The Center for Teaching & Learning

It’s election day, and I’ll go ahead and put it out there: I’m feeling anxious about what’s next. Maybe you are, too. Throughout this election season, which seems to have lasted approximately 75 years, I’ve been doing all the little jobs that make my life my life. Meanwhile, my worry just kind of hangs out, simmering. Today, on the kitchen scale of feelings, we’re a little past a rolling boil.

It’s strange when you’re surer about the little details of your life than you are about the big things. I don’t know when or how the dust will settle after the U.S. election, but I know that on Thursday, I’ll be teaching first-year students about the research process. I’ll be attending the last CTL event of 2024. I’ll be showing up as myself and inviting students to do the same. We’ve added resources in this issue about holding space and having difficult conversations in the classroom, and I hope these find their way to folks who are looking for them. No matter what happens, I hope everybody out there is able to find ways to take care of themselves and each other this week.

One thing I’m buoyed by in this time of uncertainty is the total brilliance of my colleagues on the CTL advisory board, some of which you can see below. We’ve got articles in this issue about pedagogical tools, active learning, student feedback, open educational resources, addressing challenging topics, being a kind co-worker, and poetry. I’ve been consistently inspired by my colleagues this semester, and I’m so grateful for our community, especially now.

And for those of you who are looking for distraction today, might I recommend Puppy Bowl highlight reels? If you've got a video or image that takes your anxiety down a notch, something that might be helpful to others, please post it here.

Thursday, November 7, 2024, 1:00 - 2:00 PM

Library 2028

Facilitated by Cathy Breneman

Lunch provided!

RSVP here: www.bit.ly/ctlrsvp

In this session, we will talk about how technology has impacted the development of today’s college students. We will focus on the recent research of Jonathan Haidt and his new book The Anxious Generation and discuss how technology has changed childhood and the implications for education, families, and mental health. We will talk about how to address and support these challenges with our students and consider strategies to decrease their anxiety.

Artificial Intelligence tools are widely used for creating poetry and art, but they are less commonly applied to analyze them. This fall, I am teaching a course on Latin American Poetry and sought ways to incorporate AI to enhance learning. In this brief text, I describe how AI tools, such as Ideogram.ai and ChatGPT, have opened new pathways to understanding poetry.

The course is structured as a seminar with two main goals: to cultivate a deep appreciation for exceptional texts and to promote insightful interpretation. SPAN 333 covers poets from countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Peru. This diversity exposes students to a variety of perspectives, vocabularies, and histories, though it can also introduce challenges like jargon and regionalisms.

I’ve found Ideogram.ai to be excellent for creating visual representations of poems or specific lines. The platform is free and user-friendly, allowing four “experiments” per day on the trial version. For instance, when I prompted Ideogram with William Carlos Williams' poem “This Is Just to Say,” it generated an image that I am sharing below. This visual serves as a starting point for discussion, helping students engage with the text by examining what the AI recognized as the “main idea” and what might have been overlooked. Ideogram's unique approach—generating a different image each time, even for the same poem—fosters richer discussions as students can compare interpretations.

Another tool I occasionally employ is ChatGPT, used with a specific objective in mind. Students are assigned the role of “discussion leaders,” responsible not only for moderating our conversation but also for developing thought-provoking discussion questions. They are encouraged to create these questions independently or seek assistance from AI as a collaborative intelligence. In my experience, allowing students to utilize AI for select tasks has yielded positive results, notably enhancing engagement, reducing absenteeism, and fostering a more active participation in class discussions.

I hope you find these resources helpful.

Image from Ideogram.ai based on William Carlos Williams' "This Is Just To Say":

For those of you unfamiliar with the late, great poet-physician William Carlos Williams, here's the poem that informed the image:

This Is Just To Say

William Carlos Williams

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

Course evaluations: two words guaranteed to make any instructor’s blood pressure spike. You and your colleagues have hashed out numerous reasons against student evaluations. You’ve recounted your worst comments to your closest friends, partner, pet, and that one poor unsuspecting grocery store cashier. What if you could get useful, constructive, and direct feedback from your students?

