Working Effectively with Undergraduate Non-Native English Speaking (NEES) Students (pdf)
Prepared by CTL, Fall 2010

International and Undergrad at UD: Our Stories and Observations (pdf)
Prepared by CTL, Spring 2011

Global U Panel: International Students Have Arrived. Are You Ready? (UDCapture)
Summer Faculty Institute, June 3, 2011

Time Management Workshop
Presented by the Center for Teaching Effectiveness
November 5th 2008
Presenters
 Julie Lloyd, Doctoral Candidate, Biological Sciences
Lauren Miltenberger, Doctoral Candidate, Public Policy
Nick Galasso, Doctoral Candidate, Political Science & International Relations
Lydia Romano, Doctoral Candidate, Psychology

Listed below are highlights from the workshop's presenters.

Julie Lloyd – “Using a Life Rubric”

Julie demonstrated how to use a “Life Rubric,” which is designed to help individuals envision how they will reach the goals they set for themselves. Life Coach Susan Robinson developed the rubric and introduced it to Julie at last year’s Lilly East Conference.
 
To use the rubric (see below), insert all aspects of your life that you consider a priority. For instance, Julie talked about her career goals to become a professor, as well as her goals for her personal life, such as a happy marriage, good health, and strong finances.

After inserting your priorities, list where you desire to be in five years concerning each. Julie said that in terms of her professional aspirations, her goal is to be a respected and widely published tenure-track Assistant Professor. She also plans that in five years she will have a nicely remodeled home and will be happily married to her current boyfriend. Julie said that during this part of the exercise it is important to be idealistic and that we should orient our goals to the best possible outcome we can envision. It is also important for the rubric that our goals are self-driven, instead of reflecting what others may want for us. What exactly do each of us personally desire for our lives? 

Working from the right to the left (with the right column reflecting our most desirable outcomes), list the next possible scenario for each of our goals. That is, in five years what scenario for our lives would be satisfying, though not totally ideal.  Julie mentioned that her second best category might indicate that while she may have achieved her ideal professional goals, she may still be trying to remodel her home.

The final column to the left should indicate what our life looks like in five years if we fail to reach our goal for that area. For instance, for Julie this implied not having a tenure-track position, or being happily married, or still renting an apartment instead of remodeling a new home. 
       

Example of a "Life Rubric"- Where do you see yourself in five years?

Lauren Miltenberger - "Making Calendars"

Lauren discussed the importance of starting the semester by placing all of our commitments and responsibilities on a master calendar. She stressed the importance of placing just about everything that consumes our time on the calendar. For her, this includes her husband’s schedule, doctors appointments for her children, due dates for paper assignments, days she needs to pick up her children or when they have play dates. Listing everything that requires your time allows you to gain a big picture view of your life and semester. It also helps to indicate which weeks will be more stressful than others so that you can prepare ahead of time. For instance, by listing everything on her calendar, Lauren can plan ahead to have someone else pick up her children from school during the week's shehas exams.

After making a master schedule for the entire semester, Lauren can then extrapolate a weekly schedule.  

Some tips: Lauren suggests that we need to take care in estimating how long our various tasks will take before we put them on the calendar. In fact, she recommends putting estimated time lengths on the calendar itself. From there, she discusses the importance of remaining disciplined to our time limits so that we stay on course. This means, however, that sometimes tasks may not be perfect. This is the trade off, unfortunately, for being a busy and productive individual.

“Time Management Quiz”
Have you ever wondered, “Where does all of my time go?!” Lauren introduced a “Time Management Quiz” to helps us figure how we spend our time each week. The quiz asks us to list how much time we spend engaged in all of our activities. For instance, how much time do we spend commuting to work, answering email, preparing meals, grocery shopping, and working on school projects? From here, we can determine what is taking up our time and begin to manage it more effectively.

Where Does Time Go?  Take this quiz to find out

 A good place to start in improving time management is understanding your current situation.  Answer the below questions as honestly as possible to give yourself a clearer picture about how many hours a day you have to accomplish everything on your lists.

