Higher Education and Teaching Commons^™

Using Undergraduate Students As Teaching Assistants, Joseph "Mick" La Lopa

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Given the procedure for recruiting and selecting undergraduate students to be teaching assistants (TAs) and the pros and cons mentioned, there is every reason to continue using them to help administer my classes. I completely trust undergraduate TAs to keep an accurate record of attendance, grade assignments based on the rubric, and adhere to the course policies concerning attendance and assignment deadlines. Other educators should consider using the recruitment techniques suggested in this essay to select bright undergraduates to serve as a TA. They will reap many benefits from their work.

Facilitating Group Discussions: Understanding Group Development And Dynamics, Kathy Takayama

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Facilitating discussions requires the ability to engage different perspectives and skills in response to the needs of the group. How well a group works together depends upon the dynamics among participants and the ability of the facilitator to gauge and respond to these dynamics. An effective facilitator works to create an inclusive learning environment while being prepared to set boundaries and rules when necessary. Yet, even experienced facilitators can be confronted with situations or individuals that prevent the group from functioning. Such situations are even more daunting for new faculty and graduate student Teaching Assistants (TAs) who are new to …

The Value Of The Narrative Teaching Observation, Niki Young

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Narrative teaching observations allow educational developers to document a variety of teaching behaviors and, by framing these behaviors with the appropriate vocabulary, to highlight their pedagogical functions. We use the vocabulary not to obfuscate good teaching in educational jargon but to illuminate effective teaching behaviors using an agreed upon professional vocabulary and to make the teaching process more transparent (Hatzipanagos ND Lygo-Baker, 2006). Similarly, through its examples of narrative teaching observations, this essay adds to the literature by making our contribution as faculty developers more evident and making our professional practice more explicit.

Nefdc Exchange, Volume 21, Number 1, Fall 2009, New England Faculty Development Consortium

New England Faculty Development Consortium Exchange

Contents

Message from the President: A Reflection of a Different Light - Tom Thibodeau, New England Institute of Technology

From the editors - Jeanne Albert, Donna Qualters, and Naomi Migliacci

New England Faculty Development Consortium Fall 2009 Conference, November 13, 2009, Worcester, Massachusetts, United States; theme: When Questioning is the Answer: Reflective Practice for College Faculty; keynote presentation by Stephen Brookfield, University of St. Thomas

Excerpt from Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, Jossey-Bass, 1995 by Stephen Brookfield

NEFDC Fall 2009 Conference Agenda

Connecting with others

Contemplative and Transformative Pedagogy - Arthur Zajonc, Amherst College

SAVE the date! NEFDC 2010 Spring …

Western Guide To Curriculum Review, Margaret Mcnay

Purple Guides

The Curriculum Review guide offers ideas about how to get started on the review process—questions to ask at the beginning of and during the process, suggestions about information to be gathered and how, issues to think about as you decide what to include in the curriculum, and ideas about how to teach the curriculum involving new and alternative pedagogies.

Western Guide To Mentoring Graduate Students Across Cultures, Nanda Dimitrov

Purple Guides

The Western Guide to Mentoring Graduate Students Across Cultures is a handbook for graduate supervisors who work with students from cultures around the world. The guide addresses the most frequently occurring challenges in supervision across cultures and includes concrete mentoring strategies and case studies to help supervisors promote independence and initiative in their mentees, bridge power differences in the relationship, set boundaries, communicate effectively and support their students in the transition to Canadian academia.

Nefdc Exchange, Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 2009, New England Faculty Development Consortium

New England Faculty Development Consortium Exchange

Contents

Message from the President: Where We've Been, Where We're Going - Judy Miller, Clark University

From the editors - Jeanne Albert, Donna Qualters, and Naomi Magliacci

NEFDC 2009 Spring Conference, Friday, May 29, 2009; theme: Connecting the .edus: Using Technology to Connect with Our Students; keynote speaker: Peter Doolittle, Virginia Tech

Online Teaching: Field-Tested Principles of Pedagogy and Practice - Peter Doolittle, Virginia Tech; Krista Terry, Radford University, and Stephanie Scheer, University of Virginia

Spring 2009 Conference Agenda, Friday, May 29, 2009, Middlebury College, Dartmouth College, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, New England Institute of Technology, and University of Connecticut