To offset some of the issues with the general evaluation, I ask for additional feedback on an informal End of the Semester Course Reflection. The overall reflection is a single sheet of paper that I ask students to complete during class (and usually give extra credit for). Here are a few examples of questions that I include:

1. Am I meeting my course objectives? One thing that’s not captured in the general evaluation is our specific course objectives. I ask students the extent to which they believe each objective was met on a 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) scale. For some of the objectives I ask follow-up questions (e.g., In this class there were opportunities for me to gain skills related to college and career success that are informed by psychological research. Followed by Were there skills that you would have liked to enhance or learn, but did not?). By doing this, I gain insight into the extent to which the students believe I met each objective. I also learn where I’m falling short (e.g., they have ample opportunities to work on writing skills, but fewer opportunities to work on oral communication skills). I can then use this information to make effective changes in my courses the following semester.

2. What did they find to be the most valuable? By asking students what their favorite topics are, I get a sense of what they are taking with them as they leave the course. I’m often surprised by the range of topics and concepts they mention. Many students list concepts we covered early in the semester, which means the content was memorable and had an impact on their way of thinking about their world.

3. What did they really think about that new assignment/lecture/book/activity/whatever? I’m always experimenting with new ways of teaching and while some classroom assessments like exams can give insight into the effectiveness of that new thing, asking students questions can help provide additional perspectives. I’ve learned if students felt that they needed more time to work on a project, the types of resources they wish they had to effectively complete assignments, or what aspects of a textbook they found to be the most and least beneficial.

Before giving the reflections, I let the students know that I value their feedback and remind them that the reflections are anonymous. I’ve found that by asking specific questions, I can better assess the aspects of my class that I believe are important. Informal reflections can be given at any time of the semester. When I was a graduate student, I gave informal evaluations around the midpoint of the semester and was able to make some small, yet effective changes to my class based on their responses.

You put a lot into your classes and deserve some helpful feedback! If you are ready to give informal course evaluations a try, here are some great resources:

Gathering Formative Feedback with Mid-Course Evaluations from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation

Mid-Semester Feedback from the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Teaching and Learning

Teaching Evaluation: Informal Early Feedback (IEF) from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning

Tech Snacks: Informal Course Evaluations from Montana State University Northern’s Office of Teaching and Learning Excellence

While the seasonal delight of scary Halloween decorations is now in my rearview mirror, the home stretch of the Fall semester brings me an altogether different source of dread: the dead classroom. Students’ energy tanks (and mine) are nearly empty; my class discussions contain fewer raised hands and far more blank stares. In September, the CTL Lunch & Learn group discussed active learning strategies to increase student engagement. We want to share five strategies our colleagues use to enliven the classroom:

1. Gameplay/Contests – tapping into students’ sense of camaraderie and competition can significantly boost student engagement. These activities, whether short or session-long, can be a powerful tool. In a 5-minute exercise, faculty may pit two teams of students against each other in a race to answer questions on a whiteboard, which can spark lively discussions about a class reading. Similarly, a session-long scavenger hunt, escape room, or jeopardy-style game can be used to test students’ recall of important course materials, while fostering a sense of fun and competition.

2. Student taught mini-modules – as individuals or small groups, students are tasked with teaching their peers about a key concept or course reading. They may prepare a PowerPoint, worksheet, group exercise, or discussion questions to span a pre-determined segment of a class meeting. Through this strategy, students may gain a sense of ownership in their learning experience, expand their confidence, and gain a sense of responsibility for completing course readings – as their peers are relying on them for potentially important information.
   

3. Simulations – students act out real-world scenarios to bring course concepts to life. Whether it's faculty-run improvisations of professional practice like mock case studies, client interactions, or model U.N. sessions, or online simulations like budget planners, urban design, or poverty simulators, students get to apply class concepts in a practical setting. This not only enhances their understanding but also prepares them for real-life situations.

4. Exit tickets – in the final few minutes of class, students write down a few key takeaways from that session. These exit tickets offer students an opportunity to quickly reflect upon and distill key class ideas. They also offer faculty a great way to check in with students to assess their insights, interests, and (potentially) areas needing review in future class sessions.

5. Group-built resources – as a group, students can build reviews of readings, midterm or final exam study guides, or resource libraries. These exercises are typically student-led, which allows them to build on one another’s knowledge. They can ask one another questions, respond to students’ prior postings or contributions, and have a beneficial takeaway resource for their future coursework.

If there’s one thing you might say about art history professors, it’s that we make pretty cool PowerPoints. At our best, semi-darkened classrooms come alive with picturesque views of global architecture, enticing close-ups of glittering treasury objects, and videos of makers in action. Faculty outside of the discipline often tell me that they, too, would like to bring art into their teaching but struggle to find images beyond basic Google searches. How do we know what to look for? How do we verify the accuracy, content, and quality of our images? And how do we talk about images when we bring them to class? Following a brief introduction to the history of classroom images, this first installment of “Engaging with Images beyond Art History” introduces two of my favorite websites for teaching with art and images.

In the old days, art historians depended on visual image departments to prepare and maintain analogue slides, which were sourced from library books or remixed into “greatest hits” collections by mail-order companies. Slides yellowed with age and blurred despite professors’ efforts to futz with their projectors. Today, experts like Mary Jean Hughes perform the digital wizardry required to transform our slide library into a high-quality Jstor collection accessible to the Hood community. (She makes my classes fantastic digital images from books, too!) Institutions like the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art increasingly make free, museum-quality images of their collections available online. On October 24, Adelmar Ramirez introduced the IIIF digitization project to CTL workshop participants, wowing us with the developing platform’s ability to juxtapose and zoom in on artworks.

Open access educational websites like Smarthistory.org and Khanacademy.org also expand the ways in which both faculty and students procure images and learn the basics about global art and material culture (i.e., physical objects). Both sites offer nested, textbook-style essays on various time periods, cultures, sites, and objects that are written by art historians, museum professionals, archaeologists, etc. All content is geared toward advanced high-schoolers and college students. In addition to being richly illustrated with necessary image captions, essays from both websites also contain maps and timelines of value to any presentation of historical and geographic information. So, the night before this semester’s lecture on the Silk Road (a premodern network of Afro-Eurasian trade routes), my students tucked into art historian Eiren Shea’s Silk Roads essay on Smarthistory while I, with a clear conscience, gleefully copied its maps and object photographs into PowerPoint. When the documentary “Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting” screens at Hood on November 7, my participation will also be informed by a Smarthistory article about artist Jaune Quick-To-See-Smith’s use of racist American sportswear to critique European colonization in her multimedia artwork. (Figure 1)

Smarthistory.org is perhaps best known for its short videos, in which specialists (usually curators or professors) engage in a clear, prepared dialogue with one of Smarthistory’s editors (all former professors) in the presence of an artwork. When teaching either ancient Greek architecture or modern Museum Studies, the video “Contemporary politics and classical architecture” offers my students a 4-minute break from lecture and new fodder for discussion. Next semester, I look forward to sharing a video about Roger Minick’s cheeky 1980 photograph of a Yosemite tourist to introduce museological issues in American national parks. The possibilities with these sites are endless. If you choose to try these resources, please email me at pulichene@hood.edu. We would love to feature you in a future CTL newsletter.

Figure 1. Screen Shot of smarthistory.org article "Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People)” by Suzanne Newman Fricke embedded in the “Art since 1980” module. The drop-down menu at left shows a sample of broad social, political, and ecological topics covered by shorter essays on contemporary artworks.

If we took time out of every class to discuss what’s going on in the world there would be no time left over to discuss the topic at hand. Yet, we are at college not just to learn how to conduct our future business but also how to live in the world as humans. Humans are amazingly effective at surviving whatever disaster falls upon them. War, plagues, volcanic eruptions – we survive. Painful and contentious events seem less so as they disappear into the past. With life experience comes a calm dissociation from the transient which is great for making objective long-term decisions but fails spectacularly when it comes to connecting with and assuaging the intense and focused fears of young adults. Students just don’t know that it will be alright, eventually.

There will always be the question about how, or even if, to address controversial or emotional topics in class. As a student, I can say that it doesn’t really matter as much that you have the conversation about the topic as much as it matters that you acknowledge that the contention exists. As students we may be ignorant of your topic of expertise, but we are keenly aware of some of your unspoken opinions. We watch you as much as you watch us. Leaving these topics unacknowledged can feel more unsettling than a classroom brawl.

If you can this election season, please acknowledge the elephant (or donkey) in the room. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t think it will be productive but please acknowledge it out loud in class because we all see it, but we are waiting for you to say it first.

If you decide to have difficult conversations in the classroom, here are a few resources to guide you through it:

https://tll.mit.edu/addressing-difficult-events/

https://ii.library.jhu.edu/2023/10/18/facilitating-difficult-conversations-during-class/

https://poorvucenter.yale.edu/sites/default/files/basic-page-supplementary-materials-files/difficult_conversations_in_the_classroom_-_guide_to_teaching.pdf

IT would like to remind you of a few tips that will help you keep our shared working spaces functioning well throughout the term and beyond.

