2017 Leadership Retreat

Discussion of 2017-18 Professional Development Programming
Session from the October 2, 2017 leadership retreat

Jim Swartz retreat slides (PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) 382kB Oct2 17)

Goals for this session:

• Develop a plan for our professional development activities
• Assist campus representatives in encouraging campus members to participate
• Understand what issues are pressing on the Alliance Campuses we can address.
• Using the needs assessment survey responses and September 2017 Lunch and Learn conversation
• Getting additional responses to the needs assessment survey
• Get feedback on possible formats for the PD series.

NOTES from the conversation:

New topics for sessions - what else besides the list we got last Wednesday?

Connections with center for teaching and learning

Connections between CIRTL and SERC sessions

Concrete ideas for operationalizing approaches programmatically, as a group of instructors

• What are specifics about things other campuses/faculty are doing
• How to gather examples?
• People might volunteer presenting on specific topics

Take specific topics back to the faculty? Do lunch and learn first and then do workshops?

Taking the general big ideas of being inclusive to the very detailed about day to day teaching practices.

• Sharing insights or transferring experiences from one course to another.
• Here are classroom practices that people should be using.
• How to include inclusive practice across different types of courses.
• How to make sure our faculty are using these practices across Alliance courses.
• Details about how to do culturally sensitive teaching, teaching in context, teaching in place (Ibarra 2012) CBE paper

How to get conversations going among faculty groups on campuses

• Grinnell example of reading groups and then community of practice approach to faculty learning
• Engaging centers for teaching and learning or STEM education Centers (CIRTL ?) Network of STEM Education Centers
• How to align what faculty want to see and engage with, with what the Centers or IINSPIRE are presenting
• Think about how to make successful practices go viral across the Alliance
• If there are CTLs (not STEM Centers) there is a challenge with audience for them because they have to take into consideration non-STEM fields also

Universal design model approaches - floating all boats

(I missed a comment by Derrick here)

Comments about entraining recalcitrant faculty - or getting everyone on board with changes they may or may not think they need to make.

How to deal with students who have different levels of preparation coming to college. Especially with math. But also other topics, reading, and general study and organizational skills