Applying the TILT Model

Depending on the type of course project you are working on, you may be required to apply the TILT model to one or more assessments.  Even if your project does not require the use of the TILT model, you are encouraged to consider including this best practice in your course design.

What is the TILT model?  The Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) project aims to advance equitable teaching and learning practices that reduce systemic inequities in higher education through two main activities:

1. Promoting students’ conscious understanding of how they learn
2. Enabling faculty to gather, share and promptly benefit from current data about students’ learning by coordinating their efforts across disciplines, institutions and countries

When applying the TILT model to an assignment, the following components should be included:

• Purpose: Define the learning outcomes, in language and terms that help students recognize how this assignment will benefit their learning. Indicate how these are connected with institutional learning objectives, and how the specific knowledge and skills involved in this assignment will be important in students’ lives beyond the contexts of this assignment, this course, and this college.
• Skills:  Identify and describe the specific skills that will be utilized for this particulate assignment.  Terms from Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives may help you explain these skills in language students will understand.
• Knowledge:  Identify the specific content knowledge that will be covered as a result of this assignment.
• Task:  Define what activities the student should do/perform.  Action verbs from Bloom’s Taxonomy might be helpful.  List any steps or guidelines, or a recommended sequence for the students’ efforts.  Specify any extraneous mistakes to be avoided.  If there are sound pedagogical reasons for withholding information about how to do this assignment, protect students’ confidence and sense of belonging in college with a purpose statement like this: “The purpose of this assignment is for you to struggle and feel confused while you invent and test your own approach for addressing the problem…”
• Criteria for Success:  Define the characteristics of the finished product. Provide multiple examples of what these characteristics look like in real-world practice, to encourage students’ creativity and reduce their incentive to copy any one example too closely.  Engage students in analyzing multiple examples of real-world work before the students begin their own work on the assignment. Discuss how excellent work differs from adequate work. This enables students to evaluate the quality of their own efforts while they are working, and to judge the success of their completed work. It is often useful to provide or compile with students a checklist of characteristics of successful work. Students can also use the checklist to provide feedback on peers’ coursework. Indicate whether this task/product will be graded and/or how it factors into the student’s overall grade for the course. Later, asking students to reflect and comment on their completed, graded work allows them to focus on changes to their learning strategies that might improve their future work.^[1]

Check out the example below to see how the TILT model was applied to make a science assignment more transparent.