Welcome Back Symposium
Virtual Welcome Back Symposium 2024: Teaching Strategies for Increased Student Engagement
Held virtually on August 23, 2024, from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
This symposium, hosted by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, is focused on motivating and engaging students in courses to increase academic success. Throughout the event, participants will hear from Virginia Tech colleagues about their teaching strategies for fostering student engagement as well as from Derek Bruff, Associate Director for the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia, who will present the opening keynote.
The goal of the symposium is for teaching faculty members at Virginia Tech to gain information, inspiration, and ideas for strategies that they can implement in their teaching to increase student engagement. We hope you can join us.
Keynote Speaker: Derek Bruff
Bruff is an educator, higher ed consultant, and the author of two books, Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching and Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments. He writes a weekly newsletter called Intentional Teaching and produces the Intentional Teaching podcast. He consults regularly with faculty and administrators across higher education on issues of teaching, learning, and faculty development. Bruff’s major accomplishments while leading the CFT include building a “students as producers” approach to course design into CFT programming as a way to help faculty at a research university rethink their teaching and engage their students in deep learning, and integrating learning management system and other instructional technology support into the CFT to help instructors teach in a variety of modalities (in-person, synchronous and asynchronous online, hybrid). Bruff has a Ph.D. in mathematics and has taught math courses at Vanderbilt and Harvard University.
Symposium Schedule
Getting from Here to There: Strategies for Student Learning
Derek Bruff, Associate Director at the Center for Teaching Excellence, University of Virginia
A big part of our job as instructors is helping our students, as novices in our disciplines, move toward greater levels of expertise. That kind of learning isn't easy, but we can design experiences to help our students persist in the hard work of learning. In this session, we'll explore practical applications of the learning sciences to guide our students into deeper learning in our fields.
Teaching in Stereo: Structures for Student Engagement
Derek Bruff, Associate Director at the Center for Teaching Excellence, University of Virginia
Whether it's a silent classroom after asking students a question or a sea of black boxes in a virtual class, it's not fun when student engagement is a challenge. How can we take a more intentional approach to class participation so that more students engage? In this session, we'll consider ways to turn our classes into learning communities, and whether students can learn from and with each other.
Choose Your Own Adventure: Using Student Choice to Increase Motivation
Hannah Deuyour, School of Communication
Allowing students to make choices in terms of how they complete course assignments/outcomes can be a scary proposition. Research shows that students who can make some choices related to their learning typically experience more engagement and motivation; however, too much choice can be overwhelming for students and lead to decreased motivation and satisfaction (Evans, 2015; Robinson, n.d.).
In this practice session, participants will learn various ways to incorporate student choice into their courses, when student choice is most (and least) effective, and how choice is related to student motivation and engagement. This session will allow faculty to hear a variety of student choice options (with examples that have been deployed in real classrooms) as well as identify and discuss variables that should be considered when incorporating student choice into a course.
Technology, Tools, and Strategies for Fostering Student Engagement
Aaron Bond, TLOS and Daron Williams, TLOS
Students can feel disconnected in any learning environment. Technology that is intended to increase engagement can inadvertently become a barrier to interaction. This session will provide an overview of classroom engagement tools available at VT and provide some tips to remove barriers to student engagement when using them in your classroom.
Using AI to Design Accessible Courses with a UDL Lens
Pearl Xie, TLOS, Asher Burns, TLOS, and Kim Loeffert, School of Performing Arts
Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers innovative opportunities to improve course accessibility and new challenges. In this session, we will use Universal Design for Learning principles and explore how generative AI can cater to diverse learning needs and design accessible courses.
Inspiring Student Engagement by Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops
Michelle Soledad, Engineering Education and Cassie Wallwey, Engineering Education
This short workshop will discuss challenges of feedback in courses and share strategies that instructors can use to leverage good feedback practices in their classrooms to improve student engagement with the course and course content. This workshop will cover both aspects of a complete feedback loop - both instructors to students, and students to instructor - and connect feedback practices within this loop to empirical research on student learning, motivation, and engagement.
Empowering Autonomy: Guiding College Students to Master Independent Learning
Jennifer Rainville, School of Neuroscience
In this session we will explore the challenge among VT students to autonomously master college-level coursework and discuss some strategies we have begun to employ in Neuroscience and Psychology courses to address these issues. Results are based on data from a comprehensive survey of student perceptions of their own learning within Psychology and Neuroscience majors at VT, which revealed a significant gap in preparedness for independent academic navigation. Our objective is to increase student self-confidence in their learning methodologies and study habits as they transition from secondary to higher education, with an emphasis on empirically supported learning strategies. We will present topics from our current series of workshops, which were first introduced in a FYE course in Fall 2023. These interventions focus on the practical application of skills and learning techniques, with the goal of empowering students to be self-sufficient in learning and reducing reliance on solely instructor guided learning.
Fostering Academic Integrity
Connie Bayliss, Office of Undergraduate Academic Integrity
In addition to providing an overview of the honor system and means of reporting and resolving academic misconduct, this presentation will look at ways to encourage academic integrity in coursework. We will offer recommendations for promoting authentic assessment in general, as well as taking a particular look at integrating generative AI into the classroom in a way that promotes engagement and allows authentic assessment while helping students navigate AI use in alignment with learning objectives.
In Celebration of Koinonia
Buddy Howell, School of Communication
An ancient Greek word, koinonia can be translated in several ways, all of which suggest the importance of connections—partnership, community, participation, common interest, joint ownership. This keynote emphasizes the value of approaching teaching and learning as a partnership within a learning community where everyone takes joint ownership of efforts made in the common purpose of pursuing knowledge, experience, and relationships that are beneficial now and in preparation for the future.