A part of 2.2: Lightning Talk session.

Assignments Across Disciplines: Creating a Community of Practice around Assessment
Andrea Williams, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, FAS
Erin Vearncombe, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Dean’s Office, FAS

Assignments play a vital role in both helping students acquire new knowledge and skills and documenting teaching excellence. This session explains how you can become involved in Assignments Across Disciplines (AAD), a university-wide LEAF-funded project that gives instructors a platform to share assignments and adapt colleagues’ assignments to fit their own teaching and learning goals and context. Combining an open-access database of exemplary and innovative assignments with an instructor community of practice around assessment, AAD enables contributors to engage in cross-disciplinary conversations about assessment through a peer review process. Assignment author/contributors meet in small peer groups (composed of instructors, librarians, academic developers, and graduate TAs) to discuss how to improve the assignment before it is published in the database. By encouraging contributors to include with their submission commentary on how and why they developed their assignment and how they revised it based on student and other feedback, AAD also promotes reflective teaching and helps contributors document teaching excellence.