Building Up Our Teaching Community
Sharing best practices and exchanging ideas on key topics for the Ivey teaching community.
The Building Up Our Teaching Community Seminar Series, conceived by the Ivey Teaching Scholars, provides a collaborative space for educators to share best practices and engage in meaningful discussions on topics that resonate with our teaching community. The series emphasizes practical strategies and approaches that faculty can immediately implement in their classrooms. Explore the summaries below for insights into previous seminars and key takeaways. For additional details on any session, please contact Tiffany Bayley.
Design Considerations for Assessments in ExamSoft
KYLE MACLEAN
November 2025
Are you feeling anxious about exams... but as the instructor? You’re not alone. Designing and grading exams for hundreds of students can feel like a marathon in slow motion. Luckily, Professor Kyle Maclean is here to share strategies that make the process smoother for you, your graders, and your students.
Key Takeaways
- Choose exam/question formats that align with your learning outcomes.
- Consider an exam setup that supports parallel grading to boost consistency and efficiency across large cohorts.
- Employ exam best practices;
- Preview your exam to catch any layout, formatting, and usability issues before your exam takes place.
- Communicate clear instructions before and after the exam to reduce students' anxiety and create a fairer experience for all.
Exploring Practices in Rubric Design and Implementation
KEN MEADOWS & MANDY PENNEY
October 2025
A well-designed rubric can not only promote fairness and save you time when grading, it can also be a powerful teaching and communication tool that supports inclusivity and engaged learning. In this workshop, participants will be introduced to a variety of rubric purposes and designs, analyze different kinds of rubrics, and collaboratively explore the possibilities of rubrics both individually and collectively through a facilitated, interactive design exercise.
Key Takeaways
- 5 Principles of Rubric Design:
- Align with learning outcomes
- Use clear, descriptive, and specific language
- Be shared with students in advance
- Align with and be adaptable for disciplinary, student, and instructor contexts
- Balance specificity and flexibility / creativity
- Choose the rubric type that best fits your course's learning objectives and assessment style: Analytic, Holistic, or Single Point
- Rubric ≠ Grading Key
The Art of Meaningful Engagement: Creating Deeper Connections in the Classroom
MAZI RAZ
September 2025
In collaboration with the Lunch & Learn series, Professor Mazi Raz will host an interactive session featuring the artist collective Wild Soma, who will guide us through practices and protocols that support deeper engagement in the classroom. To create a learning space that moves beyond information transfer toward genuine transformation of perception, understanding, and behaviour, faculty and students must engage one another in healthy, right relations—relationships that make deeper learning and meaningful engagement possible.
Together, we will explore capacities such as sensory atonement and attentional awareness, helping set the foundation for reciprocal relationships. Wild Soma will share practical tools for cultivating environments that foster mutual trust, openness, and transformative learning.
Key Takeaways
- Embodied awareness can deepen engagement by attuning to presence, mood, and relational dynamics in the classroom.
- Altering physical space and introducing non-human connections, such as caring for a plant, can spark reflection and shift habitual patterns.
- Practices like shared breath and back-to-back contact invite participants to quiet the analytical mind and experience learning through the body.
- Non-linear, sensory-rich approaches challenge academic norms that privilege cognitive engagement and structured takeaways.
- Faculty responses ranged from feeling belonging and connection to discomfort and resistance, highlighting both the challenge and promise of embodied practices.
Resilient Teaching: From Overwhelmed to Empowered
KAREN MACMILLAN & FELIPE RESTREPO
April 2025
Teaching can be a daunting task. All of us have faced days where we feel a little (or a lot) overwhelmed by the heavy workload, the unexpected challenges, and the pressures of the classroom. Suffering is not the only option! In this session learn practical techniques to build resilience in yourself and to enable you to model these behaviours to your students. Professors Karen MacMillan and Felipe Restrepo will share content from recent faculty training sessions sponsored by the Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership and led by experts from the University of Pennsylvania.
Key Takeaways
- Recognize and address "thinking traps," patterns we tend to fall into that can lead us down a path that's not fruitful or functional.
- Reframe negative self-talk. "Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. So when things don't go well, as least you're learning."
- Balance accountability and fairness, and don't forget to be fair to yourself.
Demo Day: An Excel Tool for Contribution Tracking and Insights
KYLE MACLEAN
March 2025
In collaboration with the Lunch & Learn series, Professor Kyle Maclean will showcase an innovative tool that allows instructors to track student contribution with ease - a system designed and tested specifically for the Ivey classroom. Key features include: seating map integration, participation dashboard and bias checker.
Key Takeaways
- Modularity of the tools: Pick and choose the features that you find useful for your contribution tracking.
- These tools promotes efficient data input and tracking of contribution scores, and allow for analysis and insights on "contribution dynamics"
Grade It Like You Mean It: Purposeful Contribution Grading
KYLE MACLEAN
February 2025
Contribution is an integral part of many courses, but does the way we mark it truly reflect what we value in student participation? In this seminar, Professor Kyle Maclean will explore how different grading schemes can align with instructors’ goals for evaluation and student learning. Discover actionable tips and share your own trusted practices for tracking contribution effectively and in a way that students can accept.
Key Takeaways
- Be transparent about your grading criteria and expectations.
- Align contribution grades with your intentions rather than just relying on raw data.
- Consider separating quantity and quality of contribution by using a “quantity-capped method”.
