From Koala to Kangaroo—Getting Your Students Hopping With Active Learning

by Shawn Orr, Digital Educator  You’ve probably seen this chart or another many times over the course of your teaching. Basically, it’s saying that we remember very little of what somebody talks to us about. We remember more if we can see it. We remember much more if we can actually practice it and experience it. Dottie Walters and her book Speak and Grow Rich and William Glasser and his Choice Theory both say that our students will learn and retain 90-95% of what they teach each other and what they are actually involved in the creation process. Who doesn’t want their students to know 90-95% of the course content? It’s not about earning the A, right? We don’t use grades to prove learning; that proves content mastery. What can I do so that my students are actively involved, so they are learning and retaining? I look at the classes that I taught 22 years ago and I thought “Man, if I can pair my knowledge of the subject today, 22 years later, to what I knew then—I can’t believe how much more I know.” Certainly, that should be the way it is. Not only is new information coming in, but I’m teaching it. I’m learning and retaining and coming up with new ways to apply it every day. That is ultimately the goal. That’s what we’re looking at. We’re going to look at 7 Icebreakers and 11 Active Learning Strategies to really engage your students in the classroom. My goal for you is that you walk away with one or two. Don’t feel overwhelmed if you see the things that I’m doing and I’m using, just pick one or two that will really resonate with your students and would really make a difference. Or pick one lecture that you’re saying “I know this is the lecture that my students really struggle with or it causes them boredom” and find one activity that you can use in there. Icebreakers are any tool that we use to facilitate interaction, stimulate creative thinking and introduce new concepts and material. Usually when we think of icebreakers, we think of them as social ways to build connection. But, icebreakers are so much more than that. They also can be educational and topical. A way that we can introduce new content, we can help make ideas relevant, and help students think in the way that we need to that day. If I know I need my students to think creatively, I might start out my course with an icebreaker where they have to engage in a lot of creative thinking. Even something as easy as a Sudoku puzzle up on the Smartboard when they walk in. They start to think creatively and critically as we move into the content. Active learning is any activity that gets students involved in the learning process with the goal of them constructing meaning. When they construct meaning, when they draw conclusions, when they collaborate with their peers, they will learn and retain the information. Icebreaker #1: Create a “Name Card” I do this in all my courses, and mine might be smaller than what some of you are. They range from 12-25 students, my largest class in 45. I have the goal that I will know every single student’s name by the end of the first week. If I want to increase retention, my students have to feel like they’re a part of a community and part of group that cares about them. I have them do nametags. The nametags are obviously for me, but I bring in markers and poster board. It’s amazing how your tactile learners immediately are drawn to doing this project and start to talk to each other. Rather than having them just put their name, I have them put something on their card that’s relevant or interesting to them. I always make myself a cheerleader because I’m always making fun of myself and my students will laugh with me because I always say “I am your biggest cheerleader. I will be so excited and there will be tears of joy that day you walk across that stage and graduate—I can hardly wait for that day. Know that I am in your corner. You’re responsible for your learning, but I am your biggest supporter.” My students will put everything. They’ll put guitars, pictures of computers, pictures of their kids, and their animals. All of a sudden, we are having a conversation about what is meaningful and important to them. Now, I don’t have my students introduce them this way, but when I call on someone, I’ll ask “What is that on your card? I can’t make that out. You are the worst drawer I have ever seen. Explain that to me.” Then they’ll laugh and suddenly they are talking about something that’s relevant to them and pretty soon we’ve formed that sense of community. This is purely a social icebreaker. Icebreaker #2: The Five Finger Introduction This is my favorite icebreaker to do on the second day of classes called “The Five Finger Introduction.” I always tell my students it’s not the one finger introduction I get on the highway all the time because I’m a very slow driver, but this is the Five Finger Introduction. I poorly draw a hand on the board and then I say “You’re going to get with the person next to you and introduce these 5 Things:

• Pointer finger: Tell them about yourself, your major, and what’s a one-word description of you as a student. Maybe they might say motivated or energetic or nervous.
• Middle finger: Who is someone you look up to? Who is a mentor or somebody that you admire? Or, who is someone that you want to emulate you career after? And for many of my students, that’s the first time that think “What do I want my career to look like and who would be a great mentor?”
• Ring finger: Who is someone you love? Somebody that’s going to be in your corner and really love and support you.
• Pinky finger: Something you need to be a little more of or a little less of. Like, I could be a little more patient or I could be a little less of a procrastinator.
• Thumb: What’s “thumb-thing” you would really love to discuss or learn? On the first day of class, I might make this about the topic in general. What is something you’re really excited to learn about Business? What is something that you really think is going to relevant to make you more marketable in this course? What are you excited about?

I’ve also done this activity halfway through the semester and just changed up some of these things. Like, what is something you need to do a little bit more in this class? Or, what is something you need me to do a little more in this class? What’s a learning style that you really hope I continue to do. There’s lots of ways you can change this up. This is also a great one to do online because it’s very visual. Icebreaker #3: Teaching a blended or online class? I’ve used this activity several times for my all-online courses. At Adrian College, we use Blackboard. I’ll post an image in the discussion forum and say “Introduce yourself to us, tell me why you’re taking this course, and then I want you to put a digital image that tells us something about who you are or what’s important to you.” This is a picture that I might put up and I might say that I live on a farm, I’m passionate about horses, and this is my best friend and share a little bit about myself. Here is the reason this is a great an effective strategy in an online course: I like to frontload my courses in my blended courses. That means that anything that I’m going to have my students using over the term, I want them to try out in the first week. So if I want them to upload a paper, I want them to do it in a very low stakes assignment during the first part of the first couple weeks of class. If they’re going to be using the discussion board, if they’re going to be working in UCU on a group project, I want them to get in a try it out.   This right away tells me something about my students. If they cannot figure out how to attach a digital image, it tells me something about their computer skills, it gives me the opportunity to intervene early — before the first big paper is due, when they can’t figure out how to get it uploaded, and that frustration overwhelms them. It tells me a lot about their skills, plus it gives me a chance to really engage with them right away and talk about their pictures and share. Icebreaker #4: Commonality Commonality is not just a social icebreaker, but also an educational icebreaker. This could be a great way to start your course out or a great way to start a specific lesson out. I actually found this one on a science website and my students love this. I download these pictures from Google and click the boxes that are free to use, even commercially, and I pass them out as students walk in. I always greet my students at the door when they walk in to help create that connection. They then have to get together, I’ll say in groups of four, and they have to figure out who their groups are. The group on the right-hand side is the Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie, which I do have to tell you, most of my students don’t know what Little House on the Prairie is. I grew up with that show and they don’t even know who Paul Ingalls is. It’s a very very sad state of society right now. But if I put the Simpsons up there or something like that, they might right away know who they were. You can put it in groups and then you can have them introduce each other in groups and you can also ask relevant questions. Let’s say it’s the first day of a nursing class or a medical assisting class. Maybe I would use those pictures on the bottom. If we were able to chat and I could ask you who those were, I’m sure you’d be able to identify those right away as historically famous nurses. Florence Nightingale, who wrote books on nursing and still shapes the industry of nursing today; Mary Mahoney, the first African American Registered Nurse; Mary Breckinridge, who was part of the frontier nursing service and rode a horse to do her nursing. Sometimes if they don’t know who they are, but they also notice the have nursing caps, they’ll get together for nursing hats and ask for a hint. And then I’ll have them look up the history of these important people. You can do this in so many different ways. You can put four terms that go together. So maybe I would put “Planning,” “Organizing,” “Leading,” and “Controlling,” and the students that have those would have to figure out that those are the Four Functions of Management. There are lots of ways that you can make this relevant to your content area. The neat thing is, is that students tend to congregate in groups and teams of who they know. I want my students to know everyone in the classroom. I want them to feel like they have somebody to side beside somebody that they have to connect with. This is a great activity for that. Another one that plays off this is that when I put my students into groups or teams, I use playing cards. When they walk in the classroom, they pull a playing card off the deck from the table. All my Kings go together, all my Aces go together, and that way they’re in a different group and a different team every time. It’s a really terrific way to get different students together. I can also tell you sometimes I stack the groups the way I want them. I use MindTap, so I’m able to go in and look at how engaged my students are in a course. Not just how well they’re doing, but how much time they’re spending in their reading and how much time they’re spending in their activities. I can take my students that are highly engaged and pair them with my students that aren’t quite as engaged and might be struggling with some of the concepts. It’s a terrific way to create formative groups to help my students be successful.  Icebreaker #5: Candy I’m sure you’ve probably given little bags of M&Ms and for every one M&M you ate, you have to tell us one thing about yourself. That’s a social icebreaker. Let me tell you how to make it educational or topical. I’ll bring in the bags of M&Ms, but then I’ll say “For however many green M&Ms you have, that’s how many times you have to participate in class today.” If you have 3 M&Ms, 1 M&M, 4M&Ms, that’s how many of my questions you have to answer, that’s how many of my activities you have to participate in. Until everyone has participated their number of times, that’s when we’ll be done for the day. Or, if everyone can participate their number of times before the halfway point, we’ll have an extra five minutes during the break. Students feel a sense of obligation to participate and can gauge when they’re being called out. They hold each other accountable for it. Another cool way to do this, is to say “You have to share three things from this week’s lectures, or three facts from last week’s lectures, based on how many M&Ms you have, and tell us why they are important.” This is a neat way to take this social icebreaker and make it so that’s it relevant to the content area. Icebreaker #6: How many items can you remember? I want everyone to grab a piece of scrap paper or something that's sitting right there. What we're going to do right now is we're going to do an icebreaker. I had a colleague tell me, “Oh Shawn, I love your idea of doing icebreakers in class to engage your students, but I'm teaching PC repair. This isn't really a great course to be able to do an icebreaker in.” I said, you know, what, I bet I could, I bet I could design an icebreaker that you could use in your class this coming week. This is the icebreaker I designed for him and it was wildly successful. It actually turned into the entire lecture for the class. I'm going to show you something on the screen, and I'm going to just show it to you for a few seconds. Then I'm going to take it off and I want you to see how many of the items you can remember. Write them down, but don't write anything down until I take the picture off the screen. Alright, here we go. Write down as many of those items as you can remember from what was on the screen. Here's a hint: there are eight items. So let me go ahead, show you what the items are then, and see how many you were actually able to remember. So obviously, there's a flashlight. There's a pair of tweezers. There's a screwdriver, a jump drive. The band with the yellow on it is an anti-static band, and anti-shock band. There's compressed air. That's what that thing is supposed to be at the bottom. There is cable ties, an outlet. I asked my students, “How many can you remember?” We had a competition and I gave out a candy bar for whoever remembered the most. I asked, “What do all these items have in common?” One student raised their hand they said, “Well, that's what this chapter was about. It was about all the items you should have available for you in your PC repair kit if somebody calls you to say there's a problem with their computer, and they don't believe it's a software problem.” I'm like, brilliant. Let's talk about each of these items then. What kind of screwdrivers and what does the textbook say? How many types did you have? What is the anti-static band for? It's so you don't shock yourself. And they're like, “Oh Professor Orr, you're so silly. It's not for you. It's so you don't shock the computer. So that if you have static in you, it doesn't shock the computer and ruin the data.” I'm like, oh that's so brilliant. Well who's doing the teaching, right? Who's doing the pushups? They're teaching me what each of these tools are for and why you might need them. They look and go cable ties. Why in the heck would we need cable ties? All of a sudden they're flipping through the pages of their book, looking it up and saying why do the experts say I need to have that in my tool kit. They're doing the teaching. While this is a great icebreaker, a way to start out, it's also a terrific way to lead right into the lecture and teach. Think of the ways that you could adapt this. You could, if you were teaching a medical course, you could have a picture of a tray of everything you need to have for a specific blood draw. If you were teaching a business course, you could have all of the elements you have to have together if you want to do a flow chart. There's a lot of different ways that you could do this. Obviously, it works better for classes that are very tactile and hands-on, but once again, just another really neat icebreaker. Icebreaker #7: Reflection Finally, my last icebreaker I want to share is an assessment icebreaker. I do a lot of informative and summative assessments and I really like Cross and Angelo's Classroom Assessment Techniques. It's one of the leading industry standards on really doing great classroom assessment, both formative and summative. It's one of my coveted, cherished books that I use all the time as I look at how my students are doing within each class and what I can change to help them learn more effectively. Then summative assessment: How can I summarize how my students did at the end of a unit? I love this reflections icebreaker. I do this one at the end of class. I'll put these statements up: I liked this unit… It got me thinking about… Something that surprised me today…. Sometimes I'll do PNI: what was one positive thing that happened today, one negative thing that happened, and something interesting that you learned. I usually have my students do these on note cards and then turn them in as they're leaving. They hand them to me and there's several ways that I use these. Sometimes I use them as formative assessments. So if I had a lot of students that say, I'm concerned about the steps to put together a title page. Or, I still don't completely understand which side of the t-cell a debit goes on and which side a credit goes on. That informs my teaching. I know right away where to start my next class. Sometimes I use those as discussion board questions. So several students say I learned this interesting thing or I was surprised by this. I can put a great discussion board question up to get all of the students talking about that concept or that idea. So there's lots of different ways. You can start your class off with this saying based on the reading or based on the homework, and have them do this and then flip through them during the break. I love doing these and I love doing this at the end. Let me tell you one other quick way that I like to modify this. I give my students sticky notes, and on each side of the white board I'll say write one thing that you really enjoyed in this first half of the course, one thing that you're really clear on, and one thing you're going to use. On the other side of the board, I want you to write down one thing that you're concerned about and one question you wish I would answer in the second half of the class. Then when they go on break, I can flip through those post-it notes. If I have six questions, or six students all ask the same question, I know exactly where to start my learning. They're engaged, they're doing something, and they're providing feedback. Alright, those are seven icebreaker activities. I hope that you picked out one of those that you might be able to use in your course. Let's go ahead and jump forward, and look at what additional things we could do during our class time to really get my students active and engaged, really get them involved in the learning process. I found this interesting statistic about kangaroos. Much like T-Rexes, from Jurassic Park, kangaroos have really good eyesight, but they only respond to objects that are moving. So if I want my students to see the importance of the course content, I've got to get them moving. I've got to get them doing something with that content. If they're just sitting back and taking it in, I don't know if they're really getting it until I do an assessment. If that midterm assessment they get a D on, it doesn't mean they can't still be successful, but it means we've got a long way to go versus getting them active and involved every single day in every single course. Let me give you 11 more great activities and strategies that I'm using in my course. And before I jump into these, Britany, are there any specific questions that somebody needs addressed right now before we jump into active learning strategies? >> Jackie asked earlier when you were first talking about your class, do you have a lot of first generation college students in your courses? Can you give us a little bit more about the demographics of your courses? >> I taught at a small private college, a technical school for 19 years in Toledo. It was predominantly first generation college students. I had a lot of students that did not have role models for college that weren't raised around the ideology of the importance of education. One of the things that I really tried to stress with them is that education is a great equalizer. It is the only thing that is really ever going to change someone's socioeconomic status. If they're hoping for the lottery to do that, it's not going to happen. Education is the thing that's going to make a difference in their lives and their children's lives. Right now, I teach at Adrian College. We don't have a lot of first generation college students. Adrian College is a private college in Adrian, Michigan. We have around 3,000 students. A bit of a different demographic there, but yes, I definitely have taught to a very wide variety of students. I also taught at Bowling Green State University as well for two years when I was a graduate assistant and then after I graduated. Active Learning Strategy #1: Identify the “Gold Nuggets” So lecturing. Do I lecture in my classes? I absolutely lecture. I think students need direct instruction. They need to know what's important in the content. If they could just take the chapter and read it and understand the key points, they probably wouldn't need me. However, I will tell you there's several things that I do. One of the things that I do for my students. I use MindTap e-books, so I'm actually able to annotate the chapters for my students. I'm able to go in and highlight the first chapter and leave them post-it notes, and then it pushes right into their electronic book, the e-book. When the students get their e-book, the first chapters highlighted for them list post-it notes I've left them throughout. This is why this concept is important. This is how this is going to be relevant. We're going to be talking about this in class. Remember when Matt made a comment in class about this? Here it is. When I lecture, I lecture on what I like to consider the “gold nuggets”—the few key concepts that every single student in my course must know in order to be successful. Then, we do a lot of active learning strategies and activities. In a 75-minute course, I'm going to lecture at the most 15 to 20 minutes. The key most important points. Then we're going to take the gold nuggets and then the silver nuggets, the five or six additional pieces of information that students should know, and we're going to do active learning strategies. We're going to do activities. We're going to do application. We're going to do case studies. We're going to do all these kinds of 11 activities that I'm getting ready to share with you in class. And then those bronze nuggets, the things that the students could know, those extras, those things that our A students are going to be able to pick out and are going to know as well, those are the things that are going to also be part of the homework for after. We're really extending the line. The gold nuggets and lecture, then the gold and silver nuggets and activity and practice, and then the gold, silver and bronze nuggets in their homework. As we look at some of these active learning, I think we should lecture, but it needs to be limited. This is a whole other webinar series, but I really, really love teaching a flipped classroom where my students watch their lectures outside of the class. I record 15-minute lectures with something that they have to deal with the first time I get a flipped class. I didn't have my students do anything. I just sent them an electronic version of the lecture, and almost nobody watched it. My students don't really do optional. I don't either, right. If my grades are due Wednesday at noon, I'm probably still working on them Wednesday morning. We're busy, and our students are busy. If I send a lecture out, there's also a worksheet that goes with it. There's the discussion posts they have to answer based on the lecture. There's a quiz that accompanies it. I'm not saying don't lecture, but we just want to limit what we're actually lecturing on. Active Learning Strategy #2: Plickers Alright, here's a really cool new active learning strategy. I actually heard about this from one of my peers and it's called Plickers. Now probably many of you use polling in your classroom. My favorite site for polling is polleverywhere.com. I love Poll Everywhere. Students can use their cell phones. I ask poll questions. They use their cell phones to put responses in. It can be an A, B, C, D. I can have them text in their response, and what answer did you get to number seven and everybody text in their answers. However, inevitably I get a student that says, “Oh, I don't have a phone,” or, “The internet's so slow I can't get it to work.” So one of my colleagues introduced me to this. It's called Plickers. You go to Plickers.com and you download these free squares. They look kind of like QR codes and each side of the square has a letter on it, A, B, C and D. So I ask a question like, “Joe is writing a new job description. Which level of management is he engaging in? If you think it's planning, say A. If you think it's leading, say B. If you think it's controlling, say D.” Then the student holds up their Plicker, their paper Plicker for whichever side they think is correct. If they think it's A, they hold the side up that says A and nobody can see which side they're holding up. I take my device, my phone or my iPad, and I scan the room with it. All of the data pops up on the board for them to see. It's live polling, but the only person that has to have an electronic device is me the teacher. You could actually also take attendance this way because each of those cards also has a number on it. Number one can be Mary, number two can be Joe, and number three can be Sally. I can scan the room and take attendance. I can scan the room again after the break and see who came back on time. I can scan the room again at the end to make sure everybody's still there. There's lots of fun ways you can do this. I have a mixture of students. I find that some of my older students often have really, really strong critical thinking skills and my younger students are really comfortable with technology. Often when I use these, I put them in groups and teams and I'll ask questions and give them a chance to work together on the answer. Then I'll have the hold up their answers as a group. Here's the best thing. This formative assessment, if everyone in my group gets the correct answer or 90% of the class answers it correctly, I know, “Move on in the lecture Shawn. They've got it.” If half my class gets it wrong, it's a red flag for me. Stop, reengage, let's talk about this concept. Let's give them a new example, and then let's ask another question and try again. So very, very easy to use. You go to Plickers.com. You type in your questions. You print out these free sheets. You can actually buy them if you want as well. They come laminated and all that. And then you just pass them out in class and use them just like Plickers. Very, very cool tool. I hope somebody can use those in your class. There are lots of neat ways that you can use that active learning strategy, but once again, instead of my students just sitting back and one or two students answering all the questions, everybody is contributing. Because their answers are anonymous, nobody knows if you're the one that said A and everybody else say D. Active Learning Strategy #3: Flyswatter Trivia (low-tech clickers) If you don't like Poll Everywhere where your students have devices and you don't like Plickers where you have the device, here's another one. This is called Flyswatter Trivia. My students love this. I never let them out of class early, not even ten minutes. You know, I'm trying to teach them work ethic, right, and marketability. So if we even have 10 or 15 minutes, they beg me to get out the Flyswatters. They get in teams, usually based on playing cards, and I ask them a question from the chapter. If I can do a 20 minute lecture, we have time to play and use activities and have them use this. They're not all easy. It's not like lowest level knowledge thinking. I might ask a case study question: What would be the best leadership style to use if somebody fell down the stairs? They have to know what the leadership styles are and they have to be able to apply it. They slap their flyswatter down and whoever's on the bottom, closest to the X taped to the table, get to answer first. If they say, “Oh, the best leadership style would be participatory.” I'm like shoot, I'm sorry. That was a great guess. You're right, there is a place for that, but we'll talk about that in a second. Who is the next color? The next color will get a chance to answer. Now if nobody on the team gets it right, the question goes back to their team. While they're trying to answer, everyone else in the room is furiously scrolling through their e-book or flipping through their book or their notes trying to find the answers. They're active. They're engaged. I'm not up there saying, “In a crisis, don't ever use the participatory.” You definitely need to use the leadership style where you make a decision and you come right in and do it. My students are doing the pushups here. There's 100 different ways that you can use this. I have learned that with active learning, you've got to learn to embrace a little chaos. My boys will sometimes beat each other with those flyswatters and we have fun with it. I've learned to embrace chaos, because if my students are talking, especially about the content and engaging and flipping through pages, they're doing the pushups, and they're learning. Active Learning Strategy #4: Treasure Hunting Definitions (Card Split) Here's another one: Treasure hunt. I told you I always greet my students when they come in the door. Sometimes I make up flashcards, and my books come with fabulous flashcards. We can make custom flashcards. I can add flashcards and send them out and I can print the flashcards out. What I'll do is I'll print them out, cut them out, and as they come in, I give them. So one person gets operational planning, the next person gets strategic planning, and then other people get definitions. They have to go and pair up, much like that commonality where they had to find if they were part of the Ingalls family. They have to find who has the definition to their word or who has the term to their definition. Then, they sit together in class forming connections. There's two ways that I've used this. I either do my lecture and when I get to operational planning I say “Who has that card?” Those two stand up and give us the definition. Or, I just say “Today, there's 20 key definitions that we need to go through and when it comes to your definition you're going to stand up and give us a definition. You're going to explain it, and you're going to give us a relevant example.” They would stand up and say, “Oh, operational planning. It's the day-to-day operations. I work at Chipotle, and when my manager is doing operational planning she's making a schedule for the week.” All of a sudden they're standing up and making it relevant to them. They're teaching each other. They're giving a lecture. I'm providing the lecture and the guidance, but they're the ones that are creating a lecture. Active Learning Strategy #5: Text Your Thoughts On days that I allow my students to use technology, I really love these two free texting apps. What students do is they download one of these two free texting apps, Text Now or Text Plus, and it gives them a generic telephone number. Now, they don't have to download the free app. If they want to give out their telephone number, they can. Then, they pick somebody's telephone number, and I'll ask a question, and I'll say text your answer. If it was a college success course, and I was teaching note taking, I might ask the question, “What would happen if you use the Cornell notetaking method and you had an instructor that talked really fast? What's likely to happen. Predict.” That is a very high level of thinking. So they text their answer to somebody. I always tell them to use an emoji. If you're sure your answer is right, give it a thumbs up. If you have no idea if you're right, give it a thumbs down. Let them know how sure you are. Then, I'll have some people share their answers. It's safe to share because it wasn't their answer. They didn't say if the person's wrong, that's on them, not them, and they don't know who the person is. Because they have a generic number. There's lots of ways you can use it. What answer did you get to number seven on the homework? Kind of like the phone a friend for Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Why should you put important information in the beginning of a memo? Oh, because often the only part of a memo people read. So all of a sudden I have my students engage with the content. They're texting each other. They're talking. Now, I love technology. I embrace and I use it. I will let you know I kind of went into the technology generation kicking and screaming a little bit. Now, I've realized if we're not talking about technology for the sake of the bells and whistles, if we're really talking about it for how we can engage our students, there are amazing technologies that we can use to engage students. I love texting. I also have my technology-free Tuesdays where we don't use any technology in class. That's a day where we really focus on interpersonal skills and talking things out and doing case studies. However, on a day that we're using technology, my students love doing this. Do I know that they're not texting their boyfriend or checking on their kids? No, probably not, but I'm always walking around. If they are the person that didn't get a text answer back, you know they're holding up their phone going, “Hey, my person didn't text me yet. I don't have an answer to share.” And you could also put them in small groups. To learn more (and to hear about Shawn’s icebreakers and active learning strategies), access the webinar recording, part of the Striving for Excellence* series. *The Striving for Excellence Series a collaboration between Cengage Learning and the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD), a membership organization committed to promoting and celebrating excellence in teaching, learning, and leadership at community and technical colleges. Recognizing the growing need for adjunct support, Cengage Learning and NISOD are partnering to co-host a series of webinars, podcasts, and blog posts covering professional development topics for adjunct faculty and administrators. To learn more about this partnership, visit http://www.nisod.org/cengage.