Teachers on Teaching Presentation Series
Teachers on Teaching is a faculty presentation series in which RIT faculty share the emerging teaching and learning practices they are using at RIT.
Past Presentations
Kaitlin Stack Whitney
Visiting Assistant Professor, Environmental Science Program
Our presenter for this session of Teachers on Teaching is Kaitlin Stack Whitney, Visiting Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the Science, Technology & Society Department, College of Liberal Arts and Gosnell School of Life Sciences, College of Science. She teaches and researches about environmental science, animal studies, ecoinformatics, and feminist biology.
Dr. Stack Whitney talks about case studies in teaching – both using them as a tool in the active learning pedagogy toolbox and creating and publishing them with students. She also provides guidance on finding case studies about your classroom topics and opportunities for submitting peer-reviewed case studies.
Paulette Swartzfager
Lecturer, University Writing Program
Paul Tymann
Director for Center for Computing Outreach, Research, and Education, Department of Computer Science
In a follow up to this presentation, Paulette Swartzfager from the University Writing Program and Paul Tymann from the Department of Computer Science talk about their assessment challenges and share rubrics that they've designed to address those challenges.
There is no recording of this presentation.
Elizabeth Reeves O'Connor
Principal Lecturer, School of Communication
Can oral presentation assignments work in the online environment? During an online intersession course, Elizabeth Reeves O'Connor set out to enable students to self-record and self-produce their own oral presentation videos, and do so accessibly with captioning. The primary goal was to enable peer review and feedback between students. In this presentation, she talks about the struggles, successes and lessons learned during her students' use of GoReact.
Elizabeth Reeves O'Connor is a Principal Lecturer and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Communication and Advertising & Public Relations in the School of Communication. Elizabeth organizes the bi-annual School of Communication public speaking competitions and supports student and faculty presentation needs through the Expressive Communication Center.
There is no recording of this presentation.
Elizabeth Lawley
Professor, School of Interactive Games and Media
Slack is an online tool that provides chatrooms for teams. Github is a platform for workgroups to manage contributions to shared code repositories.
In recent months, Slack has emerged as a popular way to provide private group and direct messaging for classrooms. GitHub is being used by faculty not just for tracking coursework around code but also for collaborative documenting editing, and as a mechanism for sharing course materials in a form that can easily be adapted by others.
Liz Lawley, professor in the School of Interactive Games and Media and director of the Lab for Social Computing at the RIT MAGIC Center, describes how she has used Slack to better engage students in an intro-level interactive media class, and GitHub to share her course materials and invite collaboration not just with other RIT colleagues, but also with faculty at other institutions.
Paulette Swartzfager
Lecturer, University Writing Program
Paul Tymann
Director for Center for Computing Outreach, Research, and Education, Department of Computer Science
Your feedback on student work is vital in helping students learn to think critically. How can you make sure the feedback you’re providing is effective? How can you be sure that students will use your feedback?
In this first of a two-part series, join Paulette Swartzfager from the University Writing Center and Paul Tymann from the Department of Computer Science in a discussion of how to assess and articulate what we value, and how rubrics can help. We will discuss how you can effectively apply rubrics and what value they bring to the educational process for both faculty and students. Participants will be encouraged to share their assessment challenges and participate in a rubric-design activity.
There is no recording of this presentation.
Roberley Bell
Professor, School of Photographic Arts and Sciences
"You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer, it gives to a question of yours." --Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Our presenter for this session of Teachers on Teaching is Roberley Bell, Professor in the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, College of Imaging Arts and Sciences. She will speak about asking questions--what are we asking and where do the questions we ask come from.
Professor Bell is the recipient of many awards, grants, and fellowships, including RIT's Eisenhart Award for Outstanding Teaching (in 1999 and 2007), the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Pollock Krasner Fellowship, and a Senior Fulbright Fellowship to Turkey. She is currently a Fulbright Specialist working on a multi-year project with the American University of Sharjah School of Architecture.
Michael Brown
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Our student-ratings-of-teaching-effectiveness surveys ask whether “the instructor established a positive learning environment.” What makes for such an environment? We might define it in the negative—as the absence of disrespect or distraction. In courses where a substantial portion of the content may be controversial or disruptive, however, a positive learning environment requires more than the absence of problems; it requires the presence of an intentional classroom community. In the face of a variety of obstacles, how can our classrooms become communities, and how do such communities support effective teaching and learning?
Michael Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, College of Liberal Arts, and a member of the Museum Studies program faculty.
Dina Newman
Associate Professor, Thomas H. Gosnell School of Life Sciences
In recent years, numerous calls for education reform have focused on the mountain of evidence for the effectiveness of active learning approaches. Though the evidence is overwhelming, changing how you teach needn’t be.
Dina Newman is an associate professor in the Thomas H. Gosnell School of Life Sciences, who has a recent publication with Gosnell colleague Kate Wright, called "What Do Students Think the Arrow Means?" CBE Life Sci Educ 13:338-348.10.1187/cbe.CBE-13-09-0188
Bernard Brooks
Professor, School of Mathematical Sciences
Teaching math online has its own special challenges. When I began developing my Financial Mathematics course as an online class in 2015 I was skeptical that learning mathematics online could be a replacement for an in-class lecture. Sure, online could work for a liberal arts class or maybe even for some of the other sciences but mathematics is special and has been taught via lecture format for thousands of years. In this talk I will discuss how some of those challenges were addressed. Many of the difficulties in teaching math online are actually pre-solved problems with the tools and resources readily available. I will present example clips of videos that use a variety of ways to replicate an in-class math experience and we can talk about the ways an online class can be better than an in-class lecture.
Professor Bernard Brooks has taught mathematics at RIT since 2001. He won the Eisenhart Award for Outstanding Teaching in 2012 and has been involved in many K-12 outreach activities.
Benjamin Banta
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
Benjamin Banta has strategically implemented active learning in his courses in a way that is intellectually rigorous and helps him engage students, keep them motivated throughout the semester, and balance his workload.