Connecting …

It Takes Discipline: Learning In A World Without Boundaries, Stephen Healey

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

As Plato suggested, pedagogy is inextricably related to the polis. The learner and teacher are constituted by social, political, and economic bounds, and yet the twenty-first century polis is increasingly a world without boundaries. This is a perilous and exciting time to teach and learn. As agents of terror have shown, political boundaries are uncomfortably permeable. Economically, culturally, and religiously, globalization has reduced the power of nation-states and threatened erasure of their boundaries. Isolated identities—nationalistic, religious, linguistic, sexual— are under siege. Nothing is immune from alteration by these large-scale forces. Plato’s insight is that the pressures and possibilities, which determine …

Anatomy Of A Scientific Explanation, Cassandra Volpe Horii

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

“If I’m going to explain this theory, the question is, are you going to understand it? Will you understand the theory?” - -Richard Feynman, 1979 Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures

In this way, Richard Feynman, recipient of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics and renowned teacher, author, and bongo player, introduced scientific explanation as an interesting problem with understanding as its testable outcome. Making quantum mechanics understandable to an audience of non-specialists is no easy task. Feynman had his audience in stitches, on this occasion, after noting that advanced graduate students in physics often “do not understand it either, and that’s …

Non-Science For Majors: Reforming Courses, Programs, And Pedagogy, Jennifer Frederick

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Scientific advances fill news headlines and find audiences in popular movies, legislative bodies, and courtrooms, suggesting that society is broadly engaged by scientific issues. Science students typically learn concepts and methods that ignore the social and cultural foreground as well as religious and ethical implications of science practice. These excluded factors often reappear in scientific developments such as genetic engineering of herbicide-resistant plants, environmental effects of chemical and biological waste management strategies, and medical and health implications of sequencing the human genome. Though today’s science professors are already burdened by expanded content from introductory to advanced courses, now more than …

Making Sure That Peer Review Of Teaching Works For You, Nancy Van Note Chism

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Peer review of teaching: A hastily arranged visit to the classroom of a faculty member in desperate need of quick testimony on teaching effectiveness, resulting in a bland letter stating that the class is interesting and students seem engaged.

Given this prevailing practice in peer review of teaching, no wonder most faculty members fail to see its inherent usefulness. To many, this limited view and practice have rendered it a necessary evil, only to be used under duress. This essay seeks to expand both definition and practice. Let’s begin with another definition:

Peer review of teaching: Collegial efforts to understand …

Orienting Students To An “Inside-Out Course”: Establishing A Classroom Culture Of Interactive, Cooperative Learning, Karlene Ferrante

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

I have developed a course in communication theories that foregrounds active learning, with structured opportunities for support. The result is an “Inside-Out Course” in which students are required to turn in a “ticket” for entry to class— usually a concept map of the reading. Since the first exposure to material is through homework, class time is used for quick overviews and learning activities designed by student teaching teams. Students are motivated to create good concept maps for tickets, since they are allowed to use those maps for the case study exams, taken with open notes. Assessments require students to select …

"How Did I Spend Two Hours Grading This Paper?!" Responding To Student Writing Without Losing Your Life, Eric Lemay

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

The specific critical moves and writing conventions of your discipline probably differ from mine, but your discipline certainly has them and when teaching them to students becomes your aim, your responses to their writing will take less time and be more effective. No longer will you have to transform novice papers into expert ideas. Instead, you can focus on the novices themselves. You can use their writing to teach them the next thing they need to know as novice historians, philosophers, or anthropologists. Given that they’re novices and you’re an expert, that thing is almost always obvious to you, although …

Using Rubrics To Teach Science Writing, Paul E. Bennett Jr.

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

An often-stated goal of education in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields is to teach students to communicate like professionals. In the STEM fields, the single most important thing we can do to teach our students better communication skills is to teach them how to write a lab report. The reason a lab report is so important is not just because it is the end product of a research project, but because each section of a lab report has a particular function that often correlates with different types of communication that a STEM professional needs to use. For …

Beyond Student Ratings: “A Whole New World, A New Fantastic Point Of View”, Ronald A. Berk

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Unfortunately, student ratings have dominated as the primary and, frequently, only measure of teaching performance at colleges and universities for the past four decades (Seldin, 2006). In fact, the evaluation of teaching has been in a metaphorical cul-de-sac with student ratings as the universal barometer. Only recently has there been a trend toward augmenting those ratings with other data sources to broaden and deepen the evidence base (Arreola, 2007; Berk, 2006b; Braskamp and Ory, 1994; Centra, 1993; Knapper and Cranton, 2001; Seldin, 2006).

