Active Learning: Revitalizing Your Classroom
Tuesday March 7th, 3-4:15 pm

Most students cannot listen effectively to lectures over a sustained period of time no matter how skillful the lecturer. This interactive workshop will discuss how “active learning” techniques can help transform students from passive listeners to active learners.
The workshop will be designed to respond to the different needs/interests of the participants. Possible areas to explore include: How do we move from passive learning to active learning? What set of learning activities would be meaningful? How can technology help?

Facilitator: Dr. Aziza Ellozy, Center for Learning and Teaching

Presentation

What’s in a Blog? Exploring Blogs as a Learning Tool
Tuesday March 14th, 3:-4:15 pm

Blogs are fast-becoming a popular tool for online communication among our students, and their educational use ranges from reflective journals to teaching media literacy to collaborative editing. This workshop will introduce you to pedagogical activities that lend themselves to blog use, and discuss their benefits to students.
We will show some existing blogs, discuss their potential uses, and then take the participants through the 5-minute process of creating their own blogs.

Facilitator: Maha Bali, Center for Learning and Teaching
http://blogsasalearningtool.blogspot.com/

Debating Across the Curriculum: Preparing AUC Students for Academic Interaction
Tuesday March 21th, 3:-4:15 pm

This workshop will highlight the benefits of using debates to develop critical thinking, and oral expression in academic disciplines. The presenters will describe methods of organizing debates with AUC students and demonstrate two systems that faculty members can effectively use to apply debates across disciplines. Participants will try out one of the methods during the workshop, and a list of debate resources will be distributed.

Facilitator: Carol Clark and Gini Stevens, English Language Institute

Teaching Critical Thinking through Active Learning Strategies
Tuesday April 4th, 3:-5:00 pm

The workshop will be an overview on how to teach critical thinking in the classroom (regardless of the discipline) using active learning strategies. It will include general definitions of critical thinking, some sample techniques for teaching an explicit skill or a broader CT strategy. The question of assessment will also be addressed as we often try to promote CT in the classroom, but then evaluate our students with traditional tests that do not address the CT skills that we try to emphasize.

Facilitator: Dr. Aziza Ellozy and Maha Bali, Center for Learning and Teaching

Presentation
Handouts

Multiple Intelligences: Why it is vital in education today
Tuesday April 11th, 3:-4:15 pm

Find out what learning styles are all about and how you can begin to incorporate this innovative approach in your teaching. We begin with a self-assessment then explore what learning styles mean in the classroom and conclude with discussion. Participants take away specific techniques to apply immediately in the classroom.

Facilitators: Dr. Emma Zevik, PVA Department

Peer Instruction: A Way to Interactive Classes
Tuesday May 2nd, 3-4:15 pm

This workshop will present Peer Instruction as an alternative to traditional lecturing. This method, developed by Harvard Professor Eric Mazur, has been proven by many studies and diagnostic tests to be considerably more effective than the conventional lecture approach. During the workshop we will watch a short clip of Dr Mazur and his students in action. The use of concept tests to engage students in active, collaborative learning will be discussed and participants will serve as the “class” in which the method is demonstrated. Dr Ramadan will share his own experience.

Facilitator: Dr. Adham Ramadan, Chemisty Department

Critical Thinking in a Visual World
Tuesday May 9th, 3-4:15 pm

We increasingly communicate with words and images. Today's university student generates highly sophisticated documents in which graphs, charts and other visuals are inserted in written products. Web pages that once offered only blocks of text now include streaming video and photographs. Some instructors across curriculums are adverse to the expanding emphasis on visuals as they view them as an erosion to literacy. However, this presentation will make the case to expand the pedagogical space of rhetorical education to include multimodal composition. Multimodal composition reflects more closely the critical visual and technological literacy that is more inclusive of the academic and work environments students acquire and produce text today.

Facilitator: Dr. Doris Jones, Writing Program

Presentation

Self Learning: The Key to Enhanced Learning
Tuesday May 16th, 3-4:15 pm

CLT has and can help professors produce self-learning materials that not only add value to the overall educational experience but also significantly enhance learning. Through the use of a variety of instructional technologies, CLT can help professors diversify course materials so as to enable a student-learning dimension alongside the conventional courseware. This workshop will examine practical examples of such ICT-mediated learning – i.e. using different instructional technologies - and provide a demonstration of how the use of instructional technology can in fact enhance learning even in a liberal educational institution.

Facilitator: Dr. Pandeli Glavanis, Center for Learning and Teaching

Writing Center & CLT Faculty Workshop Series

The Writing Center in collaboration with CLT is offering the following workshop series:

Improving Student Communication: How to Design Effective Writing Assignments
Designing effective writing assignments is the first step to accomplishing a course’s learning objectives. This workshop series will provide guidance and the chance to collaborate with others in the development of assignments. The discussions and activities in the three workshops will allow participants to conceive, create, and evaluate actual course assignments.

Facilitator: Natascha Gast, Writing Program