Category: Group 3

Cover letter

The material for my class includes history of drug laws, cultural impact of drugs (and how it has changed over time) as well as very biological based descriptions of how drugs work on the brain and how that then affects behavior. I use a wide range of assessments, including exams, papers and in-class activities. These in-class activities are the teaching artifacts I am seeking to revise, to try and achieve more interaction from the students.

In previous versions of the activity assignment for each Module, students mostly did the assignment on their own time, and we only had a limited class discussion for some of the activities.

To revise these assignments, I will make all of them more interactive and include peer review as part of the assignment. The type of interaction and review will vary by module assignment.

Revision

Module 1 Activity:

The past version of this involved the students individually completing the worksheets/questions and then discussing them briefly in class. As is typical, only a few students did most of the discussing.

For the new version, I will create a google doc with the assignment, and put students into groups and have them complete the worksheet/ questions in class.

Following the group work, each group will present their completed worksheets, and then we will discuss any differences between each groups worksheet results.

Another option I am considering is converting the first three parts of this activity into some type of in class game, but I would first have to figure out how to do that!

Module 1 Worksheet

Part 1

Match the following Functions and Structures:

Structures                                           Functions

A) Receptors                                       1) Contains the cell’s machinery to keep it alive

B) Dendrites                                        2) Long wire-like component that transmits the electrical signal

C) Cell body                                        3) A protein with a specific size and shape. Neurotransmitters and drugs bind to it

D) Axon                                               4) The part of the neuron from which neurotransmitters are released

E) Axon terminal                                 5) Branches that come off the cell body and contain most receptors

Part 2

Arrange the following statements in the correct order for neurotransmission (Make a list of the

number of each statement in the order of the steps in neurotransmission)

1) Neurotransmitter is released into the synapse

2) Calcium enters the axon terminal and causes the vesicles fuse with the presynaptic membrane

3) Neurotransmitter binds to receptors on postsynaptic cell

4) The action potential opens up voltage-gated calcium channels in the axon terminal

5) An action potential travels down the axon into the axon terminal

6) Neurotransmitter is synthesized and stored in vesicles in the axon terminal

7) The neurotransmitter is removed from the postsynaptic receptor

8) When a neurotransmitter binds to a postsynaptic receptor it causes a postsynaptic ion channel

to open or close, producing a change in the postsynaptic cell

Part 3

Match the following brain areas with their functions

Brain Area                                                       Functions

A) Frontal lobe                                                1) Control of hormones, ANS, sleep, pleasure, hunger, sex

B) Parietal lobe                                               2) “Addiction center”

C) Temporal lobe                                            3) Calming, “business as usual”

D) Occipital lobe                                             4) Vision

E) Basal ganglia                                              5) Basic vegetative processes

F) Cerebellum                                                 6) Fight or flight

G) Hippocampus                                             7) Sense of touch

H) Hypothalamus                                            8) Sleep and smoothing out respiration

I) Nucleus accumbens                                    9) Hearing, memory

J) Medulla                                                       10) Balance, posture, coordination

K) Pons                                                           11) Reasoning, judgments, decision making

L) Sympathetic nervous system                     12) Fine tuning movements

M) Parasympathetic nervous system             13) Memory   

Part 4

Select two routes of administration of drugs and list pros and cons (at least two each).

Part 5

Name two ways a drug can be an agonist and an antagonist

Module 2 Activity

This assignment asked students to watch an assigned episode of “The Business of Drugs” and then each group (the assigned episode) had a brief discussion of the key points (in break out rooms) which was then presented to the class.

In revising this assignment, I will include a google doc for the students to include their thoughts on their assigned episodes during their breakout room session.

During the class discussion of the episodes, students from other groups will add questions about the episode presentations in the google doc, which will be part of the discussion.

Module 3 Activity

The previous version of this assignment was already pretty interactive (breakout rooms to discuss the myths and listening to songs chosen by students).

In revising this assignment, for part 1, I will include use of a google doc for the myths and I will ask them to come up with as many myths as they can (again, in groups), and then have the other groups decide which myth is true and which myth is false.

For part 2, I will have the groups each select on song, and then will ask the other groups to make the judgements about the song

Part 1

Choose from any drug from Module 2 or 3 and name 2 myths (common belief, rumor, etc) about the drug you chose, one of which is true and one of which is false. Submit a one paragraph on your findings (references are fine but not required).

