Prologue/How to read this volume

This book is a testament to the pedagogical generosity of its authors. They want nothing more than to share their excitement at having found a grounding framework that shapes their understanding of learning and at being able to purposefully and intentionally support their students’ achievement. That common grounding framework is based on the ICE model (Ideas, Connections and Extensions). For those unfamiliar with ICE, Chapter 1 provides a brief overview, though it will also serve as a quick refresher for those of you who have used the model before.

The remaining chapters of the volume can be read in any order and in relation to your own emerging interests. To help make choices about what to read, each chapter begins with a description of the instructional context being presented. While the discipline depicted in a chapter might be vastly different from your own, many authors provide cues as to the ways in which their practices might be applicable, adapted, and/or transferable to other contexts. We suggest you keep your own context in mind as you read, staying open to ways of finding commonly held values and intentions that might inform your own ongoing teaching and assessment practices.

As a prompt to their writing, authors were invited to imagine sharing their experiences with ICE over coffee with a colleague. The result is a collection of highly individualized stories with the voices of each author deliberately retained with a conversational tone. The chapters, however, are designed in a consistent format that might help readers more easily find the details of most interest to them.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the ICE model, setting the context and establishing the conceptual framework that influenced the teaching and assessment practices shared in subsequent chapters and explains the use of vocabulary adopted by ICE users.

Chapter 2 offers a rich portrait of the diverse applications of the ICE model in the context of learning, teaching, and educational development, and illustrates a longitudinal view of the influences of the model and the resonance that it has had with Meagan Troop’s principles of practice.

Chapter 3 features Jenn Stephenson’s account of the ways that using the metaphor of a broken toaster to convey the essential underpinnings of ICE has helped the model’s philosophy truly become “a mindset” for her and her students.

Chapter 4  Kip Pegley shares detailed descriptions of three distinct ICE-inspired learning activities he’s used in teaching undergraduate students in his course on popular music and the ways those activities have enriched his students’ learning experiences.

Chapter 5 John Johnston, a geoscientist instructor, and Meagan Troop, an instructional designer, examine their co-creation of an online course that applies the ICE model as a way to elicit different modes of thinking at the activity and with the course as a whole, elevating the learning and teaching experience for instructor, TAs, and students alike.

Chapter 6 Mavis Morton uses ICE extensively in both undergraduate and graduate courses and shares the multiple ways that she has engaged students and enhanced their metacognitive skills and awareness with their intentional application of the ICE framework in relationship to learning outcomes, activities, and assessments.

Chapter 7 Christa Bracci offers insights and reflections on her applications of ICE in the context of an Advanced Legal Research course. She illustrates the ways that the model offered curricular cohesiveness for students as they enhanced and developed research skills in authentic ways, as well as increasing their metacognitive awareness.

Chapter 8 As an instructor of the Lived Experience of Disability course, Anne O’Riordan details her creative integration of the ICE model to facilitate deep critical reflection through journaling and dialogue about the mentor-mentee relationships that formed in the course and in community.

Chapter 9 Val Michaelson and Jan Hill openly and candidly share Val’s first experience implementing the ICE model. They outline the details of how an undergraduate research methods course was structured and what they learned about teaching, learning and assessment along the way.

Chapter 10 Shayna Watson, a family physician, presents a comparative interpretation of the evolution of medical education by juxtaposing a Flexnerian perspective with one informed by ICE.

Chapter 11 In the volume’s coda, Sue Fostaty Young outlines the multiple, embodied ways that her assessment-focused educational development approach has been influenced by ICE. She offers examples of the transformative effects of the ICE framework in facilitating enhanced communication and congruence in curriculum decision making for both instructors and students