This document provides information for a workshop to prepare graduate teaching scholars for teaching summer courses at UCSD. The workshop will cover topics like creating a syllabus, assessment strategies, learning outcomes, active learning techniques, and getting to know students. Attendees will discuss key findings from research on how people learn and implications for teaching. They will sort cards about designing classroom environments that are natural and critical for learning. The workshop emphasizes creating transparent syllabi that clearly communicate what students will learn. Sample syllabi from UCSD courses will be reviewed. Attendees are directed to prepare for next week's session on learning outcomes.

1. Summer Graduate Teaching Scholars
Preparing toTeach 1
May 5 and 7, 2015
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Name
Course Dept/School
Summer I or II # students

2. Preparing to Teach Workshops
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The aim of these workshops is to give you a well-
supported head start on many of the things you
should do to prepare for your classes, like
 creating a syllabus
 working out an assessment scheme
 drafting learning outcomes
 choose active learning strategies
 identify something you want to learn about
your students and design a way to figure it out
 and more…

3. Who are you?
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Introduce yourself to the others at your
table.
what are you excited about?
what are you nervous about?

4. Reminder: How People Learn
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5. How People Learn: Key Findings
1. Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how
the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they
may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are
taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert
to their preconceptions outside the classroom.
2. To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must: (a)
have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts
and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and (c)
organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and
application.
3. A “metacognitive” approach to instruction can help students
learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning
goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them.
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6. Sort your cards into 3 sets of 3:
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Key Finding
2
Implication
forTeaching
Implication
forTeaching
Implication
forTeaching
Designing
Classroom
Environments

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8. More than anything else, the best teachers try to
create a natural critical learning environment:
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(Bain, p. 99)

9. More than anything else, the best teachers try to
create a natural critical learning environment:
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natural because students encounter skills, habits,
attitudes, and information they are trying to learn
embedded in questions and tasks they find
fascinating – authentic tasks that arouse curiosity
and become intrinsically interesting,
(Bain, p. 99)

10. More than anything else, the best teachers try to
create a natural critical learning environment:
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natural because students encounter skills, habits,
attitudes, and information they are trying to learn
embedded in questions and tasks they find
fascinating – authentic tasks that arouse curiosity
and become intrinsically interesting,
critical because students learn to think critically,
to reason from evidence, to examine the quality of
their reasoning using a variety of intellectual
standards, to make improvements while thinking,
and to ask probing and insightful questions about
the thinking of other people. (Bain, p. 99)

11. In natural critical learning environments
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students encounter safe yet challenging conditions
in which they can try, fail, receive feedback, and
try again without facing a summative evaluation.
fail
receive
feedback
(Bain, p. 108)
try

12. Scholarly Approach to Teaching
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What should
students
learn?
What are
students
learning?
What instructional
approaches
help students
learn?
Everything
you value,
from learning
outcomes, to
what will happen
in class, to how
your students will
be assessed, should
transparent to your
students on the
course syllabus.
CarlWieman
Science Education Initiative
cwsei.ubc.ca

13. 3 Syllabi for MyDNA
With the others at your table
identify / verify the differences between
the 3 syllabi
evaluate the impact of the changes from
2010 to 2014 (impact on whom?)
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15. Example Syllabi
CSE 3: Fluency with Information Technology
(Beth Simon)
MMW 11: Making of the Modern World
(Matthew Herbst)
HIEU 131:The French Revolution
(Heidi Keller-Lapp)
Take 10 minutes and look over these syllabi.
Does anything surprise you?
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16. Next week: Learning outcomes
Watch the blog
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for details about what you should do to
prepare for next week’s meeting.
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