Although much has been learned over the 60-year history of faculty evaluation and the 50-year his- tory …

Western Guide To Graduate Supervision, Elizabeth Skarakis-Doyle, Gayle L. Mcintyre

Purple Guides

Based on the experiences of Western's graduate supervisors, this 30 page guide addresses the supervision of graduate students and focuses on best practices in mentoring, promoting student progress, and clarifying expectations in the supervisor-student relationship.

What Helps Law Professors Develop As Teachers? -- An Empirical Study, Gerald F. Hess, Sophie M. Sparrow

Law Faculty Scholarship

The overall goal of this article is to provide concrete suggestions for how law schools can improve teaching and enrich law student learning. In doing so, it reviews and analyzes the data collected from two national surveys about the kinds of faculty development activities that are most effective in improving law professors’ teaching. One survey was designed to quantify how many law teachers engaged in twenty-two types of teaching development activities over the previous five years and to assess the effectiveness of each of those activities. The other survey focused on the effectiveness of a national conference on teaching and …

Building Assignments That Teach, Mary-Ann Winkelmes

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

We have come to take assignments for granted as a necessary part of undergraduate education, largely because they provide the basis for a student's grade. But assignments can accomplish much more. In addition to helping students learn course content, assignments can enable students to practice the most essential skills of a discipline. Further, assignments can offer an opportunity for students to become better evaluators of their own academic work.

Thoughtfully structured assignments offer teachers an opportunity to build students’ mastery of essential disciplinary skills alongside their content knowledge; to improve students’ ability to evaluate their own academic work; and even …

Beyond Writing: Integrative Learning And Teaching In First-Year Seminars, David H. Krause, Robert C. Lageaux

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Campuses across the country continue to establish first-year seminars that promise students integrative and transformative learning experiences necessary for the twenty-first century. This trend inevitably challenges faculty members to teach in ways that transcend or subvert both their disciplinary expertise and their familiar, comfortable ways of teaching. These challenges become especially visible in the design and evaluation of assignments. At Columbia College Chicago, for example, where the majority of students aspire to careers in the arts, media, and communication, teachers have been negotiating the place of writing in a required firstyear seminar in liberal learning. These negotiations play out differently …

Role-Play: An Often Misused Active Learning Strategy, Stephanie Nickerson

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Role-play is a special kind of case study, in which there is an explicit situation established with students playing specific roles, spontaneously saying and doing what they understand their “character” would, in that situation. Role-plays differ from other case studies in the immediacy of the experience. Students find themselves in the role-play. In a case study, they read about situations and characters. One of the reasons role-play can work so well is because of the power of placing oneself in another’s shoes. This provides opportunities for learning in both the affective domain, where emotions and values are involved, as well …

Teaching, Learning, And Spirituality In The College Classroom, Allison Pingree

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

landscape is provoking a heightened focus on spirituality and religion in the academy. For example, UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), best known as the administrators of the CIRP Freshman Survey for over 40 years, is conducting a major research project, Spirituality in Higher Education (https://www.spirituality.ucla.edu), drawing data from over 112,000 students and 40,000 faculty at over 420 institutions. Defining spirituality in broad strokes (as the “interior” and “subjective” aspects of our lives, that which reflects the “values and ideals that we hold most dear,” gives us “meaning and purpose,” and invokes “inspiration, creativity, the mysterious, the sacred, …

Western Guide To Mentorship In Academia, Donald Gordon Cartwright

Purple Guides

This guide addresses the importance of mentoring for new faculty members, describes the pros and cons of various mentorship models, and offers advice for mentors and mentees.

Collaboration Or Plagiarism? Explaining Collaborative-Based Assignments Clearly, Tuesday Cooper

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Much has been written about the use of collaborative learning as a pedagogical tool to enhance student learning. Collaborative learning, or group work as it is commonly known, can be defined as a structured process where students are required to work in groups to complete a common task or assignment for a particular course. It has been identified as one of the most effective ways for students to become actively engaged in classroom activities (Davis, 1993; McKeachie, 1999; Nilson, 1998).

