Enhancing Teaching through Interactive Classes to Engage Students

Duration 25 hours

Overview

Welcome to the Digital Badge on ‘Enhancing Teaching through Interactive Classes to Engage students’, EnTICE. You don’t have to engage in sports and exercise to be active! You can simply encourage engagement and meaningful activity in your classroom by introducing ‘Active Learning’. This badge is focused on introducing ‘Active Learning’ strategies and enabling you to think more critically about your teaching and moreover about your students learning. We know you are already an expert in your disciplinary area, and that delivering content rich lectures will be something you are very capable of doing. However, this badge aims to increase your awareness of ‘How’, how you are delivering the material and how well your students are engaging and learning in the process.

By exploring a number of different theories, strategies and approaches to teaching, we want you to investigate what types of teaching strategies get your students to invest and engage in their learning. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to teaching! Therefore, enhanced awareness, gained through peer observation and collection of feedback coupled with a positive ‘if at first you don’t succeed, then try again’ attitude is key to ultimate success. Herein, we encourage you to embrace change, and incorporate flexibility into what you teach and how you teach it, after all, ‘variety is the spice of life’! While this badge will bring your attention to a variety of theories, strategies and options, it is you, on engaging with peers, that will investigate and implement considered solutions to issues you have encountered in relation to your students’ learning and engagement.

You’ll Learn to

Reflect on and document a challenging aspect of your own teaching to date
Discuss and evaluate some case studies
Develop a reader response and a micro teaching session on any active learning strategy
Implement, reflect and collate feedback on a teaching strategy you used to overcome any of the teaching and learning related issues you’ve identified

On earning your open badge award for this course, you will have achieved further recognition in the following domains of the National Professional Development Framework for Staff who Teach:

Domain 1 The Self At the core of the domains is the centrality of ‘the Self’, recognising that the professional and personal values that the individual brings to their teaching are pivotal in their development as a teacher.
Domain 2 Professional Identity, Values and Development in Teaching and Learning focuses on the consideration of professional and/or disciplinary identity in given contexts. The domain supports critical reflection, recognising that an individual’s professional identity can change at different stages of their career.
Domain 3 Professional Communication and Dialogue emphasises the importance of excellent, clear and coherent communication skills within the changing learning environment.
Domain 4 Professional Knowledge and Skills ensures the individual remains current in terms of their professional/disciplinary knowledge and can implement teaching, learning and assessment approaches which promote active learning and are underpinned by a strong evidence base.
Domain 5 Personal and Professional Digital Capacity recognises explicitly that we live and work in a digital world, and that teachers must develop digital skills that allow them to harness the potential of technology for learning impact.

Course Developers

This open course has been developed by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in partnership with: