In the Spirit of Learning

In this episode, Rob Eaton, co-author of "Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom," shares some of his thoughts about the topic of mental health and learning.

In this episode, Tim Howe interviews Sharon Duque, BYU-Idaho Art department faculty. They explore some of Sharon's classroom activities and quality practices in her Art classroom. Sharon explains how she uses Google Forms to create digital escape rooms as a gamified low-stakes quizzing tool. Tim and Sharon also explore how teams and group work can help deepen engagement and learning in the classroom.

The Humanities 202 teaching team spent 2 weeks in a summer course design lab (Creative Course Collaboration, C3 Lab). In this episode, the team shares some of the most noteworthy improvements they made to the course. One of those improvements came from a cross-curricular collaborator from the Marketing Dept. They decided to create an authentic assessment where the students create podcasts with the teacher.

This week we are joined by the cross-curricular C3 team for Political Science 150. This team just finished a C3 (Creative Course Collaboration) Lab where they dove into their course by asking themselves some difficult questions and left with a few new course design ideas that they will be testing in the Fall Semester.

This week we sit down with faculty from the BYU-Idaho Best Practices Committee. This committee is comprised of full-time faculty from a variety of colleges and departments. Join us as we discuss how group work, Team-based learning, and classroom community have evolved over the last 12 months during the Covid-19 pandemic. Show Notes: 36 Questions for Increasing Closeness (Berkeley)

In this week's episode, we are joined by Martin Ma from the Economics Dept. Martin explains how he has maintained rigor in his Economics courses while also providing flexibility to students through Covid-19. Martin discusses practical and holistic assessment strategies that help students apply multiple principles in the same assessment. Martin shares a new grading policy that he has been using to motivate students to study harder for each test. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Over the past year, many college teachers have been forced to move some or all of their course content online. Though many hope to return to face-to-face teaching soon, there are principles of online instruction that can benefit any teacher and any class. In this podcast, Janine Gilbert, an English faculty member with over fifteen years' experience designing, teaching, and facilitating online instruction, shares some of her best ideas for making online instruction effective. She gives practical advice for overall structure and pacing, creating meaningful assignments, managing grading, and connecting with students. If you have any part of your course available online, this podcast is worth twenty minutes of your day!

Improve student writing with writing conferences. Diantha Hopkins of the BYU-Idaho English Department shares practical strategies and solutions to help improve students' writing. Diantha uses a 1 on 1 conference to offer individualized feedback to improve her students' writing. In today's episode, she shares strategies like reverse outlining and more that teachers across multiple disciplines can utilize to help students improve their writing skills. For a sample of a teacher/student conference, please watch this Loom video called Sample Change Essay Conference (Links to an external site.). The first seven minutes are the actual conference, and the last four minutes are the professors reflecting on what happened in the conference. You can also view this as a Zoom recording (Links to an external site.). For another sample (where the student hasn't figured out their topicc yet), see this Loom video called Sample Change Template Conference (Links to an external site.). The actual conference is about eight minutes and then the professors break down the elements of the conference for about five minutes. You can also view this as a Zoom recordingLinks to an external site.

Jennifer Platt, from the BYU-Idaho Religion Department has been using learning teams to foster discussion and community in her classroom during the pandemic. Join us as we go behind the scenes with Jennifer as she shares with us some of her methods and practices for using teamwork in her classes.

With Covid-19 we are all scrambling to make the best of a difficult situation. Many universities are exploring teaching models that allow students to move their education and learning forward. In this episode Scott Gardner, Dean of Teacher Preparation, and Jason Shaw, faculty from the Biology Department will share what they've done and learned in their past experience with flexible teaching models.

What if you had a lesson that was designed around physical interactions and physical spaces, and then have both of those elements taken away? Joel Judkins is a faculty member teaching Interpersonal Communications at BYU-Idaho. Joel spent a few weeks this semester wrestling with his Broken Squares lesson on non-verbal communication and how to deliver this lesson remotely via Zoom. In this episode we discuss the finer points of the lesson and how Joel facilitated a similar experience with his remote classes.

Jenna Dyckman and the Nutrition 150 instructors have created a Podcast to extend the experience of the classroom. The Podcast is shared by 4 faculty who all teach Nutrition 150. Check out this week's episode to see the purpose that the podcast plays toward improving the student experience in this course. Resources: Royalty-Free Music website: https://audiojungle.net/category/music How to Start a Podcast article: https://audiojungle.net/category/music (I used this when I was first starting, it had some good tips of how to begin) Here are two links to the podcast. One is the link to the anchor website and the other is the link directly to Spotify. The Nutrition 150 Podcast: https://anchor.fm/jenna-dyckman or Spotify link: https://open.spotify.com/show/6eJnrvk7urXGl8jUAeFp3q

Leon Anderson, Wellness Center Director, and Brian Schmidt discuss the challenges of personal health and wellness amid the challenges of working/teaching from home, social distancing and other unusual circumstances cased by Covid-19.