(Not-so-)Extreme Makeover: Course Site Edition
TIFFANY BAYLEY & TESSA WEIDNER
July 2024
Do students struggle to find the important content on your course website? Do you want to learn about Canvas features to boost student engagement? Or maybe your site just needs a bit of a refresh? Then join Tessa Weidner and Tiffany Bayley in this interactive session on course website design and get a sneak peek at some new tools to streamline your course site building process.
Key Takeaways
- Organize your course content using modules so that students (and instructors) can track progress.
- Implement mastery paths for differentiated learning; release content automatically as students achieve certain milestones in your course.
- Leverage tools like CidiLabs for enhanced course design and an improved user experience.
Curtain Up to Curtain Down: The Art of Starting and Wrapping Up Your Case Discussions
DAVID WOOD, KAREN MACMILLAN & MAZI RAZ
January 2024
Join David Wood, Karen MacMillan, and Mazi Raz as they guide an interactive session on how to captivate your students’ attention from the get-go, navigate the twists and turns of unscripted discussions, and complete the scene to leave a lasting impression.
Key Takeaways
- "You really want to bookend your discussion with a strong start and a strong finish."
- Improvisation skills are extremely helpful in navigating the middle portion of a case class.
- Learn why “yes, and…” is such a powerful phrase.
Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum: Executive Function
NICOLE CAMPBELL
November 2023
One of the hurdles that many students face when approaching their academics are the skills to plan, focus, and execute tasks. During this session, we want to start at the beginning, addressing common reasons that students struggle when learning. Together we will examine ways that educators can support their students to develop core executive skills that will positively impact their academic success and mental health.
Dr. Nicole Campbell is an Associate Professor and Teaching Scholar at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry. She conceptualized and led the development of Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum, an online resource for educators to help them develop and embed activities that explicitly teach valuable, yet typically unofficial and unwritten, lessons that students require for success. Those lessons include executive function, communication, critical thinking, intra- and interpersonal, and social accountability.
Contribution Tracking Tips
TIFFANY BAYLEY, KYLE MACLEAN, KAREN MACMILLAN & MAZI RAZ
August 2023
Having a system to track student contribution will help keep your grades organized throughout the term. These records also allow you to provide richer feedback to students throughout the term, giving students the opportunity to reflect upon their approach to classroom contribution. Join us for a discussion to learn different ways to track contribution and give meaningful feedback in your course. Find out what works best for you and the learning goals for your course!
Key Takeaways
- Employing a systematic process for tracking contribution scores can save you from difficult conversations later on.
- Provide midterm feedback on contribution to guide student improvement.
- Minimize distractions like laptops and phones to enhance learning.
- Encourage students to reflect on their own contribution habits.
Shaking Up Your Assessment Format
COLIN MCDOUGALL & ROB AUSTIN
July 2023
Join us for a one-hour discussion to engage with Colin McDougall and Rob Austin, who will share their experiences with using assignments that stray from the typical "report style." Bring your questions or share your own ideas for how to vary your assessments (and yes, we can talk about ChatGPT too).
Key Takeaways
- Alternative formats like podcasts promote creativity and application.
- Oral exams can be a powerful assessment tool but require structure.
- "In 20 minutes, you can easily discover the limits of a student's knowledge."
- Balancing fairness and scalability in oral assessments is challenging.
- Providing opportunities for iterative feedback enhances learning.
- "Can we design assessments where students apply feedback and show growth?"
Be It Resolved: Laptops should not be allowed in our classrooms
KYLE MACLEAN & KAREN MACMILLAN
April 2023
"I didn't print the case. All of my analysis is in Excel. I take notes with my tablet. I don't have paper." While these are just some of the reasons we hear for wanting laptops open in class, we know that they are having an impact on student learning and engagement. Join us for a one-hour discussion led by Kyle Maclean and Karen MacMillan on whether laptops should be open in our classrooms.
Key Takeaways
- Laptops are a major source of distraction, not just for the user but for nearby students as well.
- Handwritten notes encourage deeper cognitive processing compared to verbatim laptop note-taking.
- Students often recognize the benefits of a laptop-free environment, even if they resist it initially.
- Accessibility concerns need to be addressed proactively;
- “Every time a student has to request an accommodation, their sense of belonging decreases.
Heart to Heart: A discussion on running an effective case classroom
BARNINI BHATTACHARYYA, ANN FROST, ROMEL MOSTAFA & GREG ZARIC
February 2023
Whether you are new to case teaching or a seasoned pro, join us for a quick, one-hour session to engage with Barnini Bhattacharyya, Ann Frost, Romel Mostafa and Greg Zaric, who will offer their diverse perspectives about teaching at Ivey.
Key Takeaways
- Use selective calling, humor, and buzz groups to ensure opportunities for contribution.
- Encourage “half-baked” ideas to help hesitant students join the discussion.
- Redirect when students go off-topic while validating their engagement.
- Set clear expectations on Day 1;
- “You’re not helping your classmates if you come in unprepared. You’re just sucking energy out of the room.”
- Set ground rules early to foster respectful, thoughtful discussions where all contributions are backed by evidence or logic.
Teaching Tricks and Learning Treats
TIFFANY BAYLEY, KYLE MACLEAN & TESSA WEIDNER
October 2022
This one-hour session explored:
- What others are doing with LEARN;
- A great new app that makes case prep a social experience for students;
- An interactive discussion on things your colleagues are experiencing in the classroom.
Key Takeaways
- Consider tools like Perusall for asynchronous discussions.
- Simplify course navigation for students.
- Incorporate course design elements.