Junior Faculty Conversations

Tapping Into Student Motivation

Thursday, February 13, 12:00-1:00 | O'Neill 246

Motivation for learning can be a complex mixture of forces, from pursuing extrinsic rewards (like grades) to exploring an interest for its own sake. How can we maximize intrinsic forms of motivation, while being realistic in meeting students where they are? In this session we'll consider factors, some visible and some more hidden, that influence our students' attitudes to their work. We'll share ideas for fostering student ownership of learning, across class levels and course settings.

Register for Junior Faculty Conversations on Teaching: Tapping into Student Motivation

Teaching Intentionally With Technology

Monday, March 23, 12:00-1:00 | via Zoom

In light of the fact that BC will be completing spring 2020 classes remotely due to COVID-19, this conversation will be held via Zoom and redirected toward a discussion about teaching remotely.

Register for Junior Faculty Conversations on Teaching: Teaching Intentionally with Technology

Teaching In An Era Of Gun Violence (Canceled)

Tuesday, April 14, 12:00-1:00 | O'Neill 246

In our current national climate of frequent school shootings, our teaching and learning contexts are increasingly shaped by the threat of gun violence. For instructors, this reality also raises pedagogical questions: How, if at all, do faculty talk with students about safety preparedness? What does it look like to facilitate a fruitful classroom climate given this broader context? How do faculty understand “classroom safety” when their personal schooling histories may also have been shaped by the shadow of gun violence? In this session, instructors will have a chance to share questions, concerns, strategies, and philosophies with one another and will access some outside resources on the subject.

Register for Junior Faculty Conversations on Teaching: Teaching in an Era of Gun Violence

Taking Ownership Of Teaching Evaluation

Tuesday, September 10, 12:00-1:00, CTE Innovation Lab | O'Neill 250

Even in departments with well-defined teaching evaluation practices, faculty can feel they have little agency in that process. In this month’s Junior Faculty Conversation on Teaching, we’ll discuss these challenges and also share strategies faculty can use to take greater ownership of how their teaching is evaluated. We’ll discuss how faculty can more intentionally respond to end-of-semester course feedback as well as approaches for gathering formative feedback throughout the semester.

Engaging Jesuit Values In The Classroom

Thursday, October 10, 12:00-1:00, CTE Innovation Lab | O'Neill 250

Faculty come to Boston College with widely varying degrees of familiarity with the Jesuit tradition and the values that undergird it. And the ways faculty express that tradition in the classroom are equally varied. In this Junior Faculty Conversation on Teaching, we’ll provide a brief overview of some key tenets of the Jesuit tradition and then shift to an open discussion of how session participants engage Jesuit ideals in their classrooms, if at all. Associate Professor of French Régine Jean-Charles will be joining us for this conversation.

Academic Integrity: Modeling The Ideal, Addressing The Problems

Wednesday, November 6, 12:00-1:00, CTE Innovation Lab | O'Neill 250

Over the past year, the University Council on Teaching has been talking with faculty and others across campus about their experiences with academic dishonesty in the classroom. Those discussions revealed concerns about cheating, plagiarism, and the proliferation of online paper mills. In this session, we’ll discuss how participants have sought to limit students’ opportunities to cheat and plagiarize, as well as approaches meant to target the underlying drivers of academic dishonesty (such as lack of confidence, lack of motivation, and performance anxiety).

Class Discussion And Participation

Tuesday, February 19, 12:00-1:00

One of the most common teaching questions we hear in the CTE is “How can I get more students to participate?” — with faculty defining participation in myriad ways. Whether you’re interested in facilitating more lively class discussions, ensuring students come to class prepared, or seeking to encourage greater student ownership of their own learning, it can be a challenge to motivate broad student participation in and out of class. At this month’s conversation, we’ll talk about the barriers we see to student participation and the strategies we’ve found effective in encouraging greater student engagement.

(What) Are My Students Learning?

Wednesday, March 13, 12:00-1:00

Looking ahead to our Excellence in Teaching Day conversation on “making learning visible,” we in the CTE have been thinking a lot about the formal and informal ways instructors seek to uncover what (and whether) their students are learning. In this month’s Junior Faculty Conversation, participants will have the chance to share their own challenges with gauging students’ learning and discuss strategies for more intentionally surfacing what their students are taking away from the classroom.

Student Well-Being

Monday, April 1, 12:00-1:00

Junior faculty are often the first to know when a student is struggling personally, and faculty can struggle themselves in figuring out how to support their students while still maintaining their own healthy boundaries. This month’s conversation will focus on the particular well-being challenges we see Boston College students facing and the various approaches faculty have found effective in supporting them.

Kids Today: Teaching The Post-Millennial Generation

Wednesday, September 12, 12:00-1:00

Jean Twenge writes that the majority of undergraduates today—“iGens” who spent their adolescence with smartphones always within reach—are entering adulthood more committed to individualism and tolerance than previous generations, but less independent and less happy than their predecessors. In our first Junior Faculty Conversation of the year, we’ll discuss the particular opportunities and challenges we find teaching this new generation and share strategies for reaching them. We’ll also consider the question of how to find the balance between meeting students where they are and maintaining our expectations for academic performance.

The Role Of Civility In The Classroom

Tuesday, October 16, 12:00-1:00

Recent calls for greater civility on the political stage—and rebuttals arguing that such demands serve to silence the powerless—invite us to consider whether and how civility should play a role in our classrooms. Most faculty are invested in creating learning environments in which students can engage in rigorous yet respectful debate, but they can struggle to know how to police the boundaries of “respect.” In our October conversation, we’ll share our own approaches to defining acceptable classroom conduct and discuss ideas for improving the classroom climate for all our students.

Learning Smarter: What The Science Of Learning Teaches Us

Thursday, November 29, 12:00-1:00

As Silvia Bunge reminded us in her 2015 Excellence in Teaching Day keynote, the study habits our students bring from high school—as well as the teaching habits many of us have inherited—are not always effective in helping students meet the learning demands of higher education. Luckily, recent findings from cognitive psychology and other learning sciences suggest that even small adjustments in our pedagogy can lead to learning gains for students. For example, spacing out practice so that students can better test their recall of what they’ve learned, incorporating “desirable difficulties” into the learning process, and helping students self-assess their own mastery have all been shown to improve learning outcomes. In our final conversation of the semester, we’ll briefly review some of these findings and then discuss possible strategies for implementing them in our classrooms.

Making Sense Of Course Evaluations

Wednesday, January 31, 12:00-1:00

Course evaluations are meant to be tools to help faculty identify areas for improvement in their teaching. But making sense of what can often feel like contradictory feedback from our students can be a challenge. In this conversation, we’ll discuss strategies for analyzing the sometimes unclear feedback we get from students and for prioritizing how we choose to respond to it.

Finding The Balance: Teaching, Research, . . . Life?

Thursday, March 15, 12:00-1:00

One consequence of the current push to continuously expand the boundaries of “excellence” in higher education is that faculty find themselves needing to meet higher and higher expectations for research productivity, teaching quality, and service to the institution. This leaves many faculty feeling overwhelmed as they try to meet expectations for tenure or contract renewal, much less maintain personal commitments to their health, well-being, family, and community. This open conversation invites faculty to share their experiences with negotiating these myriad institutional expectations and the strategies they’ve found effective in the (sometimes elusive) quest for balance.

Cancelled: Navigating Free Speech In The Classroom

Monday, April 23, 12:00-1:00

Questions about free speech on college campuses continue to dominate the headlines as institutions struggle to protect open expression while also protecting their students’ safety. The headlines, however, provide little guidance to faculty who may be experiencing new uncertainty about what acceptable limits to free speech (if any) are appropriate in a classroom setting. Our final Junior Faculty Conversation of the semester invites faculty into dialogue about their own approach to free speech in the classroom and whether our changing political climate has impacted their practices in this area.

Teaching After Charlottesville

Tuesday, September 26, 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.

Following the hatred and bigotry recently on display in Charlottesville, faculty across the country have been questioning whether and how they might address the current racial climate with their students this fall. For our kick-off meeting of this year’s Junior Faculty Conversations on Teaching, we invite faculty in their first years at BC to join us for a conversation about how we’re approaching our classes in the wake of Charlottesville.

If you’d like to do a little reading in advance of the conversation, here are a few suggestions:

• “Professors See Charlottesville as a Starting Point for Discussions on Race” (Chronicle of Higher Education)
• “There Is No Apolitical Classroom: Resources for Teaching in These Times” (NCTE)
• Teaching After Charlottesville (Vanderbilt University)

Managing Digital Distractions

Wednesday, October 18, 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.

As studies increasingly point to the negative impact that digital devices in the classroom can have on student learning, more and more faculty are choosing to ban laptops from their classrooms. However, not everyone believes that these kinds of restrictions are in the best interests of our students. For this month’s Junior Faculty Conversation on Teaching, we’ll talk about the pros and cons of classroom technology bans and how best to engage students no matter what technology is present.

Optional readings:

• “The Case for Banning Laptops in the Classroom” (The New Yorker)
• “No, Banning Laptops is Not the Answer” (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Grading Fairly In The Era Of Grade Inflation

Thursday, November 9, 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.

One consequence of the rising specter of grade inflation is that faculty face increasing demands from their departments to keep their grade distributions in check. Whether in the form of gentle feedback from a chair or in an explicit departmental policy, faculty can feel pressured to find ways to lower grades, even when they see the majority of their students mastering course content. In our final fall Junior Faculty Conversation on Teaching, we’ll discuss how different departments at BC approach grade norming and how faculty can meet departmental expectations while still supporting their students’ learning.

Optional readings:

• “In Praise of Grading on a Curve” (The Washington Post)
• “Why We Should Stop Grading Students on a Curve” (The New York Times)