Research Guides: Faculty Professional Development: Plan & Facilitate Active Learning

We Believe

We believe that learners succeed when they engage in thoughtfully designed active learning.

Lesson & Activity Planning

Strategies for Effective Lesson Planning
A detailed and helpful step-by-step guide to creating an effective lesson plan. The guide breaks the process down into six steps, with clear instructions, questions to answer, and reflection opportunities. A great starting place for a new faculty member.

Skill Building Through Active Learning

Getting Started with Active Learning.
This online guide from Cambridge Assessment International Education is geared towards high school and younger but might be useful for users just learning about the concept of active learning. This guide contains resources about common misconceptions and helpful videos about what active learning is/isn’t.
Introduction to Active Learning.
This online guide from the University of Michigan Center for Research on Learning and Teaching focuses on incorporating active learning into your course design. This guide is comprehensive and uses examples from different University of Michigan instructors who have incorporated the ideas into their courses and found them to be effective.
Teaching that Sticks - Chip Heath and Dan Heath
“In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the human scale principle, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds—from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony—draw their power from the same six traits."
Valencia College Active Learning
This resource has several of examples of active learning that helps with developing skills in the classroom.

Rubrics

Creating and Using Rubrics
This online guide from Carnegie Mellon and includes how to create effective grading rubrics and provides many example of rubrics.
Designing and Using Rubrics
This online guide from the University of Minnesota Teaching with Writing includes how to create effective grading rubrics and provides many examples.
Designing Grading Rubrics
A guide from the The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, Brown University on how to create grading rubrics. The Design Grading Rubrics covers a holistic rubric or an analytic rubric. Holistic and analytic rubrics use a combination of descriptive rating scales (e.g., weak, satisfactory, strong) and assessment criteria to guide the assessment process. Additional links to rubrics criteria and rubrics scales.

Test Questions

How to Write a Good Test Question: Nine Tips for Novice Nurse Educators
This article is written for nurses but can be applied to any discipline. Nurses are lifelong learners who are always seeking ways to improve and perfect their skills. Test item writing is a skill that must be practiced and perfected over time. Often, nurses in a clinical role are promoted to the role of nurse educator without receiving training on how to write good test questions. This article presents nine tips for item writing to help nurse educators and clinical educators to create better test questions
Your Test Questions Could Use Some Improvement
While true-false questions are great for use as ungraded knowledge check questions, they rarely have a place in graded assessments, particularly because it is difficult to create a true-false question reaching higher than the remember level on Bloom’s taxonomy. Test creators can word multiple-choice questions in ways that effectively test the first four levels of Bloom's taxonomy, much like short-answer questions.
Best Practices for Designing and Grading Exams
This online guide Best Practices for Designing and Grading Exams from The University of Michigan is a great first step in reviewing the design and grading of exams. The information is drawn from Piontek, M. (2008). Best practices for designing and grading exams. CRLT Occasional Paper No. 24. Ann Arbor, MI. Center for Research on Learning and Teaching.

Directions for Assignments

4 Tips for Better Online Assignment Instructions
Wick, an English professor at Blinn College in central Texas, presents a quick 3 minute read on how to design effective online assignments. She states to help students meet the challenges of their college-level assignments, instructors should take care to craft assignment instructions that are clear, concise, and attainable.
Assignment Design
From DePaul University Center for Teaching and Learning Teaching Commons. The Assignment Design section includes information on strategies, aligning with learning goals, critical thinking, reading, writing, deterring plagiarism, and integrative learning.
Creating Engaging Assignments
From the 2015 National Teaching & Learning Forum by L. Lamar Nisly, Sarah Cecire, Melissa Friesen, and Amanda Sensenig Bluffton University, Bluffton, Ohio. The article looks at three case studies for course assignments that led to significant engagement by students. Pages 9-11 only.
Blackboard - Help & How To
Login into your Blackboard account. Click the tab Faculty Resources --> Blackboard Help & How to for videos and instructions with building rubrics, grading center, and assignments.

Information Literacy

Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education define the term in the following way: “Information literacy forms the basis for lifelong learning. It is common to all disciplines, to all learning environments, and to all levels of education. It enables learners to master content and extend their investigations, become more self-directed, and assume greater control over their own learning.”

The term information literacy is commonly used to describe the work undertaken by librarians in ensuring that students gain the skills required to locate, access and use effectively the information resources provided by libraries.

ACRL Framework
"Information literacy is the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning."
Arsenals of Lifelong Information Literacy: Educating Users to Navigate Political and Current Events Information in a World of Ever-Evolving Misinformation
"Misinformation online now has significant tangible real-world impacts, with libraries being the best situated social institution to help prepare all users to identify misinformation and navigate through the online environments in which it lives. This article proposes the idea of lifelong information literacy—the teaching and reinforcing information literacy to all users at every opportunity."
. Fostering Critical Thinking in First-Year Students through Information Literacy Instruction.
"..., this study demonstrates that the relationship between critical thinking and information literacy is not obvious, and relatively little has been recently studied regarding how academic librarians incorporate critical thinking into their library instruction."
Teaching Faculty to Develop Student Researchers.
"A huge rethink--that librarians stress their role as research instruction consultants--is required if we are going to significantly address the biggest blind spot in higher education today: the information literacy gap."
Developing Student Researchers: The Faculty Role
Academic librarians are very familiar with teaching students about research skills and hope they become competent in critical thinking and information literacy. But librarians simply have too little time, are too few on the ground, and are given too limited an amount of time to do information literacy instruction except in a piecemeal fashion…To ensure that every student is competently information literate, we need to enlist faculty who, unfortunately, often show limited motivation to take on the task. Supporting content to 2nd edition of book.