Each year, graduate teaching fellows design and facilitate a workshop as part of their work with the Center for Teaching. In this Q&A, we feature Emily Wieder, a PhD student in French and Francophone World Studies.
Emily will be showcasing the pedagogical potential of Iowa’s superpowered TILE classrooms at a teaching demo on Wednesday, March 12, from 3:30 – 4:30 p.m. at Schaeffer Hall room 40. Event attendees will become TILE enabled and can then request TILE rooms for their courses. TILE is more than technology: It’s an approach to teaching that incorporates deep collaboration in the classroom and can work well for strategies such as team-based learning.
What knowledge or skill do you hope participants gain?
I hope participants gain familiarity with the additional capabilities and affordances of a TILE classroom from a student's perspective. I'm currently taking a class in a TILE classroom now, and that experience has been so helpful for me to conceive of ways to use the classrooms as an instructor. To be more specific, I'm taking a German class, and I usually teach French. In my German class, we annotated a document as an entire class. After the activity, I was thinking that as I teacher, I would have each table annotate different paragraphs of the document (which would be shared through SharePoint or OneDrive), then we would come together as a group to discuss the document as a whole, with each group elaborating on their annotations and identifying important vocab words that they found. I think the individual screens in the TILE classrooms open several possibilities for collaboration, in small groups and as an entire class, that are best seen from a student's perspective. I'm hoping participants can adopt that perspective with curiosity and creativity during the workshop.
Why did you choose TILE Teaching as the topic of your workshop?
The idea for my workshop stemmed from my desire to do a teaching demo. I know that teaching demos can be required for job interviews, and even though I'm still two years away from applying for jobs, I wanted to have some experience teaching other people. Katherine (Beydler) suggested TILE Teaching because she knows I'm really interested in dynamic, interactive instruction. Using a TILE classroom for my teaching demo seemed like a perfect opportunity to combine those two interests.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Even if someone has no interest in TILE Teaching, I still welcome them to the workshop! This is an opportunity to invite other instructors to experience TILE pedagogy and learn from one another. I look forward to sharing my teaching style with faculty, fellow grad students, and everyone in between. I know I can learn so much from the brilliant people who populate our campus.
Register online for the TILE Teaching Demo
Co-sponsored by the Office of Teaching, Learning, and Technology