Category: Blog 1: Core Seminar 1 Prep

I’m Amy Trautwein, from the Philosophy Department. I’ve taught a variety of courses at Baruch, such as Thought and Reality, Moral Problems of Life and Death, Critical Thinking and Ethics, and (the course I will be concentrating on for this seminar) Major Issues in Philosophy.

My courses usually have about 40 students in them, though I have taught jumbos with over 100 and seminars with only about a dozen.  

Major Issues usually has about 40 students enrolled in each section. Here is the course description and list of learning goals I usually include on my syllabus for the course (though I change the questions from time to time, depending on what I choose to focus on in a given semester):

“What does one do in philosophy? Philosophers look for questions, even where you may not have thought that questions could meaningfully be asked. We look for evidence for what are the most plausible answers even for questions that you may not have believed have answers at all. We all do philosophy sometimes, even if you may not have called it that.

This course will introduce a few of those philosophical questions.  We shall focus on questions regarding humans, our possible nature and our relation to the world.  Possible issues will include considering: what is human nature, if it even exists; if free will can exist and what it might be; whether reason can prove the existence of God; the nature of truth and knowledge; whether morality is just a matter of opinions, and if not, what else it might be; and what ‘minds’ are.

            In each case, the goals for you, as a student, are to:

1. gain a clear understanding of what is being asked regarding the issue;
2. grasp the positions some philosophers have developed to try to answer the question;
3. be able to identify and understand the premises and logical structure of the arguments given for those positions; and
4. evaluate these arguments and defend your evaluation with carefully reasoned arguments of your own.

A further goal is to develop your own answers to the questions.  However, answers that satisfy you might be years in the making.  For the purpose of this course, what counts is how well you grapple with the material presented.  The ultimate goal of this course is to improve your arsenal of thinking skills and broaden your approach to the world by careful examination of specific philosophical questions and answers.”

I have a peer review assignment for which students post a short argument on a recent course topic in one week, and the next week post evaluations of some of their fellow students’ arguments, which includes a mandatory counterargument against each of those arguments. My goals for these assignments is to have students think about the material more deeply, practice organizing and expressing their thoughts and defending their views, and also engage in metacognitive reflection about what makes for good arguments and clear communication. I would like to find non-grade-oriented ways to get students to feel more motivated to do the assignment for its own sake and not just as a rote exercise.

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? 

Hi everyone! My name is Manon, I’m a third-year doctoral student in comparative literature at the Graduate Center. I’ve been teaching in the Writing Program (ENG2100, ENG2150) and in the Great Works of Literature Program (ENG2850) at Baruch since the Fall 2019.

1. Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar? 

I’ll be working on ENG2850, Great Works of Literatue. This is a required course for sophomores of all majors. We review literature of different genres from 1700 to present, roughly. The goal is that students get familiarized with major works of world literature and learn some literary analysis, developing critical thinking and cultural knowledge which hopefully they will export onto other disciplines, and beyond college too.

1. 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!).

Specific outcomes of this course are the following:

• Interpret meaning in literary texts by paying close attention to authors’ choices of detail, vocabulary, and style;
• Discuss the relationship between different genres of literary texts and the multicultural environments from which they spring;
• Articulate a critical evaluation and appreciation of a literary work’s strengths and limitations;
• Present their ideas orally;
• Write critical essays employing
          o A strong thesis statement,
          o Appropriate textual citations,
          o Contextual and intertextual evidence for their ideas.

1. What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them?

I am currently using an interactive Google Doc where a student posts each week on the releant work, and the rest of the class comments on them. This has been great for discussion. I also lecture for half the class using a powerpoint and some videos. I need my students to engage in class as much as they do on the Google Doc. They are reluctant to speak, and are all off camera, so class can be tedious.

1. I’m Jen Whiting and I teach first year writing at Baruch (and other places). I study education at the University of Illinois, specifically law enforcement education (currently pursuing a doctoral degree).
2. I’ll be working on ENG 2150 (Writing II).
3. Writing II is an intensification of Writing I. This course encourages students to read, reflect on, write about, and synthesize ideas from a range of genres and literary forms. Students examine and learn how to employ different styles, various appropriate uses of evidence and counter-evidence, multiple methods of interpretations, close readings of texts, and, finally, literary-cultural contextualizations. As the course proceeds, students further develop competency in the use and evaluation of multiple external sources as they shape and express their own ideas and cast them into well organized, thoughtful, and persuasive argumentative essays.
4. The lecture series, essay prompts, and course guidance materials.

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? 

Hi Everyone, my name is Stefanie Gisler Larsen, and I am a 6th-year student in Baruch College’s I-O Psychology program. My research focuses on employee well-being and recovery from work.

I have been teaching since Fall 2017, and I have taught Social Psychology, I-O Psychology, and General Psychology. I first taught all my courses in-person, but switched to exclusively teaching General Psychology online asynchronous in 2019. My courses have always had 25-30 students. This Spring, I will teach Social Psychology in an online synchronous format for the first time, which will be a completely new experience for me. I feel like I will be one of the only instructors who have never taught an online synchronous course, and I hope that I will be able to learn from your experiences!

Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar? 

I taught Social Psychology in-person from Fall 2017 until 2018, and I will teach if for the first time in an online synchronous format this Spring semester. It will also be the first time that I teach it in one block per week (2h55m).

In my in-person courses, students took weekly short quizzes and two exams. They also wrote two papers and delivered a group presentation at the end of the semester. Further, the course had many in-class activities. I plan to completely revise the course in order to make it more compatible with an online synchronous format, but I hope to still include plenty of engaging activities/assignments.

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!).

These were the learning goals for my in-person Social Psychology course, but I hope to revise them and/or add some new ones for my upcoming course:

1. Understand social psychological concepts, theories, and findings
2. Relate social psychological concepts, theories, and findings to current events, society,history, pop culture, and your everyday life
3. Develop effective skills in written communication through application papers
4. Effectively deliver a coherent presentation to the class using presentation software
5. Consider how diversity and technology influence social situations as well as the field ofsocial psychology

What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them?

I would like to develop new in-class activities and assignments that work well in a synchronous format. I hope that students will find them interesting and engaging. I have heard from my colleagues that it can be tricky to keep students engaged in synchronous courses, especially when each lecture spans multiple hours.

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 Kyllikki Rytov, and I earned my PhD from Florida State University in English with a speciality in classical and digital rhetoric. I’m an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of English at Baruch; I’m currently teaching ENG 2150 asynchronously, but I’ll be teaching it synchronously in the spring, ergo my interest in this seminar. I had fairly extensive experience designing online async courses during my PhD, but I haven’t had any experience with a sync course.

Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar? ENG 2150 is essentially a genre and research composition course, and I design my sections with an emphasis on the socially-situatedness of rhetoric–we read about rhetorical ecologies, rhetorical listening, and the white supremacy of standard academic English as students pursue a topic of their choice throughout the course, beginning with a rhetorical analysis and ending with a research project.

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!). Based on the learning goals from the department, mine are as follows:
After completing ENG 2150, you should be able to: 

• Analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as genre, audience, purpose, and conventions; 
• Apply rhetorical knowledge in your own composing using the means of persuasion appropriate for each rhetorical context, including academic writing and composing using digital platforms; 
• Identify sources of information and evidence credible to your audience; incorporate multiple perspectives in your writing by summarizing, interpreting, critiquing, and synthesizing the arguments of others; and avoid plagiarism by ethically acknowledging the work of others when used in your own writing, using a citation style appropriate to your audience and purpose; and 
• Experience writing as a creative way of thinking and generating knowledge and as a process involving multiple drafts, revision and editing.
  
  What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them? I want to revamp my syllabus, both in terms of one of the projects and in terms of class session structure, so as to encourage community in an online sync class taking place during a pandemic. This semester, I opted to only use Blackboard’s tools, thinking that keeping things centralized for students would keep things easy, but I’m really dissatisfied with the discussion boards and other tech constraints–there’s just not a lot of collaboration or sense of community. Next semester, I want to bring in other tech, such as a discord and maybe these blogs–my only hesitation concerns how much of a learning curve it’ll be for students to learn these new platforms.

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 Benjamin Adam. I teach courses in the Sociology department related to deviance, inequality, and social control as an associate adjunct. Over the past few years I’ve been teaching sections of Social Inequality, Crime and Justice from a Sociological Perspective, Criminology, and Intro; and a few special topics classes on sexuality, law, and social theory. Most of my classes are 20-35 students and include varied majors. I try to engage my students by teaching about contemporary politics in all my classes.

Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar? 