• Please turn off the projector or mounted display at the end of class by using the room's control systems, we can conserve energy and preserve the longevity of these devices. Be aware that blanking or muting the projector is not the same as turning it off.

• Please logout of the instructor station PC when your class ends. Not only is this a security risk, but it is also an inconvenience for the next user who will need to log you out of the PC or any Hood systems (Blackboard, Office 365, Self-Service, etc.).

• Please do not turn off the instructor station PC or Laptop. This may create delays for the next user and deny the computer the ability to receive important security or driver updates from IT. Almost all of the Dell and Apple computing devices used in our classrooms are set to save energy and only wake when the device is needed.

• Please leave the computer set to the “Duplicate Screen” output option. If a PC is not displaying the same information on the instructor station to the projected image, this may be due to the last person in the room enabling “Presentation Mode” in Power Point. To return to "Duplicate Screen", press and hold the “Windows” key + then press the “P” key until the display indicates that it is in Duplicate mode.

• Please do not remove or swap the Power Point wireless remotes or their USB receivers from one space to another. If you accidentally take the remote with you, please return it to its original space as soon as possible. If you believe one of these devices is broken, malfunctioning, or has a low battery, please contact the IT Help Desk.

• Please return the control system to the PC input when you end your class. Please return the input from Doc Cam, HDMI, BluRay DVD or Airplay inputs to PC input since it is the most used input, especially for rooms where there may not be a control system.

• Please do not pull the projector screens far below their limits. The screen should go no farther than the chalk or dry erase marker ledge. Pulling the screens below their limits can tear and damage the internal rollers in these devices. A functioning screen should only require a slight bit of downward force from the center handle to allow it to be retracted back into its case.

• Please do not mash, hit, or bang firmly on the control system if it does not immediately respond to your button input requests. This type of aggressive button pressing can cause damage to the control system and could send errant commands to the connected teaching technologies that cause them to lock up or malfunction.

If the control system or any other room feature is acting abnormally, please alert the IT Help Desk by creating a support ticket here: IT Helpdesk Support Portal

IT hopes these tips will help maximize the performance and reduce maintenance on these important teaching technologies.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-lost-art-of-academic-conversation

“The charged political nature of things where it can be difficult to speak honestly or in a nuanced way about many issues.”

There are difficult conversations, which is a big concern this election season, and there are difficulties having conversations. This interesting article from The Chronical of Higher Education addresses the need to create space both mentally and physically for academic conversations to occur.

The activity “Cocreating Resilient Group Norms” on pages 37 and 38 of Maintaining Campus Community During the 2024 Election A Guide for Leaders, Faculty, and Staff is one example of how to address the election in a way that focuses on community instead of conflict. We can create the collaborative environment we want to see on campus by defining it.

Did you miss one of CTL's fabulous events? Slide decks from previous presentations are available on Sharepoint!

2024-2025 Events - Find resources from all events

Student Engagement

Open Pedagogy

Open Book It OER and OA

Want to read about some of the topics CTL is covering? Find CTL on Zotero.

View the CTL Library: https://www.zotero.org/groups/5620207/hood_ctl/library

Help us build the CTL library! Email ctl@hood.edu to be added as a contributor.

Want unlimited access The Chronicle of Higher Education? Access it through the library.

The library also has a section of books dedicated to teaching on the second floor.

• Jessica Hammack, Head of Research and Instruction, CTL Director
• April Boulton, Associate Professor of Biology, Associate Provost, Dean of the Graduate School
• Cathy Breneman, Assistant Professor of Social Work
• Ashley Coen, Assistant Professor of Education
• Sangeeta Gupta, Assistant Professor of Psychology
• Bridget Humphries, Director of Accessibility Services
• Beth Kiester, Associate Professor of Sociology
• Jessica McManus, Associate Professor of Psychology
• Heather Mitchell-Buck, Associate Professor of English, Coordinator of Digital Learning
• Nicole Pulichene, Libman Professor of Humanities
• Adelmar Ramirez, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish
• Kathryn Ryberg, Research & Instruction Librarian
• Sandra Thomas-Lalmansingh, Assistant Professor of Nursing
• Kristen Tzoc, Assistant Professor of Sociology
• Jeff Welsh, Director of Instructional Technology in the IT division
• Kelly Esposito, CTL Graduate Assistant

Email: CTL@hood.edu
Website: www.hood.edu/CTL
Location: Hood College, 401 Rosemont Avenue, Frederick, MD
Phone: (301) 696-3397