Module Link

This resource was originally developed with resources from the College STAR grant. That grant has ended and the College STAR modules will now permanently reside at the East Carolina University Office for Faculty Excellence.

Module Introduction

Flipped Classroom (FC) and Team-Based Learning (TBL; Michaelsen, Knight, & Fink, 2002) are two teaching pedagogies that have gained popularity in recent years; both aimed at increasing students’ engagement in active learning and accountability in their own learning, as well as more strategically using in-person class time for higher-order learning rather than passively sitting and listening to lectures.   While there are many overlaps and similarities between the two approaches, it is worth noting that FC and TBL are not identical pedagogies (e.g. flipped classroom focuses on digitally “lecturing” online before in-person class time, while there is not a specific emphasis within the TBL approach on how the pre-class preparation is delivered to students) (Wallace, Walker, Braseby, & Sweet, 2014).

This case study aims to offer guidelines and suggestions on how I integrated flipped classroom and team-based learning within the context of an undergraduate developmental psychology course at Fayetteville State University.

Support for this Module

Original development of this module was made possible by the College STAR (Supporting Transition Access and Retention) initiative.  College STAR was a grant-funded project focused on partnering postsecondary educational professionals and students to learn ways for helping postsecondary campuses become more welcoming of students with learning and attention differences. Much of this work was made possible by generous funding from the Oak Foundation.

Module Link

This resource was originally developed with resources from the College STAR grant. That grant has ended and the College STAR modules will now permanently reside at the East Carolina University Office for Faculty Excellence.

Module Introduction

This Case Study will teach facilitators how to use low-barrier, low-resource instructional tools such as children’s puzzles  to achieve targeted learning outcomes which are realized through a facilitated debriefing process.  We explain and explore  how to use puzzles in multiple ways as an activity, that when followed by a facilitated debrief, aids learners in translating and transferring the experience to their own lives, and in some cases, professional disciplines. These debriefs can be mapped against external competency and skill domains, as well as Bloom’s Taxonomy for learning. Additionally, they are consistent with principles of Universal Design for Learning by providing responsive learning opportunities geared to participants’ understanding, adapted to any audience.

There are many low-barrier, low-resource instructional tools to engage learners in skill-building for collaborative teamwork. Through the use of children’s puzzles, which are completed by putting like contours of the pieces together (as in a jigsaw puzzle) we demonstrate how to utilize a single, inexpensive resource to provide team-based experiences in multiple ways while debriefing them to target different learning objectives.  The techniques can be used by teachers/facilitators in face-to-face classroom or training environments and can be readily adapted as well to both synchronous and asynchronous teams in online teaching environments. The tasks themselves require no prior experience or training for participants, thus leveling opportunities for success among learners.

While we use these in graduate-level health professions education, we have had similar successes with high school students as well as professionals in their respective fields of expertise. We believe these activities are relevant to other fields and disciplines, as well, such as when teaching group negotiation processes in a business course or communication skills within any field. Ultimately, skills learned through this module are easily applicable to other, similar activities to broaden opportunities for student engagement in learning, and several additional low-barrier, low-resource ideas are included in this discussion. The reader takes away an understanding of the model and process for using these tools and should be able to apply easily attainable, inexpensive resources at hand to immediately implement this approach.

Support for this Module

Original development of this module was made possible by the College STAR (Supporting Transition Access and Retention) initiative.  College STAR was a grant-funded project focused on partnering postsecondary educational professionals and students to learn ways for helping postsecondary campuses become more welcoming of students with learning and attention differences. Much of this work was made possible by generous funding from the Oak Foundation.

Module Link

This resource was originally developed with resources from the College STAR grant. That grant has ended and the College STAR modules will now permanently reside at the East Carolina University Office for Faculty Excellence.

Module Introduction

Rarely can the world’s problems be adequately grasped within the four walls of a classroom. Service-learning is a pedagogical technique that combines experiential learning practices with community engagement and encourages personal growth through reflection in the classroom. Service-learning is not exclusive to student benefits: universities and colleges can increase community engagement and develop mutually beneficial relationships through this practice. Service-learning within a course is designed in a way so that the course objectives, tasks, and assignments align with student service projects that meet community needs. In this process, students engage in concrete experiences with thoughtful reflection to promote abstract conceptualization and create connections with course material. Students then utilize the knowledge gained in class with their service-learning sites through active experimentation.

Support for this Module

Original development of this module was made possible by the College STAR (Supporting Transition Access and Retention) initiative.  College STAR was a grant-funded project focused on partnering postsecondary educational professionals and students to learn ways for helping postsecondary campuses become more welcoming of students with learning and attention differences. Much of this work was made possible by generous funding from the Oak Foundation.

Module Link

This resource was originally developed with resources from the College STAR grant. That grant has ended and the College STAR modules will now permanently reside at the East Carolina University Office for Faculty Excellence.