I’ll be working on my hybrid Social Inequality class for the Winter intercession. Because it’s important to me, I focus especially on sociological explanations and analyses of inequality which offer a counterpoint to contemporary discourse about individual responsibility and culpability. I try to teach with accessible and compelling materials that offer those perspectives, and to foster discussions which engage students in the process of Sociological thinking. Sometimes it’s a hard sell.

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!).

Here’s the course description from the department: This course examines individual and structural explanations for the generation and maintenance of inequality in the United States and the impact of stratification on the social mobility of groups and individuals. It looks as patterns of allocation of societal rewards according to class, race, and gender; the distribution of educational opportunities and cultural capital; and labor market segmentation by race, class, ethnicity, gender, and immigration status.

I’d like to develop more organized, complete, and specific learning goals. Here are the 5 modules in the course, and excerpts from short descriptions I share with students about a few of the modules.

Course Introduction and Introduction to Inequality
Capitalism, Class, and Inequality
Inequality and Democracy
Intersectional Inequality
Social Mobility

In this class, students will be introduced to key sociological ideas related to inequality including
* What is Social Inequality? What are some of the ways inequality shapes our experiences, identities, and worldviews?
* The scope and degree of inequality in the U.S.
* Individual attributes v. structural approach to understanding and explaining inequality
* What is inequality and why is it important? Is inequality functional (i.e. necessary)?
* What does inequality have to do with power?

In this module, you’ll learn about how Sociologists think about the political economy of capitalism, and the class structure associated with it. For (most) Sociologists, inequality is a feature of capitalism associated with the division of society into owners and workers, and particularly, with the question of how labor is controlled and surplus value is distributed.

In this module, you’ll have an opportunity to explore one of the major axes of inequality in the United States: race, with a focus on the social construction of race in the colonial period, and the historical and ongoing racial inequalities associated with housing and household wealth.

This module will explore the concept of intersectionality a bit further, and will examine at some forms of inequality that are multi-dimensional and not easily explained by reference to what Kimberle Crenshaw calls a “single-axis framework”: that is, a perspective focused on a single axis of identity and discrimination such as race, or (but not also) gender.

What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them?

I’d like to develop a few general lesson plans for in-person and online activities, especially better alternatives to “open” or prompted online discussions. It’s been a challenge for me to foster spontaneous and ongoing verbal engagement in online synchronous sessions, which often feel forced and alienating – especially because so many students have their cameras off.

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? 

Hi everyone! My name is Molly Mosher, I teach in the English Department, specifically Baruch’s first-year writing program. I also teach in the same department at City College, so I read a LOT of student essays and talk a LOT about rhetoric and research. I love teaching in the hybrid model because I think it gives the opportunity to teach during in-person time and have students apply the techniques/lessons during asynchronous time. Also… I am sure I am not the only one but I especially love smaller classes. The smaller the class, the more time I am able to get to know each student personally and through their writings.

Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar? 

I will be working on my ENG 2100T class as well as preparing materials for the future, 2150T. These classes cover first-year writing (Writing 1 and Writing 11) for Baruch students who are (predominately) non-native English speakers. I want them to feel comfortable sharing in class, but I find they are shy (could be language related, could just be the pressure of being an 18 year old first-year!!).

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!).

Compose as a process: Experience writing as a creative way of thinking and generating knowledge and as a process involving multiple drafts, review of your work by members of your discourse community (e.g. instructor and peers), revision, and editing, reinforced by reflecting on your writing process in metacognitive ways.

Compose with an awareness of how intersectional identity, social conventions, and rhetorical situations shape writing: Demonstrate in your writing an awareness of how personal experience, our discourse communities, social conventions, and rhetorical considerations of audience, purpose, genre, and medium shape how and what we write.

Read and analyze texts critically: Analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres (e.g. essays, news articles, speeches, documentaries, plays, poems, short stories), with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, trope, genre, audience, and purpose.

Identify and engage with credible sources and multiple perspectives in your writing: Identify sources of information and evidence credible to your audience; incorporate multiple perspectives in your writing by summarizing, interpreting, critiquing, and synthesizing the arguments of others; and avoid plagiarism by ethically acknowledging the work of others when used in your writing, using a citation style appropriate to your audience and purpose.

Use conventions appropriate to audience, genre, and purpose: Adapt writing and composing conventions (including your style, content, organization, document design, word choice, syntax, citation style, sentence structure, and grammar) to your rhetorical context.

What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them?

I want to develop a series of low-stakes asynchronous discussion board posts. I want to love these (I don’t currently) because I think they are a great way for students to engage with material and with each other in a casual and conversational way. I would like to develop a series of topics / questions that are engaging and interesting so that the students overflow with responses!

I want to determine a) how much weight these should carry and b) basic rules of engagement. It would be great to develop the actual discussion questions too. My goal would be to use these developed discussion board posts in the spring.

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? 

Hi everyone! My name is Wiston Rodriguez from the Psychology department. I am a 4th year PhD student in the Industrial-Organizational (I/O) Psychology program at The Graduate Center & Baruch College. All of the courses that I teach (or have taught) are I/O courses (e.g., Intro to I/O Psychology, Advanced Organizational Psychology, Motivation, and Leadership). All these courses have been taught as in-person, hybrid, and/or fully online (synchronous and asynchronous). Outside of teaching, my research focuses on employee well-being, the work/non-work interface, and diversity issues in the workplace.

Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar? 

The course I will be working on during the seminar is PSY 4181 (Advanced Organizational Psychology). This course is an extension of PSY 3181 (Introduction to I/O Psychology) and discussions are structured to look like discussions that at the graduate level (e.g., discussion implications of research findings and discussing solutions to workplace issues).

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!).

1. Summarize, interpret, and critically evaluate theories, and empirical findings in organizational psychology.
2. Apply content knowledge to understand employee’s behaviors in real organizations.
3. Analytically describe how organizations can utilize psychological concepts, theories, findings, and research methods to influence their employees.
4. Demonstrate your ability to collaborate with peers in and outside of the classroom.
5. Deliver your own thoughts to others through written assignments and in-class discussions.

What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them?

I would like to revise an assignment that already exists or see if I can come up with a new assignment for this course. The assignments I’m thinking about revising are either a) the final presentation at the end of the semester where students have to present on an organizational issue and discuss how they would solve it, or b) the class facilitation assignment that students complete as a team of 2-3 students and lead the class discussion. I’m probably learning more towards the class facilitation since students struggled with the engagement aspect of the assignment.

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? 
   
   Hello! My name is Paulina Baltazar and I am an adjunct professor teaching BUS1011 REC here at Baruch (Aaronson Department of Marketing & International Business). This is my second semester teaching and both my semesters have been completely remote due to the pandemic. Since I am a relatively new instructor I am trying to learn as much as I can – this is my second teaching workshop and I am excited to learn about student engagement.
   
2. Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar? 
   
   The course I am working on is BUS1011 REC (Business Fundamentals: The Contemporary Business Landscape). The recitation portion of the course is integrated with a weekly lecture. While the large lecture covers the theoretical and conceptual framework of business fundamentals, the smaller recitation portion focuses on real world applications including, MS Excel Basics, Business Communications, Resume Basics, etc. There is also a semester long Shadow-a-Company group research project. 
   
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!).
   
   I do not have learning goals (yet) – however I do have course objectives provided by the department.
   
   Specifically, recitation emphasizes the following with respect to the five pillars through the Shadow-a-Company research project:

1. Ethics awareness:  The research project is required to thoroughly address the ethics awareness, such as corporate social responsibility, and ethical implications of the business plans.  Ethics in information literacy competencies also needs to be considered, such as proper use of the reliable and accurate information, and critically evaluating and avoiding the use of the misinformation without any factual proof which proliferates and is widely spread in the digital information. 

2. Quantitative Analytical Skills:  The Shadow-a-Company research project requires the quantitative analysis using the Excel spreadsheet.  Quantitative exercises in the Excel eBook are designed to analyze various concepts and models in business, and can be applied to the data collected for the Shadow-a-Company research project. You will interpret the results, derive managerial implications, and present your recommendation.  You will be able to understand better and gain more from the class if you bring a laptop to class. The library has laptops that are available for you to rent if you do not want to bring your personal laptop. We will use the recent version of Excel in class and on the final exam. You may use a PC or Mac, and any version of Excel to complete the homework assignments because you will just be graded on having correct answers.