1. On the average, how many hours do you sleep in each 24 hour period?
2. On the average, how many hours a day do you spend on meals, including preparation and clean-up time?
3. How much time do you spend commuting to and from campus and how many times do you do this during a week?  Include the amount of time it takes to park and walk from your car or the bus stop to class.
4. On the average, how many hours a day do you spend doing errands?
5. On the average, how many hours do you spend each week doing co-curricular activities (student organizations, working out, volunteering, etc.)?
6. On the average, how many hours a week do you work at a job?
7. How many hours do you spend in class each week?
8. On the average, how many hours per week do you spend with friends, going out, watching TV, going to parties, etc?
9. How many hours a day do you spend on email, Facebook, the Internet?

The questions that ask about daily habits, multiply by 7, then add to that the weekly amounts.  Calculate your total hours from the above and then subtract it from 168 – which is the total number of hours in a week.  This is how many hours you have left to study, write papers, grade exams, etc.

Julie Lloyd – “Time Management Tool”

Julie introduced another rubric developed by Susan Robinson called the, “Time Management Tool.” This rubric allows us to design a workable timeline for the various projects ongoing in our personal and professional lives. The purpose of the rubric is to allow us to track our progress to ensure that we complete them on schedule. A nice feature of this approach is that it breaks our large projects into smaller, manageable tasks so that we avoid becoming overwhelmed.  

The rubric works by listing specific projects in the far left column and indicating a deadline for that project in the far right column. Working backwards from the project’s deadline, we place in each box the tasks that must be completed and when along the way towards finishing the whole project. For instance, Julie listed her dissertation as the first project on her rubric. Her deadline to submit the dissertation is January 2009. Working backwards she lists the smaller deadlines associated with completing the project, such as when she will submit chapters for review. While Julie’s rubric is listed by what she will complete month to month, the time-period can be adjusted to your specific project. For instance, if you plan to loose 10 pounds this month the time columns can indicate weeks instead of months.

Example of Time Management Tool

Nick Galasso “List Fundamentals”

Nick discussed certain fundamental points about making and keeping lists. His points were inspired and partially borrowed from life coach Brian Tracy.

First, it’s extremely to important to write down the things that you must accomplish throughout your day. This is largely psychological, as we often feel overwhelmed by all of the things we know we need to do. However, when we write things down we often realize that those things are not as daunting as they seem. Therefore, writing things down helps to lower our stress levels.

Second, one of the major problems people have with lists is that they fail to prioritize or rank the items on their list. The problem with this is that we often will do the things on our list first that are the easiest and often the least important. If, at the end of the day, we look at our list and all we’ve accomplished are the trivial items instead of the important things our stress level may increase. A good rule of thumb to help us rank order our lists is to imagine that we unexpectedly have to leave town tomorrow and we will not return for over a month. What are the items on the list that we must absolutely accomplish before we leave? Those items,  obviously, rank at the top of our lists.

Third, Respect the list! Practice discipline in regards to the lists we create. Do not stray from the list that you have made. Throughout our day things emerge and present themselves as issues or tasks that require our immediately attention. This threatens to disrupt our carefully planned days and potentially pushes our priorities into tomorrow.  When this happens, we must be able to confront the new task, write it down on our list, and rank its importance with respect to the other items.

Fourth, And what happens if we don’t finish our list at the end of the day? Transfer those things to tomorrow’s list.

Fifth, Schedule time to make your lists. Nick says that he often makes two lists, one on Sunday and one at the end of each day. The list he makes on Sunday contains all of the things he needs to accomplish for the week. At the end of each day he makes his list for the next day. 

Classroom teachers can learn much about how students learn and how they respond to particular teaching approaches through close observation of students in the process of learning, through the collection of frequent feedback on students' learning, and through the design and use of modest classroom experiments.  Classroom assessment can help individual instructors obtain useful feedback on what, how much, and how well their students are learning.  Faculty can then use this information to refocus their teaching to help students make their learning more efficient and more effective. 

