GlobalOur workshops and teaching activities provide teaching enrichment opportunities that promote integration of our globally diverse student population (this includes all our students!) and facilitate inclusion of global, international, and intercultural elements into course design.
To access these workshops, you must first enroll in the Teaching in Globally Diverse Classes (TiGDC) program.
By enrolling in the TiGDC program, you will gain access to all of the unique TiGDC teaching activities workshops listed below and the associated resource folders and readings. Most importantly, by enrolling in this course, you will have the opportunity to complete the requirements for the TiGDC Micro-credential! Participants are not obligated to complete the requirements to earn a micro-credential; however, participants who complete the program and earn the micro-credential are more likely to experience lasting improvement in their teaching practice. Note: The Office of Curriculum Internationalization does not offer certificates of completion for individual TiGDC workshops.
- Format: All workshops are offered virtually.
- Length: 30 minutes to 3 hours
- Audience: The primary audience for these workshops is faculty, instructors, and instructional staff who directly or indirectly support teaching and learning. UMN and non-UMN participants are welcome!
- Cost: All workshops are free of charge to current UMN participants. Non-UMN participants must register and pay for the full TiGDC Micro-credential.
How do we as teachers facilitate intercultural learning that centers on the diverse perspectives students bring to our classrooms? Join us for an interactive online workshop where you will have the opportunity to expand and deepen your teaching strategies to engage the global diversity in your classes. Faculty and instructors from all disciplines face increasing demands to help students develop the intercultural skills necessary to thrive in today’s world. During this workshop, you will learn from leaders in the field of intercultural education and practice strategies to facilitate interactions among students in your globally diverse classrooms.
“[This is] an OUTSTANDING workshop: [The facilitators] do such a wonderful job of modeling the skills they are teaching about as they facilitate deep and meaningful discussions about real situations. Regardless of your experience level with this topic it is really worthwhile attending this workshop." — past workshop participant
How can we design a course that will deepen international, intercultural, and global learning for our students? Join us for this interactive online workshop where you will have the opportunity to expand your teaching strategies to prepare global-ready students. We suggest you focus on a semester-long course of your choosing to explore learning goals, assessment techniques, and teaching strategies that can help your students develop the skills, knowledge, and perspectives necessary to understand the world and work effectively to improve it.
Let’s talk about how we can leverage all interactive classroom activities for deeper content learning and interpersonal and intercultural development. In this webinar, we will share considerations, strategies, scripts, and tools (including a student handout you can adapt) that can help you and your students realize the full potential of classroom interactions. When you facilitate student interactions around content area learning objectives, students are not only engaging with content, they are also engaging with each other. This affords them an additional learning opportunity to practice critical interpersonal and intercultural skills with intention. Naming these skills for students and providing periodic opportunities for reflection are all essential for building students’ global competence. We can’t assume students are aware of or thinking about these competencies. Just as with subject-area learning outcomes, we need to actively and intentionally facilitate this learning.
“I'm so glad to have a concrete framework to give students a way to think about how they engage with each other in class discussions or group work! I hadn't thought about asking them to put this into words, and I'm really glad to have a way to ask them to think about this in addition to the context we cover in my course.” — past workshop participant
Elective Options: Teaching Activities, Strategies, and Approaches
These workshops are designed to introduce and model evidence-based, high-impact interactive teaching activities, strategies, and approaches that are applicable across disciplines/courses, easily integrated into curriculum and lesson plans, versatile and practical.
Join us to learn about this versatile and easy classroom assessment technique (CAT). This activity serves to provide instructors with valuable mid-term information on how students are doing. We will share several ways this activity can be implemented to demonstrate its versatility.
You will experience one quick and easy “check-in’ activity, the 7-Word Story, and discuss others that can be integrated into your course design in order to 1) build and strengthen a sense of community among learners, 2) broaden participation, 3) provide frequent and brief opportunities for students to engage content and practice and develop interpersonal and intercultural skills, and, very importantly, 4) for you to gather valuable information from students about the students themselves and/or about what and how they are processing class content.
This is a fun activity that demonstrates our human tendency to gravitate to the familiar—people who look, think, and act like us, as well as the limitations of this tendency. We observe this in our classrooms all the time. Students self-segregate into their same social or cultural groups, and in doing so miss out on valuable opportunities to grow their networks, broaden their perspectives, and practice intercultural skills needed in our interconnected world.
What if you could take your class anywhere in the world right now, with almost no carbon or financial cost, and not just experience the amazing sights and sounds of destinations across the globe, but develop relationships with academic partners, and engage in substantive conversations with your students' peers? With Collaborative Online International Learning, you can. Join this one-hour session on Collaborative Online International Learning, or COIL, if you want to: understand the core principles of COIL pedagogy; discuss guidelines for targeting efficient, fun, and successful project development; review innovative example projects; and prepare for developing a COIL partnership with an international faculty member by reviewing partnership resources and guidelines.
This 30-minute webinar is designed to help you consider the role of cultural communication styles in your classroom, so you can help your students deepen their intercultural communication skills. During the webinar, we will review high-context and low-context communication styles used in different cultures and countries and provide you with an opportunity to reflect on your own communication style. You will also experience a teaching activity that you can do with your students on cultural communication styles.
This one-hour webinar is designed to help you reflect on your cultural identity in teaching. You will have an opportunity to think about how the culture(s) you grew up in and lived in for an extended period of time influence your teaching. We will also discuss several strategies on how you can effectively share your intercultural experiences and lessons learned with your students and what you can do to help your students realize that their culture(s) have influenced their perspectives on self, others, and the world.
Learn one approach for establishing class or group agreements and expectations. Establishing class or group agreements and expectations sets a tone for the course that reinforces intentionality and collaborative decision-making processes, and the idea that the classroom learning environment is something we all contribute to, are responsible for, and can influence. Making these explicit and clear for yourself and for students is important for all members of the class, and even more so for students who may be new to U.S. classrooms and educational practices in higher education.
Experience an activity that is especially valuable for fostering rapport among students from diverse cultural backgrounds. During this 30-minute webinar, we will model and discuss effective facilitation strategies for how you can help your students "find common ground."
Come experience a fun, interactive review activity. Give one, get one (GOGO) is a great way to get students up and moving and talking to each other while assessing their understanding. Through this activity students can share key takeaways from a lesson, and based on what they come up with and share, you can learn what students are gaining from the lesson and if there are any underrepresented areas of content that you can address in a future class or exam review session. We will demonstrate the GOGO activity’s versatility, as well.
One challenge that many instructors face is a concern about fitting in all the required course content while also engaging students in active learning. A jigsaw activity is a way to do both by partially shifting the onus of teaching content onto the students. Come experience the Jigsaw activity with your colleagues, and consider/discuss course content that lends itself to the jigsaw approach.
An often-cited reason students choose not to ask questions or contribute to large- or small-group discussions is they are afraid they will “say something stupid.” Come learn a new activity that involves anonymity, and other concrete strategies to alleviate these fears and promote increased participation from all students.
Join a conversation on class participation to learn and share ideas, resources, and tools for establishing broader and deeper student engagement and interaction. We will facilitate this discussion using an activity that invites all voices, the Whip Around.
This 30-minute webinar is designed to help you integrate the UN Sustainable Development Goals into your courses. Integrating the goals can help your students build awareness of global issues and learn about concrete steps they could take to address them on both global and local levels. We will review several methods for and examples of integrating the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals that address various global challenges, including poverty, inequality, climate change, peace, and justice that you can include in your classroom discussions.
This is an activity that includes movement, sharing insights, negotiation, critical thinking, decision making, evaluation, anonymity...and a tiny bit of math. It can be used as a form of review and gathering key takeaways from discussions, lessons, articles, etc.
Learning and using students’ names, and encouraging students to do the same with each other, is essential for building community in your class. There are many creative ways to encourage students to learn and use names. In this 30-minute session, we will experience two simple activities and discuss others.
Group Discussions
The Group Discussions offer opportunities to meet and talk with facilitators and fellow participants. These small group discussions are largely unstructured and address broad focus areas. Participants are encouraged to bring questions, ideas, and insights related to the focus area that arise from their professional experiences and/or from other program components (readings, workshops, reflections, etc).
This session provides an informal, fun, and friendly chance to get to know a few of your fellow TiGDC colleagues. We believe that teaching shouldn’t happen in isolation, and that we should build community among us in support of each other in our teaching and our own learning. We will also invite conversation about ways we can intentionally and effectively build a sense of community in our classes.
In this discussion session, participants dig into the required readings. All required readings are available on the TiGDC Canvas site.
This discussion session is an opportunity to reflect on the workshops included in the TiGDC Program. The majority of your time in this program will be spent participating in them, so we want to make sure you have a chance to share your thoughts, ask any questions you may not have had time to ask, explore ways to apply different teaching activities or approaches in your own learning environments, and dive deeper into and ideas and activities that caught your attention. Prior to participating in Discussion C, you must attend at least 5 workshops.