199 Piazza — 10.23.2019

On October 23, 2019, participants of the Active Teaching Lab discussed best practices for implementing Piazza. The focus was on how to organize and apply different settings to manage the flow of messages to-and-from students.

Takeaways

• Create a Risk-Free Environment. Designed “so every student can have that opportunity to learn from her classmates. Whether she’s too shy to ask, whether she’s working alone in her dorm room, or whether her few friends in her class don’t know the answer either.” Enable Anonymous Posting to reduce implicit biases that often hinder participation from women and marginalized student groups. [Source: piazza.com/about/story]
• Promote Student Engagement. When students ask beneficial questions and/or provide informative responses, respond with your own commentary — a simple “Great response!” or a redirect to students increases peer-to-peer learning! 
• Encourage Multimodal, Multimedia Responses. Instructors and students can upload images, links, and files in questions or responses. Materials (and insight) gained from Piazza can be incorporated into course content or be the basis for public-facing, student-generated solutions to problems in the course!

For more information, view the session’s activity sheet here.

Video

The Active Teaching Lab is a Faculty Engagement program with sessions held on Wednesdays from 1:00-2:00pm and Fridays from 8:30-9:45am in the Middleton Building (1305 Linden Dr.), room 120. Check out upcoming Labs or read the recaps from past Labs. We build interdisciplinary conversations that are more emergent than a presenter and more dynamic than a panel — a conversation with colleagues sharing challenges, solutions, and experiments on topics selected by a variety of stakeholders.

Sign up for regular Lab announcements by sending an email to join-activeteaching@lists.wisc.edu.