Part 2

Find a song about any drug from Module 2 or 3; write a paragraph about the song, specifically thinking about some of the following questions: What perspective is the song writer expressing; one of a drug user or of someone who has been affected by a drug user? What message about the drug is the song writer expressing? Is it positive or negative?

Module 4 Activity

The previous version just asks for individual submissions.

In revising this, I will again divide the class into groups, and assign each group a drug prevention campaign to analyze (again utilizing a google doc). Each group will present their campaign and other groups will add questions to the google doc.

Part 1

Select an anti-drug/drug prevention program, such as a media campaign, or a school program like DARE, and describe the program (ie is it primary/secondary/tertiary, universal/selective/indicated). Include a description of the aspects of the program that define what type of program it is.

In creating these assignments, I was really thinking about how to avoid the typical problem of having only a few students speaking all the time. By using google docs, students who may not feel comfortable speaking can provide input non-verbally (all students will be required to provide comments in the google docs for each assignment). Additionally, by having other the groups review the work, there will be (hopefully!) more interaction and discussion of the assignments by the students.

The learning objectives of these assignments (especially the last three) is to go beyond the text material and see how our information and understanding of everything about drugs comes from a wide range of sources and not all of them are just empirical facts. I hope also to demonstrate in the discussions that there are many different opinions and understanding about drugs, drug usage and drug users.

So I have some take aways after weeks of thought on what my teaching artifact will be as a result of this seminar. I now have two artifacts, or atleast I hope they will be considered thus so.

1. Teaching in chunks for the statistical review section of the course. I have decided I am not re-teaching the pre-requisite topics for my course. These first two weeks will instead be briefings and not lecture. Students will be asked to prepare a discussion on topics I will assign to them via groups. Each session, 20 minutes will be dedicated to discussing the briefings. Lets hope I don’t have dead air for 20 minutes. To support them in their preparation for the briefings, I have built a course site on BB (and will possibly move this to blogs@Baruch at some point) with references to OER on the review topics. Students will be assigned to groups in the first week, so they can work with their groups on developing the briefings.
2. Typically I assign groups project in week 5. By then students have developed some rapport among themselves and have gotten to know their classmates. I allow them to select their own groups, with the offer to assign students to a group if they are unable to find a group to join (i understand some students don’t get a chance to connect with their classmates when a class is completely online). So far, students have been really good about setting themselves up in groups and I have rarely had to help out with the assignment. Now since I am asking them to forms groups after day1, I have to help them out with getting to know their class mates. For which meaningful ice breakers are useful. The emphasis being on meaningful. After taking Ron Whitman’s workshop on “Work it, Own It” I intend to use his ice breaker. I think it has some many unintended benefits, (or maybe intended by design). Students are encouraged to understand what engagement in a class really means, and have to go though some amount of self-reflection and self assessment of how well they engage.

Wish me luck!

My artifact is an overall course redesign based on the process of “working backwards” from revised learning goals. First, I revised the learning goals slightly since the first draft to clarify and to make the work more reasonable for a short Winter intercession. Working backwards, I’m now thinking about the projects and assessments I’ll use during each module to measure these goals. I’ve also established a rhythm for synchronous and asynchronous work.

I need to finish planning the third module, and lastly I’ll figure out “what I’m doing and assigning” so students can meet those goals.

Course Learning Goals

• By the end of this course, students will gain skills to describe, understand, and discuss the scope and degree of inequality in the United States. Students will be able to
  • Locate, access, and understand contemporary Sociological data about inequality produced by researchers and institutions in the U.S.
  • Recognize and analyze stratification associated with race, gender, sexuality, and other identities, statuses, and roles from an intersectional perspective.
  • Analyze contemporary issues of inequality as discussed in the media and in relation to their everyday lives using the Sociological imagination.
  • Use these ideas and concepts to make an informed argument about inequality, social mobility, and democracy in capitalist societies.
• Students will gain an understanding of key areas of inquiry in the Sociology of Inequality, and will be able to deploy the ideas and vocabulary developed in this class to analyze inequality in the U.S. These areas include
  • The Individual attributes and the structural approach to understanding and explaining inequality and the use of the Sociological imagination in analyzing and explaining our experiences, identities, and worldviews.
  • Racial capitalism and its relationship to contemporary forms of inequality.
  • Class power and the relational and dynamic view of class, social mobility, and democracy in capitalist societies.
  • Social movements against inequality from an intersectional perspective.

