The First Teaching Seminar of 2021 Fall Term
Published on: November 4, 2021 | Views: 2184
The first Teaching Seminar of 2021 fall term -“Making the best out of Think – Pair – Share (TPS)”-led by Dr. Kevin Quan was held on Wednesday, Oct 28th.
Dr. Kevin Quan first explained what is TPS and stressed that the core of this strategy is to ask students to think about the assigned question alone first and then discuss with a learning partner no matter whether the answer is going to be revealed or not.
The faculty members then discussed the advantages of TPS and the possible problems that may surface when using this strategy. If TPS is used efficiently, instructors can encourage participation in classroom and create opportunities for instructors and the students to explore new answers through their interactivities. More importantly, instructors can encourage students to share their ideas with their learning pairs and facilitate their participation in teamwork, which is an important skill for their future academic career. TPS strategy may also go wrong if it is not well designed. For instance, if the instructor gives students questions that are too difficult or too easy, it is possible that effective discussions will not happen, or that some students will perform too actively whereas others are not truly involved.
Although there is no such a “perfect class”, our faculty members do agree that they want to promote active learning through using various teaching strategies, thus offering high-quality education for SCUPI students.
In order to continuously improve teaching, there will be two more teaching seminars in this term: Dr. Grace (Qizhi) Chen will share her “Magic Moments in Teacher-Centered Class” on November 25th, and faculty members of SCUPI Writing Center will introduce strategies and tactics for teaching in an EMI (English as a Medium of Instruction) on December 23rd.
Author | Joanna Peng
Editor | Euphy He