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Teaching
About Teaching
Teaching in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences engages learners from young adults to professionals in a variety of settings: classrooms, field schools, internships, directed readings, co-op placements, labs, seminars, and on-line environments. Through meaningful and rigourous courses, FASS faculty develop critical thinking and key skills to provide students with a solid base for success both in academia and in life.
Excellence in teaching is actively pursued by FASS faculty both within and between departments and disciplines. Through sharing pedagogical resources, engaging in design and delivery of innovative course options, and participating in interdisciplinary ‘faculty idea exchanges’ and public workshops, FASS faculty embrace and embody a strong commitment to topical and compelling learning environments.
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Dr. Adrienne Burk
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Is Grammar Irrelevant?
Teaching Tips
Keeping your lectures organized is a key component of a successful course. Beginning each class with a brief review of key topics from the previous few lectures will help to situate the current lecture within the course [ you might even offer a ‘course map’. To keep your current lecture on track, write down the day's lecture topics so that they are visible to you and your students, and use them as “guide posts” throughout the class. This also provides students with an outline for note-taking.
Teaching Tips
To help students turn the passive learning of a lecture into active learning, try this mini case study assignment. Have students select a key point/issue/concept/theory from lecture (or suggest one yourself) and apply it to a real-life scenario from the news, social media, the internet etc. (anything that's publicly available). Students should describe how the scenario illustrates the concept in question or what the impact is of the theory on the scenario. These case studies can be submitted for credit, used in group work, or used as a pre-writing assignment as part of a major assignment.
Teaching Tips
Sound matters: be aware not only of what you're saying in class but how you're saying it. A monotone voice or a “lecturing” voice can decrease student attention. Instead, try using your natural speaking voice, and speak with expression. Speak to your students instead of reading from notes, letting your personality and your enthusiasm for your subject matter show through.
Teaching Tips
Guest lectures can turn a regular course into a dynamic one, while providing students with different perspectives and access to different expertise. Guest lecturers can be faculty members from your department or a related discipline, or can be from outside the university. Consider inviting alumni who would know about your topic from a professional or policy perspective.
Teaching Tips
One way to actively engage students in a theory or concept is to first present a problem (paradox, dilemma etc.) and have students try to develop a “solution” to the problem. You can then present the theory or concept and show how it attempts to address the problem. This places students in a good position to assess the particular merits of the theory or concept. In other words, they ‘see’ how it works, rather than just hearing from you that it does.
Teaching Tips
Answering questions in large lecture classes can be intimidating for students. To overcome this, use the “question box strategy”. Place a question box (such as a shoebox with a hole in the top) in an easily accessible area for students to place questions (anonymously or not). Address questions the following lecture, or if not appropriate for the class as a whole, during office hours. Dr. Jill McIntosh (SFU Philosophy) has used this strategy to great success.
Teaching Tips
Re-examine your assigned texts as if you were a newcomer to their content and format. Are there words or concepts that need defining? A context of how this text fits into particular debates? Some information about the personal history of the author/editor that would add to understanding the text? A ‘best way’ to get into the text? Often just a few minutes introducing such aspects of a reading – including highlighting of key passages or guiding questions you wish students to note – markedly improves how students read assigned materials.
Teaching Tips
Pre-empt the question “will this be on the exam”? Instead, ask students to submit, every few weeks, a question they think would be a good exam question. This allows you to see how students are (or are not) making sense of course material, gives you student-generated material to initiate a discussion about what makes a poor/better/best exam question, and might even provide you with some new questions.
Teaching Tips
In the first class, have students write you a paragraph about something they know well. Make it required, but let it be handed in anonymously. This will alert you to student-relevant contexts you could incorporate into subsequent lectures. It will also flag for you what percentage of the class has writing difficulties, and the nature of those difficulties, so you can advise students, and where appropriate, the Student Learning Commons, about available writing support over the semester.
Teaching Tips
Students learn in a different ways. Where you can, vary the lecture-text-notetaking dynamic. Introduce relevant observation exercises (inside or outside class). Ask students to write short responses to key questions. Bring in contexts related to course themes, but from outside the university – through topics in the news, outside speakers, use of images in popular media, etc.
Teaching Tips
Decide before the semester if/how you are going to ‘teach through media’. Can students submit work to you on-line? Will you answer content questions solely to individuals, or only as posted to the entire class? If students miss a session, how will they ‘catch up’? Will you allow computers, cell phones and texting in your classroom?
Teaching Tips
Students often diagnose errors in others’ work better than they see them in their own. Several professors thus generate ‘flawed’ texts (e.g. a summary, an essay, an exam answer) and ask students to find the errors in the texts on conceptual as well as syntactic or grammatical matters. Follow up by having each student write a (handed-in, signed) paragraph identifying the kinds of errors s/he makes, with an indication of what strategies to use to avoid making errors in future.
Teaching Tips
Students often write more carefully when they address an audience very different from you or your TA/TM. Consider altering a writing assignment to be written instead to a classmate who missed last class, or a party with a genuine bias in an issue/problem, or someone who could fund the proposed solution.
Teaching Tips
Re-examine your assigned texts as if you were a newcomer to their content and format. Are there words or concepts that need defining? A context of how this text fits into particular debates? Some information about the personal history of the author/editor that would add to understanding the text? A ‘best way’ to get into the text? Often just a few minutes introducing such aspects of a reading – including highlighting of key passages or guiding questions you wish students to note – markedly improves how students read assigned materials.
Teaching Tips
Pre-empt the question “will this be on the exam”? Instead, ask students to submit, every few weeks, a question they think would be a good exam question. This allows you to see how students are (or are not) making sense of course material, gives you student-generated material to initiate a discussion about what makes a poor/better/best exam question, and might even provide you with some new questions.
Teaching Tips
In the first class, have students write you a paragraph about something they know well. Make it required, but let it be handed in anonymously. This will alert you to student-relevant contexts you could incorporate into subsequent lectures. It will also flag for you what percentage of the class has writing difficulties, and the nature of those difficulties, so you can advise students, and where appropriate, the Student Learning Commons, about available writing support over the semester.
Teaching Tips
Students learn in a different ways. Where you can, vary the lecture-text-notetaking dynamic. Introduce relevant observation exercises (inside or outside class). Ask students to write short responses to key questions. Bring in contexts related to course themes, but from outside the university – through topics in the news, outside speakers, use of images in popular media, etc.
Teaching Tips
Decide before the semester if/how you are going to ‘teach through media’. Can students submit work to you on-line? Will you answer content questions solely to individuals, or only as posted to the entire class? If students miss a session, how will they ‘catch up’? Will you allow computers, cell phones and texting in your classroom?
Teaching Tips
Students often diagnose errors in others’ work better than they see them in their own. Several professors thus generate ‘flawed’ texts (e.g. a summary, an essay, an exam answer) and ask students to find the errors in the texts on conceptual as well as syntactic or grammatical matters. Follow up by having each student write a (handed-in, signed) paragraph identifying the kinds of errors s/he makes, with an indication of what strategies to use to avoid making errors in future.
Teaching Tips
Students often write more carefully when they address an audience very different from you or your TA/TM. Consider altering a writing assignment to be written instead to a classmate who missed last class, or a party with a genuine bias in an issue/problem, or someone who could fund the proposed solution.