• Characteristics of Classroom Assessment:  Classroom  assessment is an approach designed to help teachers find out what students are learning in the classroom and how well they are learning it.  This approach is:
• Learner-Centered:  Classroom assessment focuses the attention of teachers and students on observing and improving learning, rather than on observing and improving teaching.
• Teacher-Directed:  No one can provide teachers with rules that will tell them what to do from moment to moment in the dynamic learning environment of a college classroom.  Classroom assessment respects the autonomy, academic freedom, and professional judgment of college faculty.
• Mutually Beneficial:  Because it is focused on learning, classroom assessment requires the active participation of students.  By cooperating in assessment, students reinforce their grasp of the course content and strengthen their own evaluation skills.
• Formative:  Classroom assessment is a formative rather than a summative approach to assessment.  Its purpose is to improve the quality of student learning, not to provide evidence for evaluating or grading students.  Its aim is to provide faculty with information on what, how much, and how well students are learning, in order to help them better prepare to succeed - both on the subsequent graded evaluations and in the world beyond the classroom.
• Context-Specific:  To be most useful, classroom assessments have to respond to the particular needs and characteristics of the teachers, students, and disciplines to which they are applied.  Each class has its own particular dynamic, its own collective personality, its own "chemistry."  This is true even for different sections of the same course.
• Ongoing:  Classroom assessment is an ongoing process, perhaps best thought of as the creation and maintenance of a classroom "feedback look."  By employing a number of simple classroom assessment techniques that are quick and easy to use, teachers get feedback from students on their learning.
• Rooted in Good Teaching Practice:  Most college teachers already collect some feedback on their students' learning and use that feedback to inform their teaching.  Classroom assessment is an attempt to build on existing good practice by making it more systematic, more flexible, and more effective.

• The One-Minute Paper

            Please answer each question in 1 or 2 sentences:

    1.  What was the most useful or meaningful thing you learned during this session?

    2.  What question(s) remain uppermost in your mind as we end this session?

• The "Muddiest" Point**
    
  What was the "muddiest" point so far in this session? 
  (In other words, what was least clear to you?)

• Background Knowledge Probe - student familiarity with terms or basic problems in topic area is assessed.
• Teaching Goals Inventory (modified) - teachers compare their goals with those of the students.
• Focused Listing - students free association of terms associated with topic.
• Directed paraphrasing - putting key terms into their own words.
• Appropriate Analogies - students generate linkages between class material and other knowledge.
• One-Minute Paper/Summaries - students identify key points from the class session.
• Muddiest Point - students identify the most unclear part of the class session.
• One Sentence Summary - class material is boiled down to one sentence.
• Applications Card - students pull out key ideas and how they might apply them.
• Group Informal Feedback on Teaching - students work in small groups to generate course feedback.
• Pro and Con Grid - analysis of a key idea or approach.
• Word Journals - one word is chosen to represent the class/week around which the student writes a journal entry explaining their choice of words.
• Concrete Maps - free association of terms and subsequent visual mapping of relationships.
• Human Tableau/Class Modeling - different points of the room are used to represent choices, students are posed questions and then locate appropriately.
• Classroom Opinion/Problem Poll - teacher poses multiple choice questions, students respond on held-up cards.
• Punctuated Lecture - teacher stops lecture at 1-2 points and asks students to reflect on what they are learning and how.
• Electronic Mail Feedback - feedback about the course is requested over email/list-serv.
• Student Management Teams/Quality Circles - students select a sub-group to regularly discuss class issues and content with the teacher.
• Assignment Assessment/Reading Rating/Exam Evaluation - teacher asks students to evaluate the assignment/reading/exam on several criteria.

Article adapted from:  Angelo, T. A., & Cross, K. P. (1993).  Classroom assessment techniques:  A handbook for college teachers.  (2nd ed.) (pp. 3-6).  San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass.