This essay describes two integrated projects initiated by the 2020 3M National Teaching Fellowship Award (NTF) cohort on educational leadership and the role of authenticity among exemplary teachers, as presented at STLHE 2022. A thematic analysis of 3M NTF award-winning dossiers identified six prevalent traits characteristic of educational leaders: innovation, persistence, responsiveness, reflectiveness, curiosity, and positive opportunism. The analysis also revealed aspects of educational leadership in practice, including being committed to a cause, being action-oriented, being community-engaged, being multi-disciplinary, building bridges, freely sharing, trailblazing, and using applied methods. Educational leaders’ relationships with others tended to foreground elements of collaboration, empowerment, support, and mentorship, and their actions had an impact beyond their own classrooms or institutions. In the second project, qualitative interviews with cohort members articulated ways in which authentic teaching is expressed by educational leaders. The actions of authentic teachers were viewed as influential and inspiring, and based on their actions authentic teachers tended to be recognized as instruments of change. These results were shared in an interactive workshop at STHLE 2022, which discussed how educational leadership is currently framed in higher education, and guided participants in self-reflection as educators and leaders to formulate calls to action involving educational leadership and authentic teaching.
While the notion of an anti-racist curriculum is not new, many higher education instructors have not made the transition from a decolonized curriculum to an equally decolonized pedagogy. From a conceptual standpoint, the transition is understood but the actualization of this cyclical process is at times, not as smoothly executed. Deconstructing delivery is a daunting prospect for faculty, especially for those most invested in the content of their practice. As a result, this paper draws upon both evidenced-based practices and the practical application of decolonizing tertiary-level instruction. Utilizing a Transformative Learning lens, this article details the experiences of a college curriculum renewal project and the subsequent considerations and changes in practice that ensued in the adoption and delivery of an anti-racist curriculum.
Failure is an important part of the learning process as it provides opportunity to reflect upon and modify study habits, can increase understanding and retention of concepts, and supports the development of resilience, an important skill within and beyond the university context. Despite these benefits, undergraduate students may have a negative perception of failure that may contribute to fear of failure and risk avoidance. We investigated the influence of instructor feedback, discussions of failure in the classroom, and course-level and institutional structures on students’ view of failure across disciplines. Undergraduate students at the [redacted for blind review] participated in an online survey (n = 304) consisting of Likert-scaled and open-ended questions on perceptions of failure, experience with instructor feedback, likelihood to engage in help-seeking, and course- and institutional-level suggestions to support learning from failure. When instructors discussed with their students how to best respond to feedback, students were more likely to view small failures as a helpful part of the learning process. Further, when instructors discussed strategies to best respond to failure, students were more likely to view failure as helpful for learning and less likely to view weak performance early in a course as an indication of future weak performance. Student-identified strategies to better support resilience included improved communication between students and instructors, in peer-to-peer conversations, and by the institution more broadly. Across all three areas, students expressed a desire for systems of higher education to destigmatize failure through changes in both rhetoric and policy. This suggests the incorporation of meaningful conversations and failure narratives in the classroom and beyond are effective strategies to encourage the development of resilience-based skills. Such discussions may help students engage positively with failure and maintain willingness to engage in future challenges. Keywords: learning from failure, higher education, resilience, help-seeking, feedback
Large introductory classes typically reflect courses that cover a broad landscape of learning and necessitate assessment formats that are efficient and reliable, making multiple-choice (MC) tests a good option. Designing a good quality MC test requires reflection on the appropriateness of the assessment format, designing a test blueprint, and writing MC questions following item-writing guidelines that align with course learning objectives and teaching/learning strategies. It is a time-consuming endeavour that often requires a group of question writers who are experts in the domain—both of which can be challenging considering the demands of teaching in higher education. Sometimes we want to adopt or adapt existing MC tests that we have access to. I suggest a five-step “reverse engineering” analytical process for selecting questions from existing MC tests to utilize in our course assessment, emphasizing the alignment process. In one of the steps, we will refer to the Taxonomy Table, a practical two-dimensional aid proposed by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001), to select the questions that cover a cognitive dimension landscape. The outcome of this process provides an effective visual representation of the alignment and enables us to decide on the utility of questions for the context of our unit and assessment objectives. Keywords: course alignment, assessment, multiple-choice test, taxonomy table.
Academic conferences are key spaces of knowledge sharing and professional development. As a national society which has pledged to undergo “a robust examination of its attention to equity, diversity, and inclusion throughout the organization” (STLHE/SAPES 2021), we undertook an evaluation of the diversity of participants and presentation topics at the 2022 conference. This paper reports on some of the distinctive aspects of the 2022 conference as well as the findings of the evaluation such as diversity of participants by gender and ethnic identity, province, institution type, discipline, and more. While the 2022 conference was unique in many ways due to being STLHE’s first face-to-face conference since 2019, this report provides a useful baseline with which to compare the diversity of participants and presentation topics in future years. The report concludes with additional recommendations for programming decisions to support and evaluate equity, diversity, and inclusivity at future conferences. Keywords: conference, diversity, participation, presentation topics, Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