Synch Mon,Tues, Fri

Asynch Wed, Thurs

Course Modules

Course Introduction and Introduction to Inequality

Jan 3-7

Goals: 1,2,A

This module will include

• Wealth inequality guessing game. Students will estimate the wealth distribution in the U.S. and compare their estimates to data.
• Short in-class exploration and research assignments using Social Explorer designed to introduce students to mapping inequality, give them the opportunity to learn and explore the software, and to introduce them to the scope and degree of inequality in the U.S.
• Small research projects exploring and describing stratification in the labor market re: race and gender according to published data and reports.
• Sociological Imagination exercise

Capitalism, Class, and Democracy

Jan 10-14

Goals 3,4,A,B,C

This module will include

• How capitalism is supposed to work / how it works short essay
• Social Explorer map-making project visualizing a chosen aspect of inequality
• An introduction to social explorer stories, and practice
• Annotation and discussion of youtube videos on vocat re: social construction of race, and racial inequality
• Analysis of inequality in news media

Social Movements and Social Mobility

1/17-1/21

In my course (Drugs, Brain, and Society), the material is divided into Modules and for each module, I assign an “Activity”; some are done in the classroom and others are done outside of the classroom.

These assignments can vary from filling out a worksheet on the brain, to watching a relevant TV series and commenting on it. When the assignment is done in class, I put the students into groups/breakout rooms and then try to have discussions on all of the activities, but the responses are limited.

I would like update these assignments to use more interactive modes to try and get engagement from all the students, not just the usual 5-6 that always speak.

Activity 1

Choose from any drug from Module 2 or 3 and name 2 myths (common belief, rumor, etc) about the drug you chose, one of which is true and one of which is false. Submit a one paragraph on your findings (references are fine but not required).

Activity 2

Find a song about any drug from Module 2 or 3; write a paragraph about the song, specifically thinking about some of the following questions: What perspective is the song writer expressing; one of a user or of someone who has been affected by a user? What message about the drug is the song writer expressing? Is it positive or negative?

I often feel like when I design or redesign a class that I get stuck in the many, and overwhelming details and spend a lot of time looking for a reading or assignment that I think will be “useful” or students will “like” from the beginning. Or, I spend a lot of time thinking about logistics or the parameters of an assignment: when will we meet, and should I use a discussion board, journaling, etc. This has meant that I sometimes don’t have a strong sense of why, or how the materials and assignments contribute to the goals of the course as a whole. So! After I read this, I decided to work backwards by first defining the big goals of the course. When I did this, I realized my module structure would need to be revised. Here’s what I wrote about the overarching learning goals.

• By the end of this course, students will gain skills to describe, understand, and discuss the scope and degree of inequality in the United States. Students will be able to
  • Locate, use, and understand contemporary Sociological data about inequality produced by researchers and institutions in the U.S.
  • Recognize and analyze stratification associated with race, gender, sexuality, and other identities, statuses, and roles.
  • Analyze contemporary issues of inequality as discussed in the media and in relation to their everyday lives using the Sociological imagination.
  • Use these ideas and concepts to make an informed argument about inequality, social mobility, and democracy in capitalist societies.
• Students will gain an understanding of key areas of inquiry in the Sociology of Inequality, and will be able to deploy the ideas and vocabulary developed in class to analyze inequality in the U.S. These concepts include
  • The Individual attributes and the structural approach to understanding and explaining inequality, including the materialist structural model and its use in analyzing and explaining our experiences, identities, and worldviews.
  • The structure and operation of the political economy of capitalism including stages and varieties of capitalist organization, class power and the relational and dynamic view of class, and social mobility and democracy in capitalist societies.
  • Racial capitalism and its relationship to contemporary forms of inequality with a focus on housing, labor, and forms of social control including policing and prisons.
  • Features of social welfare systems, and policies, structures, and techniques of governance related to the management of poor people including critiques of the “culture of poverty” thesis and the nature and function of policing and prisons.

More soon!…

I am teaching a new course that is being introduced by the department this Fall to all business school students as a business core course. I am still in the throes of understanding how students are entering this course and how well they are prepped to receive this content. The primary take away is they are weak in their pre-requisite knowledge, and this is creating a bottleneck in terms of keeping up with my course schedule.

