During this two-part workshop, participants practice a series of exercises that can be used in remote teaching to engage students in interactive learning and exploration. The workshop helps faculty build a sense of community within the classroom and emphasizes dialogic approaches to teaching the whole student and engaged learning. Participants gain hands-on experience practicing the exercises and leave the workshop ready to bring new approaches back to the classroom. Together with the facilitator, participants consider questions, additional remote teaching ideas, and key take-aways from the two sessions.

• In Module 1, participants practice and learn the name game, the five-minute poem, and the culture box exercises.
• In Module 2, participants practice and learn the fishbowl exercise and the concentric circle exercise.

Do you ever feel like you are lost in space in your virtual classroom as you look for evidence of intelligent life? Workshop participants examine their own practices and learn what they can do to encourage critical-thinking skills. After watching videos of and participating in hands-on examples of critical-thinking exercises, workshop participants create their own exercises to ensure higher-level critical-thinking skills in their online students.

In an era in which all faculty members should all be prepared to teach in a virtual environment, we need tools that help students develop the critical-thinking skills necessary to be successful in any classroom or work environment.

The purpose of this three-part workshop is to expose faculty members to best practices designed to increase students’ critical-thinking skills.

Module 1:

• Clarify the meaning of critical thinking in higher education and employment environments, including the most recent research about employers’ desire for graduates who possess critical-thinking skills.
• Review and apply the “Valuable Intellectual Traits” identified by the Foundation for Critical Thinking.
• Learn how to help students create video presentations that demonstrate higher-level thinking.

Module 2:

• Examine Asynchronous and Synchronous Discussion Question Requirements, Video

Summaries, Online Interview Assignments, and Annotation Stations.

• Help students develop digital literacy, with an emphasis on research.
• Learn how to facilitate small group and one-on-one virtual conversations related to more complex course learning outcomes.
• Develop rubrics to assess higher-level thought.

Are you seeking more ways to connect with your students? Use your own learning experience and identity development to leverage powerful learning for students. Participants explore adult learning theories, strengths-based approaches, and cultivating a sense of belonging in the classroom. This workshop models interactive learning in the remote environment with an emphasis on practice and application.

Module One: Setting the Stage

• Identify best practices when working with individual students.
• Recognize how your own identity impacts students.
• Leverage your own identity to positively impact students.

Module Two: Getting to Work

• Foster a sense of belonging.
• Practice using strengths-based language and cultivating a sense of belonging in student interactions.

Module Three: Taking it Forward

• Define elements of powerful learning experiences.
• Identify effective uses of student success theories.
• Create an action plan to meet students where they are.

This highly engaging workshop reveals the intimate connection between empathy, innovation, and collaboration. Participant are led through an evolving series of game scenarios and facilitated discussions that lead to practical insights about building new levels of understanding, creativity, and cooperation in students.

Empathy is an essential skill for all collaboration efforts and is particularly important when collaboration takes place online. This workshop provides participants with the opportunity to practice tangible skills for improving agility, resilience, communication, and collaboration to build better understanding among students.

Module 1

• Assess empathy inside your classroom setting.
• Differentiate between cognitive and emotional empathy.
• Build empathy with remote learners.
• Resilience and teambuilding.

Module 2

• Make online interactions more nuanced and empathic.
• Opportunities for creative problem solving using online interactions.
• Remote learning strategies that build empathy competencies.

“Going online” may be our modern purple prose to replace “It was a dark and stormy night.” However, not all is lost for in-person classroom teachers. Much can be gained by learning new strategies and methodologies while transitioning from in-person to virtual learning. The V-i6 are six strategies and methodologies that provide positive, effective teaching experiences focused on six key fundamentals: Animate, Originate, Rejuvenate, Stimulate, Deus Ex Machina, and Tell the Story.

Recognizing that learning is considerably more gratifying when subjects weave together naturally, rather than remain compartmentalized, the V-i6 help teachers rekindle exciting interdisciplinary connections that reveal how all academic subjects work in tandem. The very nature of the V-i6 methods illustrates the ease of transitioning across all teaching modalities, including hybrid, asynchronous, and synchronous online learning environments. This workshop, together with the vast number of free conferencing and online teaching platforms such as Zoom, Eduflow, Top Hat, RCampus, and Thinkific, make “going online” not such purple prose after all!

