Honoring the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows & Scholars Participants

Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars (WTFS) is a signature program of the Universities of Wisconsin. Each year two instructors from each UW campus are selected to represent their institution. Participants spend one year in professional community, and they design and carry out individual scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) projects that are presented at the OPID Spring Conference. This year UWGB had two stellar representatives: Heather Kaminski and Taskia A. Khan. Professor Khan compared two traditional assignments with one that followed Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) principles by evaluating students’ perceptions of clarity, relevance, engagement, confidence, and learning. Professor Kaminski examined the impact on governmental accounting students of engaging in the scaffolded, high-impact practice of creating an Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for local government agencies.

Headshot of Heather Kaminski
Heather Kaminsk
Assistant Professor
Cofrin E. School of Business 
Headshot of Taskia
Taskia A. Khan
Assistant Teaching Professor
Resch School of Engineering

The 2025-2026 WTFS representatives from UWGB will be Professors Alison Jane Martingano and Golam Mushih Tanimul Ahsan. They will join the program next year with new co-facilitator Georjeanna Wilson-Doenges. If this all sounds like a great opportunity to you, watch for the Call for Applications in Fall 2025.

Teaching Strategy Spotlight – Positively Awful Visual “Non-Aid”

Roshelle Amundson, Applied Writing and English Department

Headshot of Roshelle Amundson

About the Professor

Roshelle Amundson has been teaching at UW-Green Bay since 2019. Amundson has also been an adjunct professor and a Dean of Faculty in Minneapolis, MN. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and a BA in Professional Communications from Metropolitan State University.

Assignment Title

Positively Awful Visual “Non-Aid”

Strategy

Students learn how to create appropriate visual aids for rhetorical success and develop speaker ethos by executing the opposite of the objectives of these important speaking tools.

Description

This low-pressure assignment given early in the semester is implemented primarily for student engagement and retention. A “break all of the rules” assessment is a refreshing change from read/watch/mirror/apply with the expectation that students are held to the standards of the ideal. Several semesters into this approach, students continue to report how much fun they have with the assignment, and early in the semester in an asynchronous course, that is a win. This assignment is especially impactful in Lower Level, Gen Eds, or other courses when students often have performance/content/expectations anxiety. Students are asked to reflect on an assignment and its learning outcomes, and then based on what they’ve learned, apply the exact opposite.

Modality and Context

This activity is created for asynchronous classes but could be used in any modality. The task is specific to a Communications class creating visual aids to scaffold a persuasive speech. However, many courses use visual aids, so this activity can be replicated for that purpose. Further, the “break all of the rules” spirit could be applied across disciplines and assessment types. Amundson employs this “do it wrong” strategy in her literature and writing classes as well.

Purpose

This low-stakes assignment is designed to teach learning outcomes by flipping the script of what is right or correct. Professor Amundson teaches multiple learning objectives by giving students permission to create the worst possible visual aids given the learning objectives.

Here is the purpose as written into the assignment for the course:

We now have an initial understanding of the salience of speaker Ethos, and we understand the numerous facets to establish it. As we’ve discussed, visual aids are one of those factors. The goal here is to apply what not to do as that becomes its own form of muscle memory. My hope is that having the chance to do an absurd assignment to meet course objectives is a refreshing change from a standard “make a formal PowerPoint” — which you’ll have plenty of opportunity to do throughout the term. The worse these are — the better!

Assignment Details

Positively Awful Visual Non-aid

This is an assignment for Professor Amundson’s Communication 133 course. The learning objectives for this assignment are:

  1. Enhance Audience Understanding: Simplify complex information, making key points easier to grasp through visuals like charts, graphs, or images.
  2. Increase Engagement: Capture and maintain the audience’s attention, making the presentation more dynamic and interactive.
  3. Support Key Messages: Reinforce the speaker’s main ideas, ensuring they are clearly communicated and memorable.
  4. Improve Retention: Help the audience retain information by pairing visuals with the spoken message for better recall.
  5. Promote Clarity and Simplicity: Use visuals to clarify difficult concepts and make the presentation more accessible and understandable.

Students are asked not to meet any of these learning objectives; rather, they are to try to decrease rather than increase Speaker Ethos on a “mopic”- (mock topic). Students create poor visual aids, post them to a discussion board, and discuss which is the worst. See a partial example of a Power Point presentation below from a student discussing the rising cost of avocados.

A graph showing the rising price of avocados that is obscured by textboxes with typos and images of avocados
Partial example from a student’s PowerPoint presentation for this assignment

Applying This Strategy to Your Courses

Many courses use presentation activities as a part of the curriculum and often students need some instruction in good presentation skills before such assignments. This kind of activity could easily be included in those lessons. In addition, Professor Amundson also shared, “While this strategy may not work for every course, the idea of breaking out of the standard approach of read/watch/mirror/apply is refreshing for students and for me as the instructor. I think when we are willing to take risks and let go a bit, we can increase the enjoyment of the learning experience for our students.”

