Center for Innovative Pedagogy

Terrific, concrete tips from Flower Darby about strategies which will make your discussion boards more successful.

Terrific, concrete examples of activities you can use to help form classroom communities. I appreciate the framing that these are not necessarily one-and-done "icebreakers" but might be repeatable through the course.

Great thoughts from Derek Bruff about approaches to discussion and groupwork when half the students are coming by videoconference.

These tips and techniques would benefit any breakout activity, but in online teaching this kind of structure will be crucial.

Good principles to help you make your Moodle page easier and more pleasant to read, from Jedidiah Rex at Lawrence University.

How would your Moodle page if you thought of it as acting as the students' organizer, or a space for frequent feedback and interleaved practice?

Excellent advice if you're asking students to listen to podcasts (or watch YouTube videos) for class.

Have you figured out how much work you're asking of yourself and your students this fall? There's still time to.

Terrific thoughts about a first day of class over videoconference. It's interesting to me how many of these are basically digital translations of techniques which work well in physical classrooms too.

"From love letters to pen pals, families, relationships, friendships, professional and creative collaborations, and the brilliant sudden intimacy between new acquaintances, correspondence over distance has sustained us for ages uncounted." Hopeful thoughts about pen pals, chain letters, and "writer's letters" from Sean Michael Morris.

From the "Poetry Unbound" podcast, a poem which, on its surface, is about the importance of saying our students' names correctly, but also about approaching difficult moments with charity and strength.

A terrific set of models from Plymouth State's CoLab present a set of ways of thinking about how we can make the best use of our precious face-to-face class time in the fall.

Here are three actionable ideas for white teachers who would like to support Black teachers and students right now.

A report from Data & Society provides an approach to "racial literacy" in technology companies, which would also be appropriate in other disciplines.

Molly Appel describes a strategy she uses to teach students specific critical analysis and close reading skills, allowing them to relate more deeply with diverse texts and the diversity of the classroom. While the examples are from literature, I can imagine the approach being adapted for the reading skills of any discipline.

Specific suggestions for ways to do the work of anti-racism in our instuitutions.

Serious issues we need to work on at Kenyon.

This was written to address the pivot to remote learning, but the advice applies to any crisis, including the current political situation. There's value in your lengthy, developed teaching philosophy, and there's value stating in your principles in ways which are easy to recall under pressure.

A fair number of faculty have told me that their remote teaching experience showed the benefits of a more flexible syllabus. Here's one example of how to give students options for a final paper/project, but the most important part may be the discussion of how Professor Katopodis generates these options with her students.

From Cathy Davidson: "There is almost no field untouched by this COVID pandemic or irrelevant to it. I do not mean we all have to suddenly become trauma therapists. That's dangerous (unless we are trained to that role). And it doesn't mean making every class "about" the pandemic (that would be awful). It means being sensitive to the devastating historical moment in which we are now living. Before we even think about a syllabus or videos or Zoom, think about what it means to be a student. Now."