Module Introduction

This case study describes a collective self-publication project I facilitated with college students in a freshman English class.  Through a series of rigorously structured steps, the students composed and revised original pieces of personal narrative writing, arranged their pieces into individual chapters, combined their chapters into a multi-author manuscript, and published the resulting book, which we called Writing Our Truth: Stories of Struggle and Survival, using the KDP platform on Amazon.  Along the way, students not only received a crash course in writing for publication, but they also developed online marketing materials to promote the book; made decisions about the book’s layout, format, design, and editing; and collaborated to coordinate a book launch party and to schedule other promotional events.  Most importantly, they came to identify themselves as professional, published authors, which, in fact, they were.  As part of their experience as professional writers, the students have not only seen their own book get published, circulated, reviewed, and sold, but they have also been interviewed by a film crew about their writing, they have discussed their craft with other professional writers, and they have been planning their own marketing strategy. In public appearances and media interviews about their writing, as well as in our in-class discussions, they came to talk about their writing as a vocation and a craft.  This experience provided a dramatic lesson in the ability of self-publication to increase the relevance of writing assignments, to foster a sense of community, and to empower students to own their voice and to write their truth.

The case study will describe the process we used to complete this enormous project in the span of a single semester.  We started off with a clearly articulated schedule of deadlines that would ensure that we would have enough time to compile the content for the book, to arrange and edit it thoughtfully, and to oversee the publication rollout.  We organized the semester into a writing phase, a design/editing phase, and a marketing phase.  Our last class was the book launch party.  Over the course of the semester, the classroom activities varied widely according to the phase of the project, beginning with “open mic” style readings in which the students shared their memoir essays with one another, then evolving into workshop and peer-review sessions, and finally transforming into a series of editorial “board” meetings, where we all sat around a big table and brainstormed ideas about what the book should look like and how we should let people know about it.  Although the particular class of students who worked on this project was somewhat unique (they were all in a cohort model together, and they all shared an enthusiasm for writing), this book-writing project is entirely replicable in other contexts, with the right preparation.  The case study will also consider ways in which this project can be modified for different disciplines, and it also provides important suggestions for avoiding some of the pitfalls and complications that we encountered.

Support for this Module

Original development of this module was made possible by the College STAR (Supporting Transition Access and Retention) initiative.  College STAR was a grant-funded project focused on partnering postsecondary educational professionals and students to learn ways for helping postsecondary campuses become more welcoming of students with learning and attention differences. Much of this work was made possible by generous funding from the Oak Foundation.

Module Link

This resource was originally developed with resources from the College STAR grant. That grant has ended and the College STAR modules will now permanently reside at the East Carolina University Office for Faculty Excellence.

Module Introduction

“How do you feel about writing?”

I typically pose this question on the first day of the semester in a “vote with your feet” exercise. We line up across the room: at one end are those who enjoy writing and feel confident in their abilities and at the other end are those who dislike writing altogether. Students find a place along the spectrum and share their reasoning out loud. Many students cluster near the middle, where a plethora of fears and anxieties spills forth:

            “I never know how to get started.”

            “I can never make it long enough.”

            “It's ok if I’m writing about something I know.”

            “I’m never really sure what the teacher wants, or if its good enough.”

I usually place myself somewhere near the center. “I’ve been told I’m a good writer, but I have such a hard time getting started. I never know what to say, or I say too much.” Many students will nod in sympathy. A show of hands reveals that many of us often feel overwhelmed when starting a writing project.

As an instructor in a Writing Intensive course, I teach both writing skills and disciplinary content. As I design my courses each semester, I aim to weave these together in ways that are mutually supportive and that address students’ concerns. Throughout the course, I want to foster writing as an ongoing habit and give students multiple opportunities to engage with writing. One powerful strategy for doing this is through Daily Writing assignments.

In this module, I will share my experience using frequent, short writing assignments to prepare students to be successful in a longer, formal assignment. This module focuses on the design of the jazz dance unit within my History of Dance I course, a Writing-Intensive designated course at ECU. The process of considering the content and writing skills for a particular assignment and then designing shorter assignments to lead up to it can be used by instructors in a variety of disciplines.

Scaffolding instruction and UDL

The teaching process described in this module uses frequent, low-stakes informal writing prompts that are deliberately designed to scaffold the writing process, leading students to develop the content knowledge and writing skills needed for a specific formal writing project while at the same time generating, in manageable chunks, material that can potentially be incorporated into that project.

The term “instructional scaffolding” is used by Applebee and Langer (1983) to describe a process that “allows the novice to carry out new tasks while learning strategies and patterns that will eventually make it possible to carry out similar tasks without external support” (p. 169). In the case of a college writing project such as the one described in this module, the complex writing is a new task, and support is provided to learn the strategies and patterns for accessing content knowledge and deploying it with discipline-specific writing skills.

