In the teaching and learning context, administrators kick off programs, and faculty design, deliver and evaluate their courses. The shared goal of the curriculum, individual programs, and specific courses is to enhance and deepen student learning. Each level of effort can involve specific workshops for information and development of specific skills.
The workshops that we have offered have emerged from many efforts at our universities for which we were given responsibility for the professional development component.
New Faculty Orientation and New Chairs and New Deans trainings
Both of us have designed and implemented New Faculty Orientation at our respective institutions. The NFO at Georgia Gwinnett College was a weeklong program that was repeated in multiple evenings for part-time faculty who could not attend the daytime event. At Emory’s Oxford College, the NFO was a daylong event that introduced new faculty to the Inquiry Guided Learning (Ways of Inquiry) curriculum, as well as a number of sessions supported by current faculty on best practices and HIPS to mention a few of the topics explored.
At the University System of Georgia, my office designed the program for taking new chairs and deans at the 26 USG institutions through a variety of issues, topics, and scenarios that focus on student challenges, success, and learning.
Program and Curricular Efforts
For chairs, deans, and provost office professionals, we can offer our experience designing and developing a system-wide faculty learning community program that involved selecting and supporting 250 FLC facilitators and nearly 3000 faculty. We have also designed and delivered campus-wide curricular efforts to develop inquiry-guided learning components in each course. We have written new degree proposals that span a number of colleges and disciplines. Finally, administrators at every level can greatly benefit from pedagogy workshops, specifically those Pedagogies of Engagement that can enrich all academic and most campus life programs.
Enhancing the Experience of Learning through the Four Contexts
The primary contexts within which faculty design learning experiences for students invite workshop practice and reflection. These four contexts–course design, delivery, experiential learning, and assessment of learning–involve different activities and skills on the part of faculty, so an artificial separation of them can be helpful. Once integrated together, the four contexts can lead to what Ken Bain called Super Courses. By considering each context in turn, a number of distinct workshops that we have offered emerge as vital to the development of the particular skills necessary for each context. The workshops included within each context have been offered a number of times in different settings–as the Scott Professor for Teaching Excellence (ULM), as Director of the Center for Academic Excellence at Emory’s Oxford College, as Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University System of Georgia, as Director of Assessment at Southern Polytechnic State University, and as Senior Associate Provost for Academic Affairs at Georgia Gwinnett College.
Course Design In the broadest sense, every teaching and learning workshop involves one or more aspects of course design. More specifically, however, course design (or redesign) itself is a faculty activity often undertaken during the summer or in college workshops and institutes. The primary approach is Fink’s Integrated Course design (the 5 elements) with my own tweaks after 20 years of teaching and 10 of faculty development. Many institutions or departments within them may be developing curricular efforts such as Inquiry or Experiential Learning, to mention two that have received much attention in recent years. Other institutions focus on the development of High Impact Practices within courses. For our work at the system level in recent years, work to embed Pedagogies of Engagement within individual courses has been the primary focus of course design workshops.
A single workshop can set out Fink’s process with appropriate examples; multiple workshops can focus on individual elements or a particular institutional effort.
Delivery in Class Every course meets a number of times for a specific number of minutes. Every minute can provide an opportunity for learning. Simply telling students information can be replaced by a number of strategies, activities, and technologies that engage students. Using the first minutes of class, considering when and how to employ group work, and creating interactive lecturing–are a few areas that our workshops explore with faculty. Other strategies may employ specific technologies, gamification, or pedagogies such as team-based learning, to mention only a few. Interactive lecturing techniques involve another way for faculty with a more traditional teaching philosophy to engage students. Essentially, finding ways to flip the classroom so that classroom minutes are employed in active learning the content of the course is the primary task.
Topics for workshops can include icebreakers, short writing prompts in class, student-led facilitation of discussion, effective use of quizzes, small group work, and a host of other active learning activities.
Experiential Learning/HIPS The conventional AACU 11 High Impact Practices are activities that join course content to an immersive experience. The HIPS have been proven to deepen learning; they are well-researched. For individual faculty, adding a Service Learning project or an Internship opportunity to the arc of the coursework can spark excitement and challenge students in good ways. Embedding a collaborative assignment or research project within a course can make the course memorable for students.
Adding to a Writing Intensive course a Service Learning project can exponentially lift the chances that students will ‘get it’ and do well. Travel abroad and travel away courses also provide opportunities to join course content to ‘real world’ settings.
Essentially, dovetailing the HIP with course content is both exciting and challenging for faculty. The fit of the HIP with the course content is vital for augmenting the learning of course content.
Assessment of Learning Fruitful assessment of student learning is incremental, iterative, and integrated. Within each course, early student learning assessments are low stakes that build into higher stakes, more complex, assignments and assessments. Building effective assessments is more about building learning than anything else. In one sense, assessment should be a part of every day’s work in some specific way through such activities as the Minute Paper.
What makes a good course a really excellent course is essentially an assessment question. Assessment of online courses has been fruitfully developed, and the in-person course assessment rubrics are catching up. Effective assessment also extends to the program and curricular levels. Chairs, deans, and provosts can benefit immensely from a robust knowledge of program assessment.
Based on previous presentations and publications, individual workshops can be offered on a number of topics such as the following workshops:
Co-presenter of “Three Levels of Writing Program Assessment,” a university workshop sponsored by the Teaching and Learning Resource Center (TLRC).
Presenter of “Analysis of Accreditation Standards of SACSCOC and of the American Dental Association,” presentation at the Academy of Teaching Excellence.
Presenter of “Analysis of Accreditation Standards of SACSCOC and Selected External Accreditation Agencies.” University Week Workshop for the TLRC.
Co-presenter of “Designing and Assessing Academic Strategic Plans,” a workshop sponsored by the TLRC.
Presenter of “A Study of the Accreditation Standards of SACSCOC and Selected External Accreditation Agencies,” a University Week Workshop sponsored by the TLRC.
Co-presenter of “Selecting and Designing a Quality Enhancement Plan,” a workshop sponsored by the TLRC.
Co-presenter of “Designing Student Learning Outcomes,” a workshop sponsored by the TLRC.
Co-presenter of “Designing Student Assessment Plans for Departments in the College of Arts and Sciences,” a workshop sponsored by the TLRC.
Co-presenter of “Faculty Involvement in Designing Student Assessment Plans,” a presentation at the Academy of Teaching Excellence.
Co-presenter of “Assessment Across the Colleges,” a workshop sponsored by the TLRC.