to work safely this morning.  I, like my students in class this morning, was hoping for a snow day but here I am, wet feet and all.  As we approach the  fifth week of the semester  and 8 week courses or the second week of a five-week course, I don’t know about you but I start to get tired of grading and giving feedback despite the fact that this can be the most helpful for students and their learning.  Today’s tip focuses on how to share that workload with the students themselves.  Peer review, when taught and done well, can be an invaluable tool for improving student work and their learning.  After all, our scholarship often relies on and places deep value upon peer review.   Attached is a handout with resources for teaching your students how to peer review each other from multiple disciplines.  In addition, I like the descriptions of the case studies and lessons learned included in this article: http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/resources_teach/teaching_in_practice/docs/Student_Peer_Review.pdf.  And for me, when I teach my students, I share with them exactly how I am reading, what I am looking for when I go over their work and what questions I am trying to answer.  It serves to let students have a peek under the hood at how their work is evaluated.

Next CETL Café Conversation: Teaching First Gen Students

And, thank you to Stacy Chamberlin (Regis College Chemistry department) for an early morning preview of what I would hear on my drive to work!  This is a great piece that was on NPR this morning about the experiences of first gen students at the University of Michigan: http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/02/16/385470288/fitting-in-on-campus-challenges-for-first-generation-students.  I was a first gen student myself and can relate to much of what the story shared.  First gen students, as well as many students from traditionally underrepresented groups need to see, hear, and feel the messages from us as faculty and from the university, that we believe that they can succeed.  And, we need to hold them to high expectations.  If you would like to discuss first gen and diverse students and how to best support them through our teaching, that will be the topic for the next CETL Café Conversations.  We will meet in the main café at 11:45 on Monday, February 23^rd.  I will reserve a couple tables for the discussion.  Please know that the conversation is casual and revolves around sharing our experiences.  A handout will be provided.