3. Communication Skills:  Recitation is designed to enhance students’ communication skills in a business setting. Your assignments in recitation will allow you to develop a foundation of Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint knowledge from which you can build. This course aims to help students become proficient communicators and contributors in a team setting. Thus, group work and class demonstrations/discussions are emphasized in recitation, with an objective to improve students’ ability to accomplish performance goals while respecting others and learning from multiple viewpoints. Students will also receive detailed feedback on written assignments to assist with their development of core business writing skills.

4. Information literacy competencies:  Students develop the information literacy competencies by defining the information needs for the research project, and develop the data collection plan for the Shadow-a-Company research project.  The data source may include various data bases available at the Newman Library, and digital sources.  The data collection requires the thorough reliability and validity check as you learn in large lecture.  This requires the critical evaluation of the data collected to ensure that the data are relevant and reliable without any bias nor without any misinformation which becomes rampant and spreading widely in the digital domain lacking any factual proof.  This is essential for the secondary data, but also applies to the primary data collected through survey, personal and group interviews. 
   
   Global awareness:  The global awareness is essential, and the global business theories and concepts introduced in large lecture are useful to analyze and apply to the Shadow-a-Company research project.  This further needs to be properly addressed in the recommended strategy.

Please see below. For the recitation portion specifically, my draft learning goals are the following:

a. MS Excel Basics Proficiency: By the end of the course students will have a working knowledge of basic Excel functions and business analyses.

b. Written & Oral Communication Skills: By the end of the course students will understand how to communicate in a professional business setting.

4. What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them?

I joined this course because I am having trouble fostering engagement in a remote setting. I am thinking about developing a document that would outline how students can be successful in the course or something related to the semester-long group project which has been difficult for students to manage in my experience.

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? 

Hi! I’m Mary Gryctko. I got my PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2020, and this is my first semester teaching at Baruch. I teach in the English department, in the First-year Writing program. I’m currently teaching ENG2100, Writing I, and next semester I will be teaching ENG2150, Writing II. Right now, my classes are hybrid–one class in person each week, one asynchronous assignment online. My class next semester was just switched to being fully in person. My classes are fairly small, which is good–this semester, I have a class of sixteen, and one of twenty-four. I try to focus my classes around student interests and have students participate in creating assignments as much as possible, but I feel like that’s been more difficult with the hybrid formula this semester. I’m looking forward to learning new ways to engage students in this seminar. My research focuses on death, gender, and childhood in Victorian literature and culture. Currently, I’m working on an article about “comfort books,” which were (often very weird) texts written by and for bereaved Victorian parents.

1. Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar? 

During this seminar, I plan to work on retooling the final research assignment for my 2100 course to use in the 2150 course that I’ll be teaching next semester. I want to give students more freedom to complete these projects in ways that are interesting to them next semester–I’m hoping to give them the option to present their research in different media than the standard written essay, if they want to, but I also really don’t want to force anyone to do that (I, personally, would always prefer to write an essay), and so I’m hoping to figure out a way to allow for creative responses to the prompt while also allowing traditional research papers.

1. 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!).

After completing ENG 2150 students should be able to:

• Critically analyze texts in a variety of genres: Analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres (e.g. essays, news articles, speeches, documentaries, plays, poems, short stories), with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, tropes, genre, audience and purpose.
• Use a variety of media to compose in multiple rhetorical situations: Apply rhetorical knowledge in your own composing using the means of persuasion appropriate for each rhetorical context (alphabetic text, still and moving images, and sound), including academic writing and composing for a broader, public audience using digital platforms.
• Identify and engage with credible sources and multiple perspectives in your writing: Identify sources of information and evidence credible to your audience; incorporate multiple perspectives in your writing by summarizing, interpreting, critiquing, and synthesizing the arguments of others; and avoid plagiarism by ethically acknowledging the work of others when used in your own writing, using a citation style appropriate to your audience and purpose.
• Compose as a process: Experience writing as a creative way of thinking and generating knowledge and as a process involving multiple drafts, review of your work by members of your discourse community (e.g. instructor and peers), revision, and editing, reinforced by reflecting on your writing process in metacognitive ways.
• Use conventions appropriate to audience, genre, and purpose: Adapt writing and composing conventions (including your style, content, organization, document design, word choice, syntax, citation style, sentence structure, and grammar) to your rhetorical context.

1. What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them?

I’m hoping to use this seminar to develop a final research assignment that allows students more freedom in how they present their research, and other, low-stakes assignment that will scaffold to the final.