Academic support team equips faculty members to be "powerful teachers"
Last week, the academic support team held faculty in-service presentations for each division and discussed “power tools,” which are impactful teaching strategies based on the science behind learning. These tools are drawn from Patrice Bain and Pooja K. Agarwal’s Powerful Teaching.
The goal of the presentation was to inform, affirm, and inspire our teaching practices. Learning specialists taught teachers about the power tool of feedback-driven metacognition and explained that without feedback, students’ metacognition can become overconfident and out-of-sync with their actual learning.
“Though the overview of the presentation about metacognition was consistent K-12, the ‘application’ content was carefully crafted by the division-specific learning specialists to create a customized learning experience for each division of faculty,” explains Karyn Vickery, director of academic support.
Teachers in each division considered how they can help students “know what they do not know” by implementing retrieval practices in their classrooms.
Retrieval strategies may include:
- Retrieval placemats to promote verbal discussion between students about topics covered in class.
- Brain dumps where students write down everything they remember from class.
- Exit slip surveys where students consider how they did during class.
- Retrieval challenge grids where students answer questions from current and past units, earning more points for retrieving information from longer ago.
Thank you to our academic support team for supporting our teachers and equipping our students to be independent learners.
