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"We are exploring holding weekly gatherings to discuss science and improve our skills in the horticulture department, modeling our efforts after the Pub Club, which is a weekly forum for students, postdocs and professors to discuss science breakthroughs, generate and exchange ideas and solve problems." -Marissa Benzle & Danve Castroverde
 
 
Presentation: https://iteach.msu.edu/posts/preview_attachments?post_id=1477 

In order to facilitate a blended learning approach, the university is planning to install 200 high quality web cameras in many of the lecture halls across campus. The rooms will be equipped with echo cancellation to prevent room sound from feeding back into the mic. The camera will work with existing software that are commonly used on campus; such as: Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Camtasia, and Kaltura Capture (located on mediaspace.msu.edu). 
 
Below you will find a recording of focus group conducted with educators across campus:
 

 
To contribute feedback of your own, click on the following qualtrics link:https://msu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cMGiNyXeaWe7045

The Balance and Resilience Group of the 2013-2014 Academy Cohort utilized the data they collected from a needs assessment survey with graduate students to create a series of infographics on leadership and wellness principles. This project provides a fascinating lens into the perspectives and challenges facing graduate students during this time. 
 
Resources:
Infographic about balance and resiliency in grad student life      -Based off of a survey the group conducted with 95 graduate students 
Poster about balancing
Poster about stress  
Poster about leadership
The Skills of Balanced Leadership: Develop the Team poster 

These groups, typically comprised of 3-5 graduate students, are a great way for graduate students to receieve constructive feedback from their peers on their writing, set deadlines, and develop a network of support while writing the dissertation. Contact the Writing Center for more information. New groups most often form in September and January.

Photo by Tony Hand on Unsplash
 
While individual feedback can be useful for attending to specific aspects of individual students’ work, we’ve found students sometimes exhibit similar strengths and challenges. These are moments when your time might be better used identifying commonalities across a class and using these commonalities as teaching opportunities. Below, find three different ways to effectively structure group feedback.

Identify Class Patterns (Teacher-to-Class Feedback): Much of the labor of providing responses to students comes from writing to each student individually. It can help to identify when individual responses are necessary, when responses to an entire class might be more pedagogically efficient, and when to deliver feedback to an entire class. To do this, we:


Read through projects and identify patterns. For example, in a recent project we assigned, we found many students were performing well in terms of citing sources and crafting mechanically correct sentences, but had similar problems with organization and offering critical analysis. Because of the pervasiveness of his concerns, we interpreted these issues as something worth spending time on in class.


Address comments to the whole class. We do qualify our feedback, noting that not all students have the same strengths and weaknesses, but that what we are identifying are general patterns.


Offer to meet students individually during office hours if they have questions. Having identified specific concerns, these meetings often run much quicker than they would without specific goals.


Redistribute the Labor of Identifying Patterns (Student-to-Class Feedback): We’ve already recommended redistributing the labor of offering individualized feedback. You can do the same thing by asking students to identify patterns across the class’ work. To do this, we:


Model feedback! We told you this before, we are telling you now, and you should tell yourself this over and over again. By modeling feedback (i.e. walking through the ways you would respond to a project), you are teaching students how to respond to each other, as well as how to read and understand your comments.


Give students projects to assess. This helps students get a fuller view of the work being done across the class, allowing them to begin to notice patterns and to think about their work in relation to the work done by their classmates.


Ask students to look for patterns. We found there are several good ways to have students identify patterns: he sometimes asks students to identify strengths and weaknesses from a corpus of work; or, closer to high-stakes evaluations (or grading moments), we’ll ask them to rate performance along a specific evaluation criterion.


Ask students to generalize. What do strong projects do? What about weaker projects? Have students articulate moves that make strong projects strong. This is a place where you can intervene and offer your perspective about what makes work succeed in your class, (especially in relation to specific evaluation criteria).


Ask students to develop revision strategies. Once your class has articulated the features of good performance, ask students to and develop specific strategies for revising their own work.


Facilitate Student-to-Student Feedback (Small Group Feedback): If you like peer review but are having mixed results, structuring smaller groups of students (2-3) could help you guide student responses to the whole group. To do this, we:


Ask students to identify problems. Heather typically asks students to choose no more than three struggles from their project (“I am having a little trouble organizing my paragraphs”) or process (“I am not sure how to revise my argument”). This gives small group members (and you) specific ways to give feedback.


Ask students to respond to group member concerns. Whether their responses are physically on a group member’s paper, embedded as a digital comment, or written in a brief response memo, ask all small group members to read and respond to each other’s concerns.


Meet with small groups and facilitate feedback. Have a student share their concerns, ask their group members to provide feedback, and facilitate any questions that come up from the discussion. This could range from how to apply specific feedback to their writing or sometimes what to do if feedback from group members don’t seem helpful.

 

Hillary's project sought to develop a peer mentoring system for students in the Department of Physiology. 
 
"I would like the Physiology Graduate Student Council (PSL GSC) to build a sense of community between Physiology grad students and faculty in by addressing student needs and providing opportunities for students to engage with each other." -Hillary Woodworth
 
Presentation: https://iteach.msu.edu/posts/preview_attachments?post_id=1475 

This week, we wanted to highlight Stokes Schwartz and Garth Sabo, both educators with the MSU Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities. Stokes and Garth are also the co-facilitators of the “Reading Group for Student Engagement and Success” Learning Community this academic year! According to the Office for Faculty and Academic Staff Development (formerly AAN), this Learning Community is: A Zoom based reading group that pairs theory and praxis of student engagement techniques to drive greater student success in general education and prerequisite courses at the university. Bimonthly meetings (twice a month) consist of reading and discussing 2-3 recent articles and sharing best practices for applying methods in courses across the university. These two also use a group on the #iteachmsu Commons to share information about upcoming meetings, attach reading files, and continue to engage in asynchronous dialogue outside their meeting times!
Read more about these Learning Community co-facilitators’ perspectives below. #iteachmsu's questions are bolded below, followed by their responses! 
Q & A with Garth Sabo & Stokes Schwartz

You are facilitators of a Learning Community (LC) and decided to have a group on iteach.msu.edu for that LC. What about the #iteachmsu Commons appealed to you for this group?
Sabo: A major component of the LC structure at MSU focuses on providing some element of public dissemination of the work we do together, and Stokes and I both appreciated that #iteachmsu would allow us to make our group activities visible to the wider MSU community. We both felt a strong need for some type of digital meeting space/repository for things like meeting notes, agendas, etc., and we found that iteach.msu.edu offered a suite of those tools that were fairly easy to wrap our heads around and adopt as practice. 
Schwartz: Having a central place for learning community members (and interested parties) to check-in, share our thoughts, relevant documents, and planned talking points for meetings/discussions as well as any follow-up observations in the days following a meeting.  Personally, I have found iteach.msu.edu relatively easy to use.  
Sabo: Our LC meets digitally, and we also thought that it would be nice to structure things in a way that leaned into benefits of that structure rather than simply trying to imagine ourselves as an in-person community that only meets via Zoom, so we’ve also tried to use iteach.msu.edu as a platform for ongoing and supplemental conversations to the discussions that come up during our scheduled meetings.
Tell me more about your LC and what activity in your #iteachmsu Group looks like? (This can include, but not limited to goals, topics, general overview of membership, the kinds of things being shared in your group.)
Sabo: Our learning community is titled “Reading Group for Student Engagement and Success,” and the only thing I don’t like about it is the name. Stokes and I are both faculty in the Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities, and part of the impetus for the group was a desire to dig deeper into pedagogy research that might help us crack the egg of engaging students in a required course. We wanted to find a format that allowed us to have pedagogy conversations that were data-driven and practical in focus, so that our community members could feel like our conversations were driving towards concrete actions.
Our Zoom meetings focus on talking through a few pre-designated texts that the entire group reads. We’ve been fortunate that our current roster has also agreed to take turns as interlocutors, with one person briefly presenting on some additional text(s) that add additional context to the material we all consumed
Schwartz: Typically, Garth and I plan 8-10 multipart discussion questions for our meetings on fostering student engagement and success, which we share via iteach.msu.edu a few days ahead of time. Team community members have also shared information and related ideas via our iTeach group.  We are also in the process of compiling a playlist.  
Sabo: Our iteach activity tends to be kind of evenly split between looking back at what we’ve already done with logistical stuff (like meeting agendas, Zoom links, etc.) and what we might do (like additional discussions or resources that members post or comment on in the Feed). Our current membership is a great mix of folks across the College of Arts and Letters in a range of roles, which has enriched our conversation in ways that I couldn’t have anticipated. We’re certainly open in having more folks join us if interested!
Schwartz: We have had four meetings so far and have our fifth coming up on December 3, 2021 from 10-11:30 EST and all are welcome! Please note, if you're interested in joining the 12/3/21 meeting, please reach out to either co-facilitator via email or on iteach.msu.edu, as the readings we'll be discussing are from a hardcopy book we've procured!
What has been a highlight of this semester for your LC and what are you looking forward to next semester?
Sabo: I love talking about teaching with people who love teaching, and I really feel like that has been the tone of our conversations all semester. I’ve been very appreciative of the fact that our group has been able to talk about the challenges of teaching while still being productive and hopeful about what good teaching can do for our students and the world. One thing that has certainly helped that has been the spirit of collaboration that’s breathed through this group since its beginning. Stokes and I have had a good rapport even since the planning stages of this community, and that has continued as we’ve gone from the process of proposing the group to actually planning its meetings. As you might be able to tell from how long my answers to these questions are, I tend to be wordy and big-picture in my focus, and Stokes does a great job of bringing things back around to ask, “Okay, but what would that actually look like?” in a way that has helped our conversations find a great balance between macro and micro issues of engagement and student success. Our members have been great about thinking and sharing proactively as well.
Schwartz: The highlight?  Two actually.  First, working with my co-facilitator Garth.  We seem to have established an effective working relationship and bat our ideas-plans back and forth until they take solid shape.  It has been fun sharing our ideas, developing our respective parts, coming back to the figurative table for another round of mashup, and then seeing what the final results are before the day of an actual meeting.  Second, the knowledge and personalities of our learning community members, all of whom bring interesting experience and perspectives to our meetings.  Thus far, I have really enjoyed the experience.  It has been like grad school in the best way possible (without the egos and constant stress). 
Sabo: Just to peek behind the curtain a little bit,  next semester we’re pivoting slightly to frame our conversations with the goal of producing tangible results of our collaboration, whether that be conference presentations, publications, or something else entirely. I’d love to see a step on that road being a bigger focus on producing material that we might share to the wider iteach community via the Articles feature.
Schwartz: Looking ahead, I am excited to continue working with our community in the new year and possibly develop a panel or presentation on concrete things we might do to engage our students in the general education or lower division prerequisite "classroom" (F2F or online) more effectively. Beyond that, I am already mulling over ideas for proposing another similar learning community for the 2022-2023 AY.  The cross-pollination possibilities offered/brought about by learning communities like these is fantastic and a good way to break out of our various silos here at MSU.
If you are interested in learning more about this year’s Learning Communities at MSU you can see the full list here. If reading this story peaked your interest in #iteachmsu Groups, you can view all the current groups here. Looking for a group on a particular topic or practice, but don’t see one - start it! Any MSU user can create a group, just login to iteach.msu.edu with your MSU netID to get started. Easy to follow instructions for starting a group are here. 

