Dal Events

Grading for TAs” Series: Equitable Grading Practices: Ensuring Fairness and Consistency

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 18:00:00 GMT

Tuesday, March 4
2–3 p.m.
Online via Microsoft Teams
Link to register for the event

Grading is one of the most common responsibilities of a TA, and ensuring fairness and consistency is essential for maintaining student trust, motivation, and academic success. This interactive workshop equips TAs with the knowledge and tools needed to establish equitable grading practices. Participants will explore common grading biases, such as the halo effect and recency bias, and learn practical strategies to mitigate them. A key focus of the session will be the effective use of rubrics to enhance objectivity and clarity. Additionally, attendees will have the opportunity to reflect on and identify potential biases in their own grading processes and brainstorm actionable solutions.

Presenter

Nasim Tavassoli, Educational Developer

CLT Virtual Drop-in: Student Assessments

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 17:00:00 GMT

Wednesday, March 5
1–3 p.m.
Online via Microsoft Teams

Come to our Student Assessments virtual drop-in session to create a personalized support experience. Your needs and interests guide the direction of the session! Ask questions about developing student assessments, bounce ideas off a sounding board, and hear what others are doing in the classroom. Ask a CLT Senior Educational Developer about topics such as: designing rubrics, assessing higher-order thinking with multiple choice questions, writing clear assessment instructions, providing effective feedback, alterative grading approaches, and making your assignments more creative and “Gen-Z friendly”! Join us online anytime during the two-hour window, and stay for as little or as much time as you would like! Registration is NOT required.

Teaching for Inclusive Learning Experience: A Developing Story of Two Pedagogical Frameworks

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 15:30:00 GMT

Tuesday, March 11
12:30–2 p.m.
Killam Library, Room B400*
Link to register for the event (opens in new window)

This session is being held in person because the workshop revolves around an activity that uses printed cards. We are looking into ways to hold this as an online or hybrid workshop in the future. The session is limited to the �鶹��ý and King's community.

Pedagogical frameworks such as Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP), Intercultural Teaching Competence (ITC), and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) support students’ learning by guiding instructors in designing courses and creating safe, interactive, inclusive and flexible classroom environments.

On its own, UDL does not specifically address cultural differences among instructors and students, although its core principles need to be situated, for every learner, within their cultural framework(s). As such, many practitioners are integrating ITC and CRP into their practices to design and teach courses that apply decolonizing, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive theories and practices, and promote accessibility, equity, and inclusion through an intersectional lens.

In this interactive and collaborative workshop, we will engage in an activity together to find intersections and overlaps between two inclusive teaching frameworks, namely ITC (Intercultural Teaching Competency) and UDL (including the new UDL Guidelines 3.0!). This will be followed by discussion to reflect on and strategize ways to incorporate into our course designs and teaching these pedagogical frameworks.

Outcomes

By the end of the workshop, you will be able to:

Articulate the ITC and UDL principles and philosophies and discover how they intersect with each other.

We endeavor, too, that as participants, you will:

Feel inspired, and invested in implementing ITC, and/or UDL
Have built knowledge and skills capacity as a means for collegial co-learning, ongoing learning, and mutual support

Facilitators

Shazia Nawaz Awan (she/her): Educational Developer (Internationalization & Intercultural Competency)
Les T. Johnson (he/him): Senior Educational Developer (Online Pedagogies)

*Please note that the B400 classroom is in the basement of the Killam Library. We are aware of, and apologize for, the accessibility barriers associated with this room. If you require the use of an elevator to reach this room, one of the CLT staff will have to access the elevator with you, using their key card. Please let us know in advance so that we can facilitate a smooth and timely transition to the basement.

We also ask that participants be respectful of those with significant allergies and avoid wearing perfume, aftershave, cologne, and highly scented hairspray, soaps, lotions, and shampoos.

Mental Health 101 - Recognizing and Responding to Students in Distress (online)

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Thursday, March 13, 2025
10 a.m.–12 p.m.
Online via Microsoft Teams
Link to register for the event

Facilitators

Joanne Mills, Psychologist, Student Health & Wellness, and two Stay Connected Peer Support workers (who are students themselves).

The MH101 session is limited to faculty, instructors, and staff at �鶹��ý and King's.

In any given year 1 in 5 Canadians will experience a mental illness, and according to Statistics Canada youth aged 15-24 are the most likely group to suffer the effects of a mental illness, substance dependency and suicide. Considering most university students are within this age group it is essential that those working with University students are provided the necessary knowledge and resources to recognize and respond to students in distress.

MH101 is a short yet informative presentation developed for university faculty and staff to increase awareness and understanding of mental illness and mental health problems, thus increase your confidence in supporting students.

Resilient Classroom Series: The Emotionally Intelligent Educator

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 13:00:00 GMT

Thursday, March 20
10–11 a.m.
Killam Library, B400 (basement)*
Link to register for the event (opens in new window)

“Emotions drive people. People drive performance.” – Joshua Freedman, CEO, Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Network

For decades, emotional intelligence (EQ) has revolutionized the business and leadership practices of workplaces and Fortune 500 companies (Globe and Mail, 2024). EQ involves accurately recognizing and managing your own feelings, and recognizing and responding effectively to others’ feelings (Mayer & Barsade, 2008). As a part of the Resilient Classroom Series, this session will shift the focus of EQ toward higher education, showcasing how you and your students can use EQ to blend the actions of thinking and feeling to enhance interpersonal dynamics and make optional decisions in the classroom and beyond. In this in-person session, you will learn:

What emotional intelligence is and its main competencies, such as self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and social skills.
How emotional intelligence can benefit students and instructors.
Your own personal EQ score.
How you can use “emotional data” to build stronger connections and inform decision-making.
Strategies to enhance EQ in yourself and your students.

To help you take what you learn from this session to your classroom, we will identify ways you are already using EQ in the classroom, and collectively brainstorm strategies to further incorporate EQ into your teaching practices.

Presenter

Daniella Sieukaran, Senior Educational Developer (Curriculum)

Intended Audience

Faculty
Staff
Graduate Students
Teaching Assistants
External
Open to all

*Creating an accessible and optimal learning environment is paramount for the CLT: please email us at clt@dal.ca to let us know if you anticipate any barriers we will need to remove in the learning environment, or if there is anything in particular you feel we should know that will best facilitate your learning experience. The information you share will be kept confidential and only shared with the session facilitators.

Please note that the B400 classroom is in the basement of the Killam Library. We are aware of, and apologize for, the accessibility barriers associated with this room. If you require the use of an elevator to reach this room, one of the CLT staff will have to access the elevator with you, using their key card. Please let us know in advance so that we can facilitate a smooth and timely transition to the basement.

We also ask that participants be respectful of those with significant allergies and avoid wearing perfume, aftershave, cologne, and highly scented hairspray, soaps, lotions, and shampoos.