The three-day workshop for the Bottlenecks and Thresholds Initiative (BTI), a part of the Teaching Learning Innovation Summer Institute (TLISI), brought together faculty from a wide range of departments to discuss strategies to enhance student learning. Whether they were seeking to rethink a current course or engage in new course design, faculty began by examining the bottlenecks (or significant stumbling blocks that regularly prove challenging for students)
in their classes.

Participants examined the ways that crucial intellectual activities involve steps and stages that often remain tacit in instruction and inaccessible to students. Moving from a close examination of these difficulties, Randall Bass, Maggie Debelius (English / Writing Center), and the rest of the BTI team assisted faculty in locating concrete strategies for deepening student engagement and enhancing long-term understanding. Strategies discussed included:

• classroom assessment techniques (short, quick, ungraded assessments that register student understanding of key concepts)
• social pedagogies (e.g. using digital tools like blogs or discussion boards) that help students engage with difficult material and develop a sense of authentic audience through social learning
• uses of electronic portfolios (strategies that help students collect and reflect on intellectual work)

These discussions kicked off a year-long project in which faculty will transform these ideas into changes in their teaching or into the design of new courses. Whether in small group discussions or in general sessions, the BTI team was very pleased with the level of engagement exhibited by this year’s participants. Their willingness to dig deeply into their own classroom techniques and examine both what was working and what wasn’t will mean great things as we continue to work with them over the coming year.