903: AU Signature Skills Demo: Intentional (Re)Design – Tips on Helping Students Hear the Tree Fall

Date: Wednesday, August 26

Time: 9:15 AM – 10:15 AM

Presenters: Egis Zilinskas (Director, Chemistry Laboratories and Adjunct Professorial Lecturer, CAS | Chemistry), Nabina Liebow (Director of the CAS Leadership Program and Senior Professorial Lecturer, CAS | Philosophy/Religion), Piper Campbell (Hurst Senior Professorial Lecturer, SIS | Foreign Policy & Global Security) & Yana Sakellion (Associate Professor, CAS | Art)

Moderator: Martyn Oliver (Faculty Chair, AU Core and Senior Professorial Lecturer, CAS | Critical Race, Gender & Culture Studies)

Session Description:

Join us for one of eight sessions where faculty discuss the process of integrating AU Signature Skills into their course assignments and classroom activities.

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Sometimes teaching can feel like this age-old riddle: we work to create assignments that we hope will help students obtain real-world skills, but at the end of the semester, they don’t seem to have connected the dots. We walk away scratching our heads, wondering what exactly we were providing students to begin with; in other words, we start to question whether the tree ever really fell, since no one seemed to hear it!

Join us for an interactive session demonstrating how easy it can be to integrate AU Signature Skills into your course assignments and classroom activities in ways that students can readily recognize and understand. We’ll begin the session describing how we learned to uncover and give prominence to skills we already were teaching — but that maybe were not being “heard fall” by the students. With additional intentionality, we’ve revised our syllabi, labs, and/or class assignments to help students better connect these activities to the signature skills AU has committed to helping them build. We’ve also become more explicit about explaining why those skills are professionally important now. In this session, we will describe adjustments we’re incorporating this fall into assignments/class activities across a range of disciplines. You’ll leave with a page of the tips we developed doing this work.

The AU Signature Skills were developed by a group of AU faculty and staff this spring to operationalize AU’s goal to help students develop into thoughtful and engaged professionals, and are an extension of AU’s Meet Our Moment Strategic Plan.