Seminarium

The Elements of Great Teaching

The BYOD Classroom: Smartphones May Change How You Teach

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Students appeared with smartphones in my classrooms long before my pocket-sized revolution. Their use of these devices were the trigger for changing how I teach….

These devices allowed them to do more advanced work in-class. This pedagogical shift made my classrooms BYOD/BYOT learning contexts. Bring-your-own-device/technology, in my mind, names an approach to teaching that intensively and directly leverages whatever equipment that arrives in my classrooms via student’s pockets….

How Do we Keep it Real? Authentic Assessment and Religious Studies

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It seems to me that a change in pedagogy towards authentic assessment and outcomes-based instruction demands the conception of clear lines between religious studies and professional lives in contemporary society. But to answer that, I need to determine how might religious studies teaching authentically assess learners….

Quite Possibly the Best Resource in Your LMS: Forums

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On what side of the flipped classroom do I put my forums?

Class forums are butter of how I teach “introductions to world religions”-type courses. Forums help me keep my students as far as possible away from approaching “world religions” as a mind-numbing memorization marathon of beliefs and practices that distances them from thinking critically about religion. Students can do that in an anatomy and physiology class, should they choose to study medicine. I think it’s far more interesting for me and the students to have the intro course engage in the current theoretical and methodological debates of religious studies. My goal is for students to learn how to critically think and discuss with others. . . .

 

Welcome to Seminarium

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Well-known-as-excellent Instructor 1: “Some of us were talking at lunch about how our efforts in course design, and in the scholarship of teaching & learning, fit in as part of our professional development here at Local Seminary.”

Well-known-as-excellent Instructor 2: “I really want to hear more as you work that out, because–in all sincerity–it would never have occurred to me in a hundred years that someone would ‘design’ a course.”

It’s in the spirit of this exchange that we welcome you to Seminarium: The Elements of Great Teaching, a group blog and resource site dedicated to pedagogy for religious studies in higher education.We invite you to join with us here as we “bootstrap each other up” on our understandings and practices in the craft of education.

Backwards Course Design in Religious Studies—1 of 2

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As a new teacher in a liberal arts undergraduate college, I had no idea how to plan a religious studies course, except to imitate the text-book dependent plans of my own teachers.

I quickly felt frustrated; no textbooks quite did the trick and my creative innovations felt more like clumsy interruptions.  Understanding by Design, by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, gave me some very useful tips that I now pass onto you, adapted for college-level teaching in religion, biblical studies, and theology.