Workshops

State Your Case! workshops are offered two or three times a year. Many are led by faculty or consultants from other institutions. Locations will rotate among the three institutions, but all St. Olaf, Carleton, and Macalester faculty are invited to participate in any event. Workshops are typically a one-and-a-half or two-day commitment with a stipend of $200 and travel expenses as needed between Northfield and St. Paul. The links to upcoming workshops include on-line registration forms.

Upcoming workshops

Learning to Communicate, Communicating to Learn: Oral Communication Instruction Across the Disciplines
Monday, June 7 - Wednesday, June 9 at St. Olaf College
This three-day workshop will help faculty in any discipline integrate oral communication instruction, practice, and feedback into their courses to improve students' proficiency in listening and speaking while enhancing their learning of course content. Communication-rich courses can help students learn to "state their case" effectively in a variety of communication settings, including interviews, discussions, debates, group projects, panel presentations, poster presentations, and public speaking assignments.

Participant lists from previous workshops

Learning to Reason and Communicate in College forum - January 10 (Microsoft Word 94kB Mar28 10)
State Your Case! workshop - August 09 (Microsoft Word 98kB Mar28 10)
Assessing for Learning conference - April 09 (Microsoft Word 190kB Mar28 10)
Team-Based Learning workshop - January 09 (Microsoft Word 91kB Mar28 10)
CLA in the Classroom workshop - October 08 (Microsoft Word 91kB Mar28 10)

Materials from previous workshops

State Your Case! Practical Strategies for Helping Students Learn to Develop and Support a Point of View
Tuesday, August 18 - Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at Macalester College
This two-day workshop provides practical examples of assignments and activities that help students learn to make a convincing case for a policy, position, or point of view, and suggests simple approaches to classroom assessment to help instructors track improvements in students' proficiencies.

Assessing for Learning: A Collaborative Assessment for Liberal Learning (CALL) Conference
Friday evening, April 24 - Saturday, April 25, 2009 at Carleton College and St. Olaf College
This conference engaged faculty from the four original CALL institutions (Carleton, St. Olaf, Macalester, and Grinnell) in sharing what we have learned about assessment over our four-year partnership. Many sessions showcased faculty using assessment in innovative ways within their courses to improve student learning.

Department-Level Scholarly Inquiry Into Learning: The Teaching Portfolio
March 3, 2009 at St. Olaf College
Dan Bernstein, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Kansas, conducted a mini-workshop providing examples of teaching portfolios used by departments to explore how well they are achieving their own goals for their undergraduate programs. 

Designing Rubrics for Improved Grading and Powerful Outcomes Assessment
February 11-13, 2009 at St. Olaf College and Carleton College
In a series of events hosted by the St. Olaf Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts and the Carleton Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching, John Bean, Professor of English at Seattle University and author of Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, offered practical guidance for creating rubrics that give students meaningful feedback on their work, save grading time, and provide useful assessment evidence. 

Team-Based Learning
January 30-31, 2009 at Carleton College and St. Olaf College
TBL creator Larry Michaelsen (University of Central Missouri) introduced the key characteristics of effective team assignments that sharpen an array of learning outcomes, including the ability to make a convincing case for a specific decision, course of action, or point of view.

Assignments That Improve Arguments: A State Your Case! CLA in the Classroom Academy
October 31 - November 1, 2008 at Carleton College and St. Olaf College
Researchers from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) project led a two-day workshop that showed participants how to design a CLA-like "performance task" for their courses, and how to assess students' work using criteria similar to those used to score the CLA. A CLA performance task requires students to evaluate an array of evidence - qualitative and quantitative, relevant and irrelevant, reliable and questionable - and make a convincing recommendation that is appropriately supported by that evidence. St. Olaf, Carleton, and Macalester are all participating in the national CLA assessment project.