Blog

I blog about educational development, facilitation, and teaching. 

As of March 2018, I am blogging more regularly at isabeauiqbal.com (my coaching site). I will still occasionally blog here.

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Please click on the tags at the bottom of the page (in the black shaded area) if you would like to find a post on a particular theme. For example, to find posts I have tagged with “educational development”, you would click on that word at the bottom of this page.

Photo credit: Colors by Jon Cornwell (CC BY)

  • Group facilitation

    In this post, I reflect on a 3-day course titled “Effective Group Facilitation” which I took last month and that was facilitated by Julian Griggs of Dovetail Consulting (see note 1). In some cases, my reflections will encompass aspects of the course which spanned the three days; in other cases, I will write about a single…

  • Favourite Podcasts (at this time!)

    Inspired by Katie Linder’s “You’ve Got This” episode about her favourite podcasts, I decided to create my own list. Since I feel like doing some light and fun blog writing, this seems like the perfect fit for this month’s post. In no particular order, my favourites are: Side Hustle School: I’ll try not to gush…**but**this one is so much…

  • Give students choice in their assignments

    The other day, I was part of a focus group organized by an instructor so he could get student feedback on a group assignment he had designed and implemented for an intense 2-week module in a Health Sciences masters program. Participants were students who had completed the course last term. In that course, students could opt to complete…

  • The role of informal conversations in developing university teaching

    This blog posts consists of some notes on a paper titled “The role of informal conversations in developing university teaching?” by Kate Thomson and Keith Trigwell (full reference at end). It ends with reflections from my educational developer perspective. My interest in this topic is tied to a research collaboration with Gary Poole and Roselynn Verwoord. Thomson…

  • Formative assessment to enhance self-regulated learning

    I recently re-read the paper “Formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice” by Nichol and MacFarlane-Dick (reference at end). The paper looks at how to enhance feedback practices to support students’ self-regulation. Authors argue that formative assessment and feedback should be used to foster students to become self-regulated…