The process of scaffolding instruction through informal writing assignments is one way to implement UDL Principle 2: “Provide multiple means of action and expression,” specifically Checkpoints 5.3 “Build fluencies with graduated levels of support for practice and performance” and 6.2 “Support planning and strategy development” (CAST 2012). An instructor, working backwards from the goal of the finished paper, considers the constituent knowledge and skills and designs shorter writing assignments that provide support in the form of focused questions, templates, or prompts for brainstorming. Collectively, these assignments can guide students through the planning process of a major writing project, preventing total procrastination and encouraging students to develop a process-oriented approach to writing that may transfer to future projects.

Applebee and Langer (1983) explain the steps that teachers, as designers of instruction, take to create the scaffolding that will allow their students develop as writers:

Teachers approaching instruction from this perspective must a) determine the difficulties that a new task is likely to pose for particular students, b) select strategies that can be used to overcome the specific difficulties anticipated, and c) structure the activity as a whole to make those strategies explicit (through questioning and modelling) at appropriate places in the task sequence. (p. 169)

This module describes how these three steps were adapted to create scaffolded instruction in a writing-intensive course. Just as a scaffolding is used to facilitate the construction of a building and then removed when it is no longer needed, scaffolded instruction helps students to work through the steps to a process that they may not be ready to take on independently. Key to this process in a writing-intensive course is the use of frequent, low-stakes assignments that function as the braces, brackets, and platforms students use as they construct a formal writing project.

Support for this Module

Original development of this module was made possible by the College STAR (Supporting Transition Access and Retention) initiative.  College STAR was a grant-funded project focused on partnering postsecondary educational professionals and students to learn ways for helping postsecondary campuses become more welcoming of students with learning and attention differences. Much of this work was made possible by generous funding from the Oak Foundation.

Module Link

This resource was originally developed with resources from the College STAR grant. That grant has ended and the College STAR modules will now permanently reside at the East Carolina University Office for Faculty Excellence.

Module Introduction

Winifred Gallagher, author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life (2010) theorizes that “Your life - who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love - is the sum of what you focus on” (p.1).  Mindfulness is a process of practicing the art of attention.  It holds the promise of engendering focus, presence, and receptivity along with an inner perspective that supports flexibility of mind, non-judgmental self-awareness and reduction of stress and anxiety.

This case study highlights multiple means of engaging students with processes of mindfulness throughout a college course on leadership.  Mindfulness processes and evidence of student achievement in this area are not situated as a gradable components of the class, instead, mindfulness outcomes are integrated into the class as a mode of inquiry, an experiential process with no right or wrong answers, no rubricized criteria, and feedback is given as affirmation and encouragement. The UDL goal of providing multiple means of student engagement and internalizing self-regulation intersect with several experiential aspects of the classroom mindfulness practices. Additionally, engaging students in foundational mindfulness practices creates opportunities for self-regulation, reflective self-assessment and the development of personal coping strategies.

Support for this Module

Original development of this module was made possible by the College STAR (Supporting Transition Access and Retention) initiative.  College STAR was a grant-funded project focused on partnering postsecondary educational professionals and students to learn ways for helping postsecondary campuses become more welcoming of students with learning and attention differences. Much of this work was made possible by generous funding from the Oak Foundation.

Module Link 

This resource was originally developed with resources from the College STAR grant. That grant has ended and the College STAR modules will now permanently reside at the East Carolina University Office for Faculty Excellence.

Module Introduction

Few academic assignments are as universally dreaded as the research paper. It is certainly the case that one of the most important skills that college students can acquire is the ability to express themselves effectively in long-form writing. At the same time, however, the genre of the research paper can intimidate and alienate students who might find it to be an unfamiliar or onerous medium for communicating what they know and what they think about a topic. One strategy I have found helpful in addressing this issue is to encourage students to develop their research papers into instructional videos. Students still do all the work of researching, organizing, drafting, and revising a research paper, but the added step of using their research paper as a script for a narrated video helps to make the final product more meaningful, encourages students to incorporate visual and auditory elements into their research projects, and enables students to share their writing with their classmates and with a global online community. At the same time, the video project allows students who do not self-identify as strong writers to demonstrate additional knowledge and skills.

This case study provides an overview of how students were supported in the process of developing their research papers into video lectures, as well as a description of the procedure students followed to arrive at this goal. While the most conspicuous element of this teaching strategy is the video itself, this case study also examines the scaffolded manner in which the video project developed through a sequence of stages. Students worked in groups to generate insights and observations, and they developed these notes into an oral presentation, scripted the presentation out into a written essay, and recorded the video as the final step in this sequence of assignments. While the steps students followed to create their videos closely follow the traditional steps of the writing process (Hairston, 1982), the inclusion of the video element led to several novel permutations on the writing process that enhanced students’ engagement with the material and allowed for more opportunities for student writers to receive and respond to feedback from their peers and from the class instructor.

Support for this Module

Original development of this module was made possible by the College STAR (Supporting Transition Access and Retention) initiative.  College STAR was a grant-funded project focused on partnering postsecondary educational professionals and students to learn ways for helping postsecondary campuses become more welcoming of students with learning and attention differences. Much of this work was made possible by generous funding from the Oak Foundation.