Looking for a simple way to evaluate whether your teaching practice is staying on track or jumping the rails?
Mark Francek, a Central Michigan Univ. geography professor, has devised a simple mnemonic to look at his teaching: CAR. Try it out; see if it works for you! There are three elements:
1 – Community: Building community within your class can pay dividends in terms of learner engagement, positive collaboration, and a supportive environment in which to work toward shared learning goals. Francek says, “promoting camaraderie and mutual respect in the classroom should be a teaching priority,” and that it’s incumbent on instructors to foster community. He also encourages instructors to consider how student learning can be applied to the broader community through service learning projects and activities.
2 – Accountability: The use of formative assessment throughout a course can aid in student accountability for learning. Frequent low-stakes assignments, such as weekly quizzes or brief reflective writings, not only help motivate students to move forward through the course content, but also give you significant feedback on student learning. This continual feedback gauges student learning is valuable information for a nimble instructor who can make course adjustments and intervene as needed to support learning.
3 – Relevance: It’s natural for learners to be drawn to subject matter and learning activities that appear relevant to their lives, their interests and their future careers. And course content can be more engaging to your learners if you take the extra step of showing them or, better yet, challenging them to show you, how the subject matter relates to their prior learning.
Although Francek’s CAR model is oriented primarily toward classroom teaching, it is every bit as meaningful in online and hybrid courses. Explore the ways that other recent posts here in the Ecampus CDT blog illustrate this by considering how each of these learning activities can build community, increase accountability for learning and/or make a course relevant to students:
- Peer review of student work.
- Collaborative writing around course texts.
- Using social media platforms such as BuddyUp to support group study.
- Incorporating written or video reflection into a major assignment or using brief reflective activities such as Muddiest Point or One-Minute Paper.
Community, accountability, relevance. These three elements can benefit your teaching practice and your learners.
Reference: Francek, M. Let CAR drive our instruction. Tomorrow’s Professor eNewletter, 1449. Retrieved Dec. 15, 2015, from https://tomprof.stanford.edu/mail/1449
