Highlights From the 2019 Conference for Advancing Evidence-Based Learning
On Tuesday, April 30, 2019, Northeastern’s Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning Through Research (CATLR) held the annual Conference for Advancing Evidence-Based Learning.
Over 250 faculty, staff/co-curricular educators, and graduate and undergraduate students attended, participating in and presenting sessions focused on three key areas: research on teaching and learning, cross-role collaborations, and new designs for learning. Participants included on-campus and virtual attendees.
Watch an overview of the day below:
Opening and Welcome
Dr. Kate Ziemer, Acting Senior Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education and Experiential Learning, provided the opening welcome. “This conference reflects our commitment as a university to making the learner the center of all that we do,” Ziemer said.
Dr. Hilary Schuldt, Director of Project and Team Strategy at CATLR, followed with comments on the state of evidence-based learning and the importance of “coming together as a community of educators and learners” at Northeastern. Dr. Laurie Poklop, Senior Associate Director at CATLR and lead for the conference planning team, gave an overview of the day.
19 sessions and workshops were offered throughout the day. The sessions featured a variety of topics, with the underlying theme of the importance of engaging and collaborating with learners.
View all of the day’s sessions and presenters here.
Morning Sessions
In the morning session “Student Pedagogical Teams: Effects of Engaging Students in the Teaching Process,” presenters Lorna Hayward and Pam Donlan discussed the significance of using student pedagogical teams to improve courses throughout the semester, not just at the end.
During the session “Students as Partners: Empowering TAs to Design, Teach, and Assess,” Eric Winter and Richard Conley emphasized engaging teaching assistants in course planning, including developing learning outcomes, the syllabus, and assessment, as well as feedback for improvement. One tip encouraged participants to “involve TAs early, often and throughout the design of the course.”
The session “A Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Mindfulness Training in Education on Self-Compassion” focused on the benefits of taking mindfulness into consideration when planning courses and activities. In presenter Mariya Shiyko’s statistics class, she asks students to do some stretches at the beginning and reminds them that “we’re not here to be perfect, we’re here to learn.”
View all of the morning sessions and presenters here.
Keynote Speaker
Dr. Alison Cook-Sather led everyone through a transformative discussion on how we think about partnerships, specifically cross-role or pedagogical partnerships. Dr. Cook-Sather opened with an explanation of the importance of the language we use to describe such partnerships:
“I typically try to use terms like pedagogical partnership or student/staff partnership or student/faculty partnership because either everybody is named or nobody is named. So there isn’t an assumed namer within the term. This complexity matters because students are among those who have brought up that they don’t appreciate the ‘students as partners’ term because it’s unlikely that they would be using it.”
She highlighted many of the findings described in earlier sessions, stating that partnerships really allow everyone’s voices to be heard. Generally, it allows for both partners to have more understanding and appreciation for one another. In her informal conversation with participants following the keynote, she discussed practical ways to start pedagogical partnerships. Some tips for faculty and staff included:
- Let students recommend new students, so you aren’t picking who you think should be there.
- Redefine what partnership means–it’s not just talking out loud.
- Don’t train the students, because this is about relationship-building.
She emphasized that these partnerships don’t remove hierarchies but instead share the power. Dr. Cook-Sather also noted that SAIL is a great intersection with partnership, with its emphasis on self-authorship, an important aspect of students learning how to engage in partnerships with faculty and staff.
Watch the full keynote here:
Dr. Cook-Sather shared a resource on Guidelines for Student and Faculty Partners, available to the entire Northeastern community.
Afternoon Workshops
In the workshop “Reimagining Your Learning Opportunity: Using SAIL to Illuminate Embedded Competencies, Skills, and Literacies,” facilitators Rebecca Riccio, Carolin Fuchs, and Brianne McDonough shared a variety of experiences integrating SAIL across contexts. Rebecca Riccio, Director of the Social Impact Lab, said, “With SAIL, we have a language to make these skills more explicit.” Carolin Fuchs described the process of using SAIL in her language courses as a natural one: “I can see how my course maps onto SAIL.”
View all of the afternoon workshops and presenters here.
Poster Reception
The day concluded with a lively poster reception. The posters’ presenters explored a wide range of topics:
- A Collaborative, Personalized Approach to Promoting Growth and Development in Student-Athletes
- Bridging the Gap Between Competencies and Assessment Data: Professional, SAIL, and Outcomes
- Designing Engaging Educational Modules to Teach Multiple Analytical Techniques and PCA in Matlab
- Developing and Implementing Comics as a Visual Learning Tool
- Students as Partners as a Model for Research on Reflection in Cooperative Education
- The SAIL Experience and Opportunities for Faculty: “I SAILed My Course, Now What?”
- The Use of Open Educational Resources (OERs) in the Classroom
- We Own This: A Class Patent System as Experiential Learning
Thank you to all of our participants and presenters at our 2019 conference! If you’re interested in connecting with CATLR about evidence-based approaches to teaching and learning, including scholarly inquiry into your own teaching, please email us at [email protected].
View photos from the 2019 Conference for Advancing Evidence-Based Learning below: