The following schedule is subject to revision.
Contents
Workshops | 2:15- 3:30 pm
Tuesday May 30
1A. Balancing Time: Managing Priorities while Teaching and Learning
Luke Waltzer | Room 3309
Effectively managing your time requires balancing teaching, research, your course load, and often other work. This workshop will offer strategies to help you balance your responsibilities as a teacher and a graduate student. Topics to be covered include deliberate planning of your research and teaching agendas, planning time for productive class preparation, and dealing with procrastination. You will leave this workshop with a plan to manage your time… and maybe even a strategy to take some nights and weekends off.
1B. Cultivating Creativity in the Classroom
Pedro Cabello del Moral and Fernanda Blanco Vidal | Room 3308
How can we think of inventive ways to hold our student’s attention and help them remain engaged? How can we accentuate the joy of learning in community with others that sometimes is lost in traditional lectures? In this workshop, we will showcase, explore, and design our own creative assignments and classroom activities, drawing upon lessons from environmental justice, the visual arts, and the potential of multimedia production.
1C. Building A Course Website
Laurie Hurson and Zach Muhlbauer | Room 3307
As part of prepping their course at the beginning for the semester, instructors must choose a platform to host the course materials online. CUNY offers several options for hosting and distributing materials, including Blackboard and the CUNY Academic Commons. This workshop will introduce attendees to both platforms, highlighting the affordances of the platforms, and sharing best practices for sharing course materials with students.
Şule Aksoy and Kristi Riley | Room 3305
Being a TA can be a generative experience that provides graduate students with professional development where supervisors model pedagogical approaches and provide guidance. Relationships between TAs and faculty of record can also be challenging and often require negotiations. This workshop provides participants with opportunities to practice engaging faculty in conversations about teaching roles, responsibilities, and boundaries in lectures, labs, and discussion sections, as well as asking for support in building relationships with colleagues and communicating with students.
1E. Teaching for the First Time: Strategies to be Comfortable with the Discomfort
Ana Badue | Room 3207
Are you anxious about teaching in the Fall? This workshop will elaborate on strategies for working with the uncomfortable feelings that might arise when we begin to teach. We will first examine the sources of anxieties, and then we will explore methods to navigate them while adopting intentional and responsive pedagogical practices.
Wednesday, May 31
2A. Techniques of Classroom Participation
Ana Badue and Kristi Riley | Room 3309
This workshop explores techniques to foster active learning through classroom participation. We will focus on class discussion and share strategies to encourage students to actively engage in group discussions and with one another’s ideas. The workshop will also explore how to foster participation while providing students with a variety of opportunities and avenues, as well as strategies for navigating moments of awkward silence and the concentration of participation among a small group of students.
2B. Effective Presentations: How to Lecture Without Putting Your Students to Sleep
Shima Houshyar | Room 3207
This workshop will teach participants how to present information effectively to students in the form of lectures and slides and how to balance lecturing, use of multimedia and visual aids, and in-class activities and discussion during their class sessions to foster an engaging learning environment. It will draw on basic principles of universal design for learning, visual hierarchy, information architecture, and storytelling techniques.
2C. New York City as the Classroom: An Introduction to Place-Based Pedagogy
Cristine Khan | Room 3310A
When we take our students out of the classroom and into the streets of New York, class material can come alive in entirely new ways, and resonate with students’ lived experiences. This workshop will cover strategies for incorporating place-based pedagogy into courses across disciplines. We will offer examples of how to lead site visits to local cultural institutions and more broadly, how to use New York City as a “living laboratory” in which students are engaged in community-driven inquiry practices. This approach allows for real-time case studies on a range of issues, including environmental crisis, immigration, neighborhood change, and more.
2D. Media-making in Teaching and Learning
Pedro Cabello del Moral | Room 3305
Media is a key pedagogical tool teachers can use to make assignments exciting and meaningful, enliven their lectures, and empower students to bring their technical savvy into coursework. Asking students to create media might seem intimidating, but the goal of this workshop is to share easy-to-use approaches. We will examine model assignments from CUNY’s classrooms, and learn innovative practices that can be applied to our online and in-person classes. We will review user-friendly software for photo/video/audio editing and collective annotation for assignments such as blog posts, video essays, photo albums, and podcasts in any field or discipline.
2E. Who Am I When I Teach? Creating a Teaching Persona
Chandni Tariq and Oriana Mejías Martínez | Room 3307
Considering who and how you would like to be as an instructor is a critical step in developing your pedagogy. The version of yourself that you bring to class each day–your “teaching persona”– is subject to change, and will evolve over time. In this workshop, we will develop this version of ourselves by examining our positionalities, considering who our students will be, and thinking through how we can build rapport with them that will help everyone meet their goals.
Thursday, June 1
3A. Using Discord In Your Class
Zach Muhlbauer | Room 3310A
A key step for instructors preparing to teach involves choosing where and how to facilitate course communications. One option available is Discord, a widely used messaging app among students that combines text, image, and video in communication spaces called servers. This workshop will guide attendees through the process of adopting and integrating Discord servers into their courses, drawing on models and strategies for how to connect students, stimulate learner engagement, and build community through tailored class servers.
3B. Critical Approaches to Grading
Laurie Hurson and Pedro Cabello del Moral | Room 3309
How can new instructors make grading a more meaningful, intentional process? A critical approach to grading can offer multiple pathways for engagement and opportunities for student self assessment.This workshop will offer concrete practices for creating scaffolded grading structures and methods for including students in the grading process. Attendees will have the opportunity to begin crafting their own grading structures and learn how to make the labor associated with grading more purposeful and productive.
3C. Plagiarism and AI Chatbots
Kristi Riley and Luke Waltzer | Room 3207
The recent release of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots have ignited critical conversations about academic integrity and the role of writing in the college curriculum. CUNY has historically over-relied on educational technology tools like Turn-It-In to detect plagiarism in student work, which are insufficient to address the needs of the moment. This workshop will explore the embedded assumptions within these tools and their uses in teaching and learning, and will engage participants in discussion to develop policies and strategies for AI in the classroom that are consistent with one’s pedagogical values and teaching goals.
3D. Group Work for Community Building
Chandni Tariq and Şule Aksoy | Room 3305
Community building is essential for curating a supportive space where students can pursue their learning goals in the classroom. We can build a sense of community through group work with intentional and responsive pedagogical planning. In this workshop, we will discuss strategies for building routines for the classroom community and share models of group work.
3E. Integrating Open Educational Resources into Your Class
Elvis Bakaitis (Mina Rees Library) | Room 3308
In this session, we’ll take a deep dive into OER, with an emphasis on finding educational materials to start using in your course. We will explore broadly, offering a brief overview of how OER and Open Access (OA) intersect, looking at repositories such as the Directory of Open Access Books, Open Textbook Library, OER Commons, OpenEd.Cuny.Edu – with an eye towards attribution, accessibility, and the immediate utility of OER.
Office Hours | 3:30 – 4:30 pm
Tuesday May 30
Topics and Room Assignments coming soon
Wednesday, May 31
Thursday, June 1
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