CTL Faculty Development

Active learning is “anything that involves students in doing things and thinking about the things they are doing” (Bonwell & Eison, 1991, p. 2). Active and problem based learning involves and engages students with the resources and activities by requiring them to do things and to collaborate, instead of just sitting and listening or watching.

Derek Bruff is director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching and oversees the Center’s programming to help develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching and learning. He also consults regularly with campus leaders about pedagogical issues, seeking to foster a university culture that supports effective teaching.

The K. Patricia Cross Academy was launched in 2019. Offers 50 technique videos and downloadable templates for the onsite classroom and videos guiding teachers on how to adapt these techniques for the online classroom.

Kialo Edu is a custom version of Kialo (kialo.com), the world's largest argument mapping and debate site, specifically designed for classroom use. Its clear, visually compelling format makes it easy to follow the logical structure of a discussion and facilitates thoughtful collaboration. Kialo’s mission is to promote well-reasoned discussion online, and to that end, Kialo is free for educators to use.

View a list of instructional activities and ideas for use in your courses. ION Professional eLearning Programs, University of Illinois, Springfield.

Offers practical and engaging advice about what "next" should look like across higher education, from sixteen current and forthcoming authors in the Teaching and Learning in Higher Education book series from West Virginia University Press. "Our contributors created videos, audio podcasts, interviews, infographics, and articles. All are underpinned by a student-centered, evidence-based ethos."

The Pedagogic Service project is part of the National Science Digital Library ((NSDL) sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

A place for college teachers to share practical strategies for today's classrooms. Created by David Gooblar, author of The Missing Course. Browse by category.

POGIL is an acronym for Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning. Because POGIL is a student-centered instructional approach, in a typical POGIL classroom or laboratory, students work in small teams with the instructor acting as a facilitator. The student teams use specially designed activities that generally follow a learning cycle paradigm.

OpenCoLab, Plymouth State Univesity

Arthur W. Chickering and Zelda F. Gamson wrote the “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education” in 1987 to improve teaching and learning.The original article and book (1991) are based on decades of research on undergraduate education supported by the Association for Higher Education, The Education Commission of States, and the Johnson Foundation.

9-Part Series by James Lang, Chronicle of Higher Education. In this series, James M. Lang argues that simple changes in our pedagogy — in things like course design, classroom practices, and communication with students — can have a powerful impact on student learning.

Offered by University of Central Florida's (UCF) Center for Distributed Learning (CDL), TOPR is a public resource for faculty and instructional designers interested in online and blended teaching strategies. Practices are organized into three categories: Course Content, Interaction, and Assessment. Each entry describes a strategy drawn from the pedagogical practice of online/blended teaching faculty, depicts this strategy with artifacts from actual courses, and is aligned with findings from research or professional practice literature.

Adapted from Brame, C., (2013) Writing good multiple choice test questions by BC Campus' The H5P PB Kitchen: Cooking with H5P & Pressbooks.The H5P PB Kitchen is the support hub for projects awarded BCCampus H5P OER Development Grants. These projects augment open textbooks with open-licensed interactive learning activities authored in H5P.

Jay Howard. Chronicle of Higher Education. 2019.
- Why Discussion Matters
- 7 Strategies to Change the Norms of Class Discussions
- How to Keep a Discussion on Track
- Common Challenges: Participation Grades, - Bad Answers, and Divisive Topics
- Resources

A powerful teaching strategy that engages our students in critical inquiry, and creative problem solving in their local community, with the goal of investing them as engaged and active citizens, in the here and now. Crucial Academic and Social Emotional Learning (SEL) outcomes are the result.

In an inquiry-based lesson, questions form the foundation of student learning. Creating a classroom environment where students learn to ask good questions and know how to organize questions to guide inquiry can produce opportunities for the students to construct meaning and deep understanding from their inquiries. This session sets the foundation for student-generated questioning with deeper level questions in the classroom. It focuses first on establishing a classroom environment conducive to student-generated questions. Second, the session examines different types of questions that lead to factual knowledge as well as deeper thinking.

Developed by The Right Question Institute, the Question Formulation Technique, or QFT, is a structured method for generating and improving questions. It distills sophisticated forms of divergent, convergent, and metacognitive thinking into a deceptively simple, accessible, and reproducible technique. The QFT builds the skill of asking questions, an essential — yet often overlooked — lifelong learning skill that allows people to think critically, feel greater power and self-efficacy, and become more confident and ready to participate in civic life.

The Right Question Institute makes it possible for all people to learn to ask better questions and participate more effectively in key decisions. The Question Formulation Technique (QFT) was developed here.

STEM blogger Eric Brunsell on the importance of good questions. Edutopia blog.