Guest post by Carmen Bruni, Computer Science (cbruni@uwaterloo.ca) 

CMS Toronto has come and gone. With every passing conference, I still find myself feeling reinvigorated and inspired to make our university a better place.

I thought I'd take this opportunity to briefly summarize some of the wonderful ideas that were presented at CMS in the session I co-organized with Amenda Chow (York) and Fok-Shuen Leung (UBC) in hopes that you as the reader will also be a bit inspired.

Starting off with Dr. Thomas Wong from Heriot-Watt in Edinburgh, UK, he presented a really interesting situation to be team teaching with people from different parts of the planet. The pandemic brought about an opportunity for him to be creative and with his colleague in Malaysia, they came up with an interesting idea for disseminating information. They decided to use a model common to podcasting where there is a host, an impartial moderator and a guest. In the academic setting, Dr. Wong acted as the host, the moderator was Dr. Wong's Malaysian colleague Dr. Kai Lin Ong and an undergraduate student (Emma) acted as the guest. They presented the material to the student live and the student was able and encouraged to ask several questions. Dr. Ong would act as an intermediary, correct any mistakes he saw and acting as a bridge to connect the student and the presenter. Students seemed to respond really well to the model and Dr. Wong and his team won an award for their work during the pandemic.

Next was Dr. Caroline Junkins and Ms. Jessie Meanwell from McMaster. The idea at McMaster is to have a peer-mentorship model where students who are slightly older mentor those slightly more junior. This was based on a model implemented at Harvard. The program was offered as a 4 week virtual summer program. Some fun activities the students participated in included making a function that goes from the math building to the nearest bus stop. It helped to both orient students with campus and meet new people.

Dr. Chelsea Uggenti from the University of Waterloo gave a talk about her time at Western University. They had a 2 hour training session at the beginning of term discussing active learning and training new graduate students on the benefits and ideas behind the concept. The seminar used techniques such as think-pair-share and dotmocracy to both exhibit the techniques and teach how they might work in a class. Results from follow-up surveys indicated that the graduate students learnt a good amount and were excited to try these techniques in their classes.

Dr. Matt Coles, Ms. Katie Faulkner and Ms. Jaye Sudweeks discussed how they are organizing graduate TA training at The University of British Columbia. They talked about how they had a sustainable TA training model that has lasted for over a decade. One of the main tenets is that graduate teaching assistants need to be trained before they get to participate in tutoring students. The same holds for if they run workshops for students. Current Graduate students host a two day workshop at the beginning of the term for new incoming students (coupled with food!) where they discuss the culture at UBC. They also host a grad student panel before the term starts online so that students can ask questions and get oriented with UBC. This emphasis on training persists throughout the years a graduate student is at UBC with optional training as they continue their studies at UBC.

Dr. Emily Braley from Johns Hopkins University gave a talk about making the instructional experience more inclusive for all involved in the course design. This includes getting input from graduate TAs and undergraduate TAs who participate in the course development process. The instructor helps coordinate everything, ensures quality control and is involved with setting the curriculum. Most participants in the course design enjoyed the increased responsibility and increased participation in the course design.

Dr. Vanessa Radzimski discussed work done at UBC with Dr. Pam Sargent and Dr. Fok-Shuen Leung to rethink the classroom experience. Instructors were given jumbo-sized classes of 450 students and teaching for 2 hours a week. Classes are then broken down into extremely small class sizes led by graduate students in a workshop-style setting. Students get a very personalized experience with graduate instructors, and instructors get to focus on the presentation aspects of teaching and less on the minutiae of dealing with exceptions, answering emails and so on.

Dr. Jason Siefken at the University of Toronto discussed a problem-based classroom approach with novice instructors. There, he demonstrated the idea of getting instructors to teach in more of a flipped style where students would work on problems in class and instructors would help facilitate as needed. These instructors that work with Jason are typically inexperienced and need some instruction to get to the level where they could facilitate such discussions. Jason discussed how he managed to get instructor buy-in for this model and how it has worked at the University of Toronto.

Dr. James Charbonneau discussed an extremely interesting peer teaching model in which two instructors are given the same class and asked to co-teach it. The idea is to pair fantastic instructors with struggling instructors in an attempt to have a productive peer-teaching dialogue with one another to help improve the struggling instructors' teaching abilities. Each instructor gets full teaching credit for the course and the pairing occurs in advance with both parties aware of the situation and agree to the terms of co-teaching. The idea has some interesting aspects that if budgets allow could bode well to help improve teaching at the university level.

Dr. Fok-Shuen Leung rounded up the conference by summarizing the above and getting us to think about how to proceed.

In the end all the talks were great. I really do think that some of the ideas above would be great to implement here at Waterloo and hope that we can take on the challenge of getting projects like these started (or continued) here at Waterloo.