Although there are many positive aspects of group work, there are negatives as well. One particular problem occurs when students …

Developing The Scholarship Of Teaching And Learning Using Faculty Learning Communities, Milton D. Cox

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) have proven successful in producing teaching projects, as evidenced by a survey of institutions with FLCs. It follows that these groups should provide ideal conditions for a subsequent development of those projects into peerreviewed publications and presentations, or the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). This essay offers faculty practical advice for producing such SoTL products based on what started as a teaching project in an FLC. My advice is based on work with FLCs for 28 years on my campus and others (Cox, 2003).

The Right Start: Reflections On A Departmentally Based Graduate Course On Teaching, Craig E. Nelson

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Full credit courses on teaching offered by academic departments for their own graduate students and postdocs have many advantages. Many students come to graduate school because they want teaching to be an important part of their future professional life. Most who are hired in academia will go to jobs where teaching is important. Indiana University’s Graduate School noted that 95% of its PhDs who landed tenure-track positions found those positions at liberal arts colleges, smaller comprehensive universities, and urban institutions. They noted that their teaching experience at Bloomington did not necessarily prepare them fully for these jobs.

I offered a …

The Useful, Sensible, No-Frills Departmental Assessment Plan, Barbara E. Walvoord

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Academic departments from physics to philosophy to physical therapy face new demands for “assessment of student learning.” It’s hard to argue against the basic idea of assessment: when a department invests time and resources trying to nurture student learning, it should ask itself: Are they learning? Yet departments may also fear that assessment will require them to dumb-down their teaching; use standardized tests; teach alike; or compromise academic freedom. Every department wonders how it will find the time and resources for one more thing.

This essay suggests a simple, sustainable, and useful departmental assessment plan that capitalizes on what departments …

Nefdc Exchange, Volume 18, Number 2, Fall 2007, New England Faculty Development Consortium

New England Faculty Development Consortium Exchange

Contents

Message from the President - Judy Miller, Clark University

From the editors - Tom Thibodeau, New England Institute of Technology, and Jeanne Albert, Castleton State College

NEFDC Fall Conference, Friday, November 9, 2007, Worcester, Massachusetts; theme: Engaged Learning: Fostering Student Success; keynote speaker: George Kuh, Indiana University

Engaged Learning: The Foundation for Student Success, Note from our Fall Conference Keynote Speaker - George Kuh, Indiana University

Fall Conference Agenda

Learning Through Community Engagement - Kevin R. Kearney, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

Reciprocal Mentoring - Mathew L. Ouellett and Susan E. McKenna, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Helpful …

Nefdc Exchange, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2007, New England Faculty Development Consortium

New England Faculty Development Consortium Exchange

Contents

Message from the President - Judith Kamber, Northern Essex Community College

From the editors -

Encounters With George: Information Literacy and Mathematics at Berkshire Community College - Karen Carreras-Hubbard and Annette Guertin, Berkshire Community College

Achieving Information Literacy Goals Through Collaboration - Pamela Bedore, University of Connecticut, Avery Point

Teaming Up! The Sociology/English Composition I /Librarian Embed Experience at Northern Essex Community College - Linda A. Desjardins, Northern Essex Community College

Common Learning Outcomes for First-Year Information Literacy - Mary Adams, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth; Gabriela Adler, Bristol Community College; Susan Berteaux, Massachusetts Maritime Academy; Marcia Dinneen, Bridgewater State …

When Motivating Generation Y In The Classroom, Jim Westerman

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Generation Y students have matured and developed in an artificial, technologically-centered environment significantly different from what prior generations have experienced. This essay examines the impact of this environment on student classroom expectations and provides suggestions for how faculty can adapt their pedagogy to be successful.

Student Plagiarism: How To Maintain Academic Integrity, Ludy Goodson

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Plagiarism detection tools undermine academic integrity when they ignore student copyright protections, contribute to a vendor’s unauthorized commercial gains, fail to detect many forms of plagiarism, and require instructors to do the real detection. By becoming aware of these realities and possibilities, instructors can develop more effective strategies to reduce plagiarism while simultaneously enhancing students’ academic performance.