The Office Faculty and Organizational Development at MSU conducts an annual Spring Institute on College Teaching and Learning every summer. The past week was their 15th such event (details here) and I was asked to conduct a workshop on Creative Teaching. I was assisted in this by Mike DeSchryver.

Over 50 people signed up for the workshop, which though immensely exciting, was not, truth be told, something I was expecting. As it turned out I fell sick the day before the workshop and though we did go ahead with the workshop I didn’t necessarily feel that I was really totally with it. That said, it was a great experience for me – since this was the first time I was doing something like this for university faculty. I have a much better sense now, both in terms of timing and content, of what I would change if I were called back to do this again. I am including below, for the record, pdfs of my slides, a workshop handout and handouts for some activities we did.

As a part of the workshop participants worked in groups to “see” letterforms in the world around them (the alphabits activity above). Since there were 9 groups Mike and I selected the 9-letter word “Discovery” and each group was given one letter to look for (though we were careful not to let the groups know that the letters they were looking for would end up becoming a word!). These are three images made from the letters the groups came up with. Pretty creative, don’t you think?

You can see another version of this activity, looking for the alphabet in cracks here: Alphabet on Crack and more…

The PDF of my keynote presentation does not include the movies that I showed. The ones created by me and the kids can be found here. The Teach/Learn ambigram can be found by following the links from this page.

Enjoy.