Module 1: Strategies That Animate and Originate Emergent in Virtual Learning Classes.
Participants learn how to apply the first two V-i6 strategies to energize content that engages student learning in a virtual environment.

• Apply creative online resources
• Reach beyond the traditional
• Bring interdisciplinary connections to life
• Share resource tools
• Create unexpected connections and associations

Module 2: Strategies That Rejuvenate and Stimulate in a Virtual Environment.
Participants learn how to apply the next two V-i6 strategies through rejuvenating and stimulating virtual learning activities and examples that recognize the connections between the sciences and the humanities and inspire innate curiosity.

• Identify captivating and engaging video talks and presentations
• Become a team learner, shifting from passive viewer to active participant
• Continuously apply several online resources
• Create a meeting of minds experience
• Generate stimulating discussion questions

Module 3: Strategies to Develop Dues Ex Machina Ad Lucem and to Tell The Story.
Participants learn how to apply the last two V-i6 strategies to discover diverse solutions to complex problems and understand that behind every fascinating idea is an illuminating story that is relatable and relevant to modern students.

• Demonstrate critical thinking activities that reveal creative solutions in a new light
• Show unorthodox solutions to complex problems
• Learn to tell the story behind every fascinating idea and discovery
• Use visualization techniques to become an online actor
• Share ideas, concepts, strategies, methodologies, and stories to enhance creative thought

Are you experiencing trouble concentrating? Are you struggling to regulate your emotions or experiencing sleep disturbances? These behaviors are normal reactions to high stress and trauma. Unfortunately, it’s easy for your brain to form pathways in response to anxiety, stress, and trauma. The more these pathways fire, the more likely they are to fire again and become “hardwired.” It’s important to rewire these pathways into feelings of calmness, resilience, and happiness.
Anxiety, stress, and trauma can damage your health and lead to long-term mental disorders such as depression. They also inhibit higher-order executive functions, while strongly activating the emotional centers. This makes it harder to remember, pay attention, think critically, plan, organize, and control emotions. Anxiety, stress, and trauma can affect family and home life, resulting in higher rates of substance abuse and domestic and health issues. Unfortunately, your anxiety, stress, and trauma are also contagious to students, and can impair their learning.
During this two-part workshop, participants learn the science behind how stress affects them and actions that can be taken to effectively address it.

• In Module 1, participants learn why their brain feels foggy and why they aren’t performing optimally. They also learn about two nervous systems: fight/flight and rest/digest, as well as how to switch their physiology into the calming nervous system. Participants acquire recovering strategies—including how to calm down quickly—and practices they can use to inhibit the fight/flight response that impairs mental and physical health.

• In Module 2, participants focus on renewing and rewiring. It isn’t enough to stop stress every time it occurs; you must learn to stop it from occurring in the first place. Participants learn lifestyle practices that renew the mind, brain, and body, and reduce feelings of high stress. Participants also learn about the process of burnout and where and how they can stop it. The module concludes with information about post-traumatic growth, so that when these difficult times are over, participants remain as mentally healthy as possible and are ready to resume a normal life.

Learn what science recommends when undergoing anxiety, stress, and trauma, and experience multiple ways to create calm, resilience, and happiness pathways that work specifically for you!

“Depleted.” “Just plain worn out.” As the COVID crisis caused a larger proportion of faculty members to teach remote courses than ever before, accounts of teacher fatigue and feeling overwhelmed are rife. Many professional development opportunities offer advice about the optimum use of technological tools, but most do not focus on ways to make online teaching less exhausting and more sustainable for teachers.

This workshop helps new and experienced online instructors understand the features of online practice that contribute to teacher burnout. Participants learn about specific, actionable strategies for reducing their workload without sacrificing student engagement and success.

