Workshops
Building Bridges to Success: Enhancing Learning for First-Generation College Students View Digital Media
Workshop Presentation Denese Wolff-Hilliard
First-generation college students are quickly becoming a majority on many college campuses. As they enter college, they bring unique academic challenges that require additional support and guidance. In this workshop, you will explore the hidden curriculum of your discipline and how to help students discover those caveats. You will review sample syllabi for areas of assumed knowledge or understanding of college vernacular. Working with a college, you will practice how to readjust lesson directions for clarity and explore other areas of lesson design that assume students understand what is expected of them. You will uncover ways to restructure the lesson design to address time constraints, such as using multiple resources, materials, and technology. In addition, you will explore ways to provide more engaging and effective learning experiences to meet first-generation college students' diverse needs and learning styles. Building rapport, creating a supportive classroom culture, and providing specific instructional techniques will help the first-generation students in your college class strengthen their knowledge, develop their confidence, and experience more academic success. This workshop offers a valuable opportunity to refresh your teaching approach and gain the tools and knowledge needed to support the success of your first-generation students.
Opening Our Classroom Doors: Professor-practitioner Co-teaching View Digital Media
Workshop Presentation Lola Costa Gálvez, Birgit Strotmann
This study scrutinizes the co-teaching model employed in the “Strategic Communication Skills” course at Comillas Pontifical University. Conceived as a collaborative academic-professional partnership, the course aims to harmonize educational approaches from both realms. The benefits are twofold: it augments professional development for instructors and enriches the student learning experience through diverse instruction and multiple viewpoints. Both pedagogical methods and assessment criteria are jointly designed to bridge the academic-professional divide. Key questions of this experience include how industry professionals can assist academics in acclimating students to emerging digital communication needs and how to effectively prepare future graduates for digital work dissemination. The target audience of this workshop are lecturers, policy-makers, heads of study, teaching innovation departments. Main objectives and/or intended learning outcomes are (1) an understanding of the contribution of interdisciplinary co-teaching to preparing students for the workplace and (2) the challenges and affordances of co-teaching for professional communication courses. Activities to be carried out (including with/by the audience). The workshop dynamics are: after a brief interactive introduction to interdisciplinary co-teaching, examples of good practice from the case study will be presented. Participants will then be asked to brainstorm applications of the approach to their own teaching situation, developing a step-by-step plan for implementation, to be shared with other groups by means of a jigsaw activity.
