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)

  • Thank you Jan!

    Below is a short speech I prepared as a public ‘thank-you’ to Janice Johnson, my long-time mentor. Jan retired from the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology in 2016, after a long career there. **** Jan hired me as a graduate student assistant to work on a teaching portfolio initiative at the teaching and learning…

  • Big ideas and course design

      “A big idea must have pedagogical power: It must enable the learner to make sense of what has come before; and, most notably, be helpful in making new, unfamiliar ideas seem more familiar….a big idea is not just another fact or a vague abstraction but a conceptual tool for sharpening thinking, connecting discrepant pieces of…

  • Starting a mastermind group

    I first heard the term “Mastermind Groups” in the Coaching for Leaders podcast approximately 8 months ago. Since I am thinking about starting one, but wasn’t clear on how these differed or were the same as other support groups, I did some reading on the topic and wanted share what I have learned. What is a mastermind group? A mastermind…

  • Small Group Instructional Feedback

    I conducted a small group instructional feedback (SGIF) session last week. In this post, I share on the process I used for the in-class portion. SGIF is a formative, mid-course check-in process for gathering information from students on their learning experience. Like with all mid-course evaluations, the advantage is that the instructor can respond to the information gathered during…

  • Calibrated Peer Review: An introduction

    I am enthusiastically involved in a project in which I am helping instructors implement writing assignments that use student peer feedback into their courses (see note 1). I am loving this initiative and the learning; plus, it is a neat extension of the work I have been doing on peer review of teaching. Today’s post…