The teaching artifact I’d like to work on is teaching in chunks, and making my teaching more a briefing and less a lecture. This is particularly relevant since the first few weeks of my course syllabus is designed to be a review of their pre-requisite course (statistics) of which my students remember nada. Which means a two week statistics review ends up becoming a 4 week re-teach of statistics.

However I am trying to work out what is keeping students from engaging during the class sessions. Do my expectations of engagement need to be re-set? Thinking in progress…

The artifact I am planning to work in is the composition assignment for my Elementary Spanish classes. In my experience and from what I heard from other professors, students trend to use google translator or to copy their writing assignments from somewhere. My solution to this problem is to create an structure that their composition needs to fit in, using certain structures and vocabulary. This way the students have to be original. Something that would help this goal as well student engagement is to make the assignment interactive with the other students.
The objectives for the long composition are:

-To improve grammar and vocabulary skills in Spanish in writing that show a proper use of this elements at a basic level.

-To improve student communication at an oral level.

-To provide repetition about the components of the assignment, fostering retention.

-To reflect on ones writing. Metacognition.

Hello, my name is Carmen Valenzuela. I teach Spanish at the Modern Languages and Literatures Department at Baruch College. The classes I am currently teaching are Elementary Spanish I and II. The format is in person, but I have taught online classes and the classes I will teach next semester may be online.
The goals for the classes are to communicate in Spanish at an elementary level, both in writing and orally. Becoming familiar with Hispanic culture is another important goal.

I would like to work on the frame of the class and policies that can make the class more productive. The sylllabus is an important document that reflects the frame, but there are also interventions one can make that are not written, but work for this purpose

 

My name is Rebecca Smart. I have been teaching at CUNY on and off since starting as a graduate student at the Grad Center in 1994 (I taught at Hunter College). I am currently an adjunct at BMCC and Baruch teaching psychology. At BMCC, I mostly teach Introduction to Psychology, but have also taught almost every psychology class you can name. My favorites are Intro, Development and the course I am currently teaching at Baruch: Drugs, Brain and Society.

This course covers both paharmacology (what drugs are and how they work in the brain and on the body), as well as the social issues associated with addiction and the war on drugs, and also the cultural impact of drugs.

The learning goals for this class, as listed in my syllabus are:

• To demonstrate how drugs interact with the nervous system to produce their effects, the different classes/types of drugs and the specific drugs in each class.
• To criticallyevaluate the methodology of past and current studies on drug action as well as drug dependence, with respect to the strengths and weaknesses of the studies. Specifically, we will evaluate empirical papers in the area of drug use/dependence research, and distinguish among different research designs typically employed in the area of study. Additionally, we will interpret and synthesize findings from primary research in discussion of current studies.
• To analyze the impact of individual characteristics, developmental environment and societal attitude towards drug use/ dependence.
• To apply this understanding to critically evaluate the changing influence of attitude towards drug use/dependence on treatment of the user, at an individual and societal level in written and oral form.

I am interested in developing more interactive assignments/discussions for this class. Despite my best efforts to change how I present the material (using videos, memes, class activities etc), I still have only a few (and the same) students actually talking in class throughout the semester.

1. Hi! Nice meeting you! Could you introduce yourself? What department are you from? What courses are you teaching or have been teaching? What are the classes you teach like, such as format or class size? Is there anything you want to tell us about your teaching, research, or other projects? 
   My name is Amita Singh. I teach courses in the Management Department at Zicklin. This semester I am teaching two online synchronous courses: Operations Management with 45 students, and a quantitative methods course on Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics with 79 students.
   
2. Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar? 
   I will be focusing on the quantitative methods course. This is a required course for all BBA students, and is being offered for the first time to the students this Fall.
   
3. What are the listed learning goals of your course? They could be ones provided by the department, or ones that you have written for your syllabus? Please list them (pasting is fine!).
   The goal for this course is help students develop quantitative reasoning skills necessary for success in business. Throughout the course, students will build quantitative literacy skills through writing about analytics, model building, and interpreting quantitative information to understand and use data in managerial decisions.
   
4. What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them?
   I would like to develop a way to get students to refresh their pre-requisite foundational concepts in statistics without taking up 4 weeks of the course time.