Teaching Strategy Spotlight – Debate on High Capacity Wells

Portrait image of a person, Rebecca Abler

Rebecca Abler, Manitowoc Campus, Natural and Applied Sciences Department

About the Professor

Rebecca Abler is a Wisconsin native with a degree in Biology from UW-Oshkosh. She graduated with a PhD in 2004 and then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at UW- Madison. She became a faculty member in 2005 in Manitowoc and is now a member of the Natural and Applied Sciences Department.

Strategy

Image of a circular digital badge with a trophy in the center. Text reads UW-Green Bay Canvas Gallery People's Choice Award.Utilizing Canvas discussion boards as interactive debate platforms for real world, immediate problems. This strategy was one of two awarded the People’s Choice award for the Canvas Gallery.

UWGB Canvas Gallery: A Virtual Exhibition of Teaching. Haven’t checked out the gallery yet? Self-enroll in the Canvas course and see all the projects.

Representative Assignment

Debate on High-Capacity Wells

Description

This assignment is a Canvas Discussion Board where students either take sides in a debate on a real-world topic or vote as an audience member. Students rotate the role they take in each different discussion. They get to apply knowledge from their course to a real-world situation.

Modality and context

Face-to-face or online. Developed for an introductory Environmental Science course.

Purpose

This activity was originally created for face-to-face classes. Students seemed to be more engaged during field trips to streams and natural areas and issues connected to the real world. The instructor wanted to use that “reality” to engage even online students, and so the panel discussions were born, focused on real-world activities.

Assignment Details

In the first example of the debate, students are provided with the topic of High-Capacity Wells. They are given their roles, which could be part of the Farm Bureau, the Central Sands Lake Association or the Legislature who will vote on the proposal. The two sides are given a date to propose opening arguments, the audience is then given a date to pose questions, the two groups are given more time to answer the questions, and then the legislature votes. All students are given source material to prepare for their task in the role-playing. The tasks are laid out in a way that makes sense for this real-world activity and gives the students an opportunity to delve into the issues that are impacting their world.

Applying This Idea to Your Classroom

Canvas discussion boards are a tool that everyone has access to. Turning an idea of interest that is applicable to your area into a debate on a discussion board is generally possible in most subject areas. Give it a try with your students and see how it goes!

Teaching Strategy Spotlight – PostSecret Writing Project

Photo of a person, Jonas Gardsby, standing in front of trees.
Jonas Gardsby, Green Bay Campus, English Department and Writing & Applied Arts

About the Professor

Jonas Gardsby is in his third year as an Assistant Professor at UWGB. Previously, he completed an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English at the University of Colorado. He earned his PhD in early modern literature at the University of Minnesota.

Strategy

Image of a circular digital badge with a trophy in the center. Text reads UW-Green Bay Canvas Gallery People's Choice Award.Using the PostSecret Project as a way for his creative writing students to add psychological depth and an element of the unexpected to their fiction.

This strategy was one of two awarded the People’s Choice award for the UWGB Canvas Gallery: A Virtual Exhibition of Teaching. Haven’t checked out the gallery yet? Self-enroll in the Canvas course and see all the projects.

Representative Assignment

PostSecret Creating Writing Exercise & Discussion

Description

This is both a creative writing assignment and a Canvas discussion board. It draws on PostSecret, a social and art experiment where people anonymously create postcards that share something they have never told anyone. Students choose one of these secrets and apply them to characters they have already created.

Modality and Context

Face-to-face or online. This assignment is the last of six exercises completed by creative writing students who are drafting a full story. Each exercise teaches some element of craft as well as changing the story they are working on in a way that gives it a renewed energy. The PostSecret activity is the last assignment before piecing the whole story together.

Purpose

This activity helps the writer to more fully realize a character by uncovering a previously unexplored dimension that affects the character’s motivations and actions.

Assignment Details

Having already worked on elements of fiction like plot, setting, scene, and character development, the student is asked to browse a Canvas page featuring postcards that display art and written secrets, arranged into different categories like addiction, lying, and regret. The student chooses a secret, gives it to a character they have been developing, and writes a monologue for the character about the secret. After completing this activity, they share the monologue on a discussion board. Peers reply with insights into how this secret is being used to advance the narrative of the original story.

Applying This Strategy to Your Courses

This may seem like an assignment that could only work in creative writing classes, but the idea of adding something surprising to what you already know can be employed in many areas of writing, from policy debates to nursing case studies. Add an unexpected element for students to work within, through which they can generate surprising solutions in their writing. As was done with the PostSecret project, you can give students a list of choices or ask them to come up with an unexpected element and see how they handle it and how that shapes their thinking.