Zoom break-out rooms are a go-to option for student-student interaction in online courses. When I think about break-out rooms, the image I see commonly displays a blue 'Share' button in the upper right, this is how accustomed I have become to seeing Google Apps along with Zoom. Works great, facilitates interaction, leaves an artefact that can be used to assess understanding. As time went by, we got better at it. Instead of hearing 'I forgot what group I was in', groups would have names. We even used 'come up with a group name' as a get-to-know each other activity. We learned that having a single document shared by all worked for some situations, but we could also make group folders for holding supporting documents and individualized instructions. We could control access or have students share from their own Google Drives.
My next break-through for break-outs: Google Forms. So glad I saw that demonstrated. The report-out instructions could be right in the form, and could include images and video. Forms could be copied or questions imported, thus saving time. And responses all went neatly into columns and rows on a Sheet, which could be converted to a Doc if we that made reviewing easier.
I only recently opened the door into the big candy shop of Google App joy, and it wasn't for work. My child is taking piano lessons online. In person, the teacher would annotate his book to adjust a phrase for exercise purposes or to transpose the key. Online, the teacher was relying on my son to record the changes. That didn't happen. But the boy had a suggestion for the teacher: use a Google doc with musical notation. This was new to us, but sure enough, in the Chrome Web Store we found an add-on called 'Flat'. (Not a very enticing name, but 'Sharp' is taken.)  Flat is a blast and fun way to learn. In addition to musical notation, it can make guitar and ukulele tabs so we can quickly try the music on other instruments, and we can have a group play together. While I was in the Store, I also grabbed an add-on called MathType, which we could use for math and chemistry but for some reason we just haven't got to that. 
Something else that is cool: Microsoft Edge accepts Chrome add-ons, because both browsers are built in Chromium. I don't want to give up Edge: I love being able to search the MSU cloud from my browser. If you haven't tried that, just use Bing in Edge, and check out the results under the 'WORK' heading. It will even take you to your Teams chats. Amazing.