Our Services
In order to support and promote good teaching practices we provide a variety of workshops each year open to the entire IU community. The workshops address issues about the college classroom and student learning common to all disciplines with some examples being “Campus Climate,” “The First Day of Class,” and “Writing Multiple Choice Tests.”
Our consultants collaborate with many departments to design meetings, retreats, and working group sessions geared toward the needs of an individual department. This could be for faculty and adjunct instructors alike and includes working with departmental committees on curriculum planning, teaching evaluation and peer assessments and facilitating faculty discussions on teaching and student learning.
Teaching Consultations & Conundrums
Have a teaching conundrum, a nagging classroom issue or maybe just a question about the ways your students learn? We provide free and completely confidential individual consultations to support all aspects of teaching and student learning.
Course portfolios, teaching portfolios, online teaching snapshots, and scholarship of teaching and learning presentations and publications capture the intellectual work of teaching so that it can be shared with others. Campus Instructional Consulting offers workshops, working groups, and one-on-one consultations to assist faculty members and graduate students as they document their teaching and their students’ learning.
Our consultants often meet with individual faculty members and associate instructors to help design new courses or revitalize existing ones. This includes but is not limited to defining course goals, identifying leaning objectives, developing class activities and using appropriate assessment and grading methods. The first section of the IU Teaching Handbook, entitled Preparing to Teach also includes useful information on planning a course.
We work with instructors to design custom learning assessments that help instructors gain feedback about what students are learning. These learning assessments include non–graded, in–class activities (Classroom Assessment Techniques), student self–assessments, and knowledge surveys. Make an appointment with one of our consultants to design a student learning assessment tool.
Although valid and reliable tests are never easy to create, when properly written they can be a way to accurately assess student learning while indicating the overall success of your class as well. But writing fair and equitable tests requires both patience and experience. Our instructional consultants help faculty and adjunct instructors write tests that are based upon course objectives and that are reliable indicators of student learning.
Student Evaluations of Teaching
Our consultants meet with individual faculty members and associate instructors to interpret mid–semester and end–of–semester student evaluations of teaching, to conduct focus groups, or to devise shorter classroom assessment techniques. These evaluations are important tools in improving one’s teaching craft, but they are often difficult to interpret both because of the overwhelming nature of the data, and because of the personal nature of the comments. Come see one of our consultants and learn how to use student feedback to improve student learning.
Scheduling a classroom observation is a way to gather information and gain new insights about how your class is working. Such data augments student evaluations and other classroom assessments. If you would like to schedule a classroom observation, please plan a few weeks ahead of the class you want observed.
Being videotaped during a class is an excellent way to see yourself through the eyes of your students. If you would like have your class videotaped we suggest that you first meet with one of our consultants to become familiar with the process and to identify some goals. After the class has been videotaped, you will meet again to review the tape, discuss the class and how well your achieved the goals you set out for yourself. The consultant not only serves as a sounding board for your own thoughts, relating those thoughts to the appropriate research on teaching and learning, but also serves to model a beginning learner in your discipline.
Books on Teaching & Learning are available for reference and loan at our library in Franklin Hall 004. We also have extensive holdings of several leading journals on teaching and learning that may be used for reference and a selected list of videotapes on topics such as collaborative learning in the sciences, lively classroom discussion and making large classes work. In addition to the online Article Listing, we have hundreds of the best articles on teaching and learning that are organized for use by CIC consultants. If you have a particular issue that you are researching, feel free to make an appointment with us.