“The Great Re-Wiring of Childhood” Goes to College: A Reflection on Jonathan Haidt’s THE ANXIOUS GENERATION

Article by Tara DaPra, Teaching Professor & 2024-25 Instructional Development Consultant

book cover for "The Anxious Generation" with a sad girl looking at a phone, surrounded by a sea of smiley emojisJonathan Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, was supposed to be about how the rise of smartphones and social media were damaging democratic society. But when he wrote the chapter on adolescent mental health, he knew there was much more to say about what smartphones and social media were doing to children and teens, what Haidt has dubbed “the Great Rewiring of Childhood.” This book is essential reading to help us understand our students today, the youngest of whom were in 8th grade when the pandemic began, and how the college classroom can be the space for them to re-wire once more.

First, how we got here: Haidt claims that two big shifts have happened to create this re-wiring in children born after 1995. First was the decline of what he dubs “the play-based childhood,” which began even earlier, in the 1980s, when fears about safety permeated the culture. Instead of children being allowed to wander parks and neighborhoods with one another, as you or your parents might have done, children were continually supervised, giving rise to the term “helicopter parenting.” They could no longer take the ordinary risks of childhood—or, in turn, develop the resilience and confidence those opportunities provided.

Then in the late 2000s, with the advent of the iPhone, the “phone-based childhood” was born. But instead of parents providing the same vigilant protection against internet-based dangers, they did the opposite, underprotecting children during vulnerable stages of brain development. For girls, their time was largely spent on social media, while boys were pulled into the spheres of gaming and pornography.

On this two-pronged shift in childhood, Haidt writes,

We decided that the real world was so full of dangers that children should not be allowed to explore it without adult supervision, even though the risks to children from crime, violence, drunk drivers, and most other sources have dropped steeply since the 1990s.[1] At the same time, it seemed like too much of a bother to design and require age-appropriate guardrails for kids online, so we left children free to wander through the Wild West of the virtual world, where threats to children abounded. (67)

While some argue that Haidt overstates the correlation between the rise of smartphones and adolescent mental illness, the thrust of Haidt’s argument is that the “the Great Rewiring of Childhood” has created “the Anxious Generation.”

Thankfully, this book does more than describe the problem. He also offers solutions, starting with advice for parents to protect their children. First, Haidt argues that parents must delay giving children their own smartphones, arguing that an internet-connected watch or the texting and basic apps of a “dumbphone” is all they truly need. He praises the movement “Wait Until 8th” (224) but then advises parents to wait even longer, until high school, and encourages parents to support one another in this. It’s so much easier to hold out, he says, if parents do it together.

Second, he tells parents that children should not have social media accounts before 16 and argues for stronger age-verification laws. Haidt writes, “Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a firehose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers” (15). (This parent is going to wait until her kids are 16 for both social media and smartphones, if she can help it.)

But beyond personal action, Haidt advocates for collective action. In particular, he argues that schools play an important role in driving change, and he calls for phone-free schools, all the way from elementary school through high school. He doesn’t endorse the compromises that some local K-12 districts are exploring, such as students putting phones in a pouch when they walk into a classroom or allowing access during the lunch hour. Instead, Haidt writes, “Students should store their phones, smartwatches, and any other personal devices that can send or receive texts in phone lockers or locked pouches during the school day” (15). This means no phones for seven hours, full stop—not until the final bell has rung. The Anxious Generation (and his blog After Babel) describes schools that piloted such programs, and the results were astonishing: students talked to one another. They engaged in class activities and felt less lonely and they learned. They weren’t thinking about the next text or that mean social media post they had to wait forty minutes to respond to. They were free.

Finally, Haidt calls for young children being allowed much more free and unsupervised play, including “junkyard playgrounds” (259), which the New York Times reported on in 2019 but also 2016 and 1971. Haidt argues that letting children play without constant adult intervention is essential to their well-being: “That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults” (15).

But what does this mean for those of us teaching and serving college students today? What control do we have over their use of phones in our classrooms, between periods, or, for that matter, how much free play they were afforded as children, how much screen time they had as teenagers who came of age during the pandemic?

We can, of course, encourage students to put away phones during our face-to-face classes, and I do, especially during the five- or ten-minute increments that students are freewriting or otherwise generating ideas for a larger project. But I’d bet that most of us are not interested in policing phones. Instead, I’d argue that when teaching face-to-face classes, we should lean in to what’s always made those such effective learning spaces: facilitate rich discussions. Haidt writes, “Synchronous, face-to-face, physical interactions and rituals are a deep, ancient, and underappreciated part of human evolution” (57). We can create space in our classrooms for students to talk to one another, to make eye contact, to take small risks, and, with any luck, to be producers of knowledge. And even as some students talk more than others, let’s not forget the benefits of active listening: “When people practice silence in the company of equally silent companions, they promote quiet reflection and inner work, which confers mental health benefits” (207).

“The Great Rewiring of Childhood” has changed our college classrooms, and not for the better. But our students are hungry for the chance to “develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.” Like those who saw the value of letting kids play in piles of construction debris, we can create the space and then watch while our students create from it.