Transforming teaching: CEE’s peer-based programs offer fresh approaches for increasing student engagement

Are you looking to experiment with your teaching?  

Teaching can be a solitary activity with few opportunities for feedback and collaboration. For over ten years, SFU instructors have been exploring new ways of structuring individual classes or entire courses through the Centre for Educational Excellence’s two intensive, peer-based teaching programs: the Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW) and Rethinking Course Design (RCD).  

The Instructional Skills Workshop is a four-day workshop that focuses on skills and approaches instructors can apply to deliver effective lessons. Rethinking Course Design is a four-day workshop that supports instructors to design or redesign an entire course.

According to instructors who have taken these courses, both offer unique and transformative experiences.

Instructional Skills Workshop: A four-day workshop on lesson planning

An opportunity to receive peer feedback
 

For Jonathan Driver, archaeology professor emeritus and former provost, feedback he received during the ISW helped him gain crucial insights into his teaching.  

“As researchers, we get feedback on our work all the time—you submit an article to peer reviewed journals and you accept that getting feedback is an important part of the process. But we don’t get feedback opportunities in our teaching. The peer feedback I received during the ISW helped me uncover areas where my assumptions about what students did or didn’t know were hindering their learning. I didn’t completely abandon my teaching style, but I was able to make small changes that had big impacts for my students. In fact, after over twenty years of teaching, I had my best ever teaching evaluations after taking the ISW.”

Peter Keller, also a former provost and geography professor, echoes Driver’s sentiment.

"The ISW challenged me to question how I teach and engage with students. The exercises where we were asked to do 10-minute learning modules and present them to our peers gave me invaluable feedback that helped me refresh my teaching."

A safe environment to experiment and take risks
 

Criminology Professor Shannon Linning found that the ISW’s supportive environment helped her become more confident in trying new techniques and activities in her teaching.

“I was looking for new ways to keep my students focused going back into the classroom after the pandemic. The ISW gave me the opportunity to take risks and try different things that I might not have otherwise. If something doesn’t work, your peers will tell you, but in a supportive way, and you try again, which results in becoming more confident in what you’re doing.”

Nadine Wicks, biomedical physiology and kinesiology lecturer, the describes the ISW as an opportunity to engage and learn from a community of instructors who are passionate about teaching.

“In the ISW, there are no teachers per se; participants play different roles, but in the end, we are all learners. We are all excited about academia and instruction and we come into the room to share ideas and take away ideas–many of which, in my experience, we go on to implement into our teaching, even years and decades later.”

Rethinking Course Design: A four-day workshop on course design

Similar to the ISW in its peer-based and interdisciplinary model, RCD focuses on the design or redesign of an entire course.

A dedicated group of colleagues from different disciplines
 

For Molly McVey, sustainable energy engineering lecturer, developing a course in the four-day program with input from a cross-disciplinary group of instructors allowed her to plan her course in new and unexpected ways.

“There are synergies that come from hearing about how teaching approaches and techniques are being used in different fields. It helped me to think about different ways to explain my content ... I learned that you have to check your assumptions about what students know about your discipline. I signed up for RCD because I had been tasked with developing a new course and was a bit nervous about it and left feeling confident and ready to launch it.”

Miranda Meents, biology lecturer, explains that the RCD’s climate of idea sharing helped her gain the confidence to imagine news ways of approaching the design of her course. 

“In my department, not everyone has the capacity to be thinking openly about course design while they’re running their courses. There's something special about having everybody in a room being in that blue sky, endless-possibilities atmosphere. It's helped me be brave and do things that I might otherwise hesitated to do.”

A focused timeframe
 

For Theresa Pauly, gerontology professor, spending four days focused primarily on her course design was a major benefit.

“It is so much easier to build the different elements of the course so that they all fit together when you aren’t distracted by other tasks because then you can remember what decisions you made around one component and how that impacts other interlinked components. Yes, it’s hard to clear your schedule but the productivity is so much higher when you do,” says Pauly.

According to CEE director, Nanda Dimitrov, peer-based feedback programs like the ISW and RCD can have a significant impact on teaching and on student experience.

“The research shows that programs like these allow instructors to take some risks and shift towards more student-focused teaching approaches. After the workshops, they tell us that they are more confident in their ability to create engaging learning experiences, and to ask their students for feedback more frequently and integrate student and peer feedback over the long term.”

The ISW is typically run five to seven times a year. To find out when the next session will be offered, please visit sfu.ca/cee/events. RCD is held annually. To be put on a notification list for the next offering (to be held Spring 2024), email Amanda Wallace at amanda_wallace_2@sfu.ca.