Video Scenario: Translating Lessons From Virtual Teaching

Motivational interventions are strategies that increase student motivation to learn or that remove barriers to learning. This primer from Brown University's Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning walks through a menu of evidence-based approaches that educators may want to incorporate in their classrooms to support all students, but especially students from historically underrepresented groups. Though it is not an exhaustive list of motivational theories, this primer helpfully outlines the pedagogical approach and the challenge it…

Imagine this: Your students have just learned about infectious diseases in a lecture. To build off what they learned, you planned a discussion for a section around the Ebola virus, but at the beginning of class, your students seem very excited to talk about COVID-19. How do you respond? In this video, Sr. Instructional Designer Nina Bhattacharya and Bok Pedagogy Fellow Elizabeth Hentschel unpack some ways you can pivot your section discussion—and why that is so…

Defining participation in a discussion-based course can be tricky. When leading a discussion it is important to acknowledge that contributions to the classroom community can take many different forms and often look different for different learners. To this end, it is important to create community norms, often with the help of students, to define how participation will be quantified in a discussion-based section.  One creative technique is to allow students to define for themselves how…