Module 1: Before

• Emergence as a planning principle
• Reframing “content”
• Formative versus summative teaching

Module 2: During

• Managing personality
• Managing time and timeliness
• Managing community
• Managing feedback

Module 3: After

• Avoiding “Groundhog Day”: Invigorating the iterative
• Lasting lessons of emergence
• Practitioner troubleshooting and reflection

Inclusive courses require intentionality during planning and teaching. During Module One of this Virtual Workshop, participants explore integrated course design to create inclusive syllabi and assessments that center on course learning outcomes. Participants are encouraged to bring a current syllabus and assessment to revise. During Module Two, participants examine a variety of inclusive pedagogical practices and assess their own teaching using research on building community and validation. This workshop models interactive learning in the remote environment with an emphasis on practice and application.

Module One: Design

• Designing an inclusive syllabus.
• Creating inclusive assessments.

Module Two: Delivery

• Establishing a community where students feel known, acknowledged, accepted, and are able to contribute and feel comfortable doing so.
• Assessing the use of validating practices.
• Managing hot moments.
• Developing an action plan.

Even before the COVID-19 Pandemic changed the way higher education delivered instruction, EDUCAUSE’s 2019 Horizon Report stated that a significant development in higher education would be increased mobile learning. In March 2020, we all became mobile educators and learners, with the expectation that faculty members engage students in virtual environments as rich in relevant and meaningful experiences as are available in face-to-face classrooms.

In an era in which all faculty members should all be prepared to teach in a virtual environment, we need tools to effectively and efficiently instruct, monitor, motivate, captivate, and assess our students beyond what our LMS may provide.

The purpose of this two-part workshop is to expose faculty members to websites and apps that can be used to increase student engagement and achievement in virtual and face-to-face classrooms.

Module 1:

• Using text messaging apps to communicate with students on a regular basis.
• Assessing student comprehension of interactive online lecture material.

Module 2:

• Creating video tutorials, with assessment questions embedded within those self-made videos.
• Communicating with students using visual discussion boards.
• Providing students with the ability to create their own videos that demonstrate mastery of course topics.
• Engaging with students via online scavenger hunts related to course learning outcomes.

Workshop participants are able to contact the facilitator following the conclusion of each module for assistance and coaching as they design their creations.

This workshop provides participants with specific tools they can use to teach critical-thinking skills in an online environment. An emphasis is placed on using the tools in Humanities and Social Sciences classes to improve students’ reading and writing skills.

Learning Outcomes/Objectives

1. Understand the fundamentals of critical-thinking skills.
2. Learn how to apply precise pedagogical methods that help students at any level improve their critical-thinking skills.
3. Learn how to apply precise pedagogical methods that improve students’ writing skills based on critical-thinking practices.
4. Learn how to create critical-thinking rubrics.

Activities

1. Participate in exercises that have been proven to enhance students’ critical thinking.
2. Create exercises that enhance and measure students’ critical-thinking skills.
3. Receive worksheets that have been shown to enhance students’ critical-thinking skills.

Participants can claim a digital badge and certificate upon completing the workshop and a post-workshop survey.

Have you ever wished you could change your students’ attitudes toward more positive engagement in their learning? YOU CAN! The secret rests in appreciating that all of us have a profound impact upon the emotional state of the students that we engage with every day. Whether interacting with individuals or groups, the neuroscience is clear: The affective domain powerfully impacts student cognition, persistence, motivation, and performance. During this multidimensional, highly-interactive, experiential, and fun workshop, participants explore ways to promote positive, enthusiastic, and engaged collaboration among students. They also explore how to encourage student learning in a manner that maximizes motivation, a sense of inclusion, and equity within the learning environment!

The workshop includes PowerPoint slides, stories, video, breakout room activities, and opportunities for full group discussions, all of which allow participants to interact with each other and process the information in a fast moving and fun format.

Module One:

• Demonstrate the impact of emotion on learning.
• Create positive learning outcomes associated with respectful and affirming relationships.
• Identify, nurture, and develop talents, rather than focus on weaknesses.

Module Two:

• Understand how positive emotions expand cognition and creativity.
• Understand how the affective domain profoundly influences persistence and practice compassionate correction.
• Apply premises behind the “Growth Mindset” and growing intelligence to our learning environments.