Raschel Larsen, Health and Human Performance Faculty

Health and Human Performance faculty Raschel Larsen’s superpower is turning learning into doing. 

Whether it’s helping colleagues plan wellness goals, turning her interest in alpacas into a family business, or teaching students how to put theory into practice, Raschel has a way of finding tangible possibilities for every new idea she learns. “I want students to be able to do something with what they’re learning,” she said.

Her new favorite learning-by-doing enterprise in the classroom is an assessment she dreamed up last spring for her dual-delivery HE204 Nutrition and Fitness class. After completing several CAI workshops for her Excellence in Teaching certification, she wanted to try a new way to help students reach a central goal aligned with the course outcomes: overcoming barriers to exercise, like extreme weather or low energy. 

Instead of an in-class review of concepts after students read about overcoming barriers, Raschel decided to ask students to create a detailed fitness plan, using the concepts. 

She used backwards design to help students build this skill, then used the Transparency In Learning and Teaching (TILT) framework to create the new assignment. She spelled out what she intended students to learn and what she wanted them to do, and provided an example. Then she assigned students to groups to talk through their plans and to get feedback about how to make their plans work.

Raschel was wowed by the results. “It was really powerful to me,” she said. “After 20 minutes in groups, both remote and in-person students were all still actively talking through their plans and having great conversations.” 

Their plans were widely diverse, meaning students were also learning new applications for the concepts from each other. An added bonus—that lasted through the term—was the sense of community that the assessment and the conversations built in the class.

Raschel is excited to try out new versions of the assignment in other modalities of the course this upcoming year. After her kids got helpful AI reinforcement for math skills they were learning last year, she has even used AI to give her ideas to start with, changing up an assignment. She asks it to apply “TILT” principles to an assignment for first generation college students, for example. “It’s not perfect, but it’s a start. It can help you learn how to do this with an assignment.” 

 “Those CAI workshops are great,” she said. “I’ve been teaching for 20 years and I still learned a lot. It was a really good experience.”