Small Teaching - Module Overview

Overview:

Small Teaching is Flower Darby's approach to making small, incremental changes to your course. Not whole sale changes or redesigning everything, but rather small impactful changes to your assignments or interactions that are designed to improve student learning and increase your efficiency so that you can be freed up more.  One of those Small Teaching strategies that Flower introduced in her book and her keynote at the eLearning Academy was about scaffolding learning activities. We felt this strategy was worthy of it's own topic this month. 

Scaffolding learning activities is the idea of breaking down complex tasks in your class into smaller "chunks" or activities. These smaller activities require an action from your students and provide the opportunity for you to give feedback to reinforce, redirect, encourage, or adjust their approach to the activity.  

Learning Objectives:

Our goal this month is to identify strategies to scaffold major assessments in our courses in order to strengthen student's preparation, mitigate cheating, and to model successful academic behavior. For this module you will look at one specific assessment and identify ways you could break that assignment up into chunks or ways you can scaffold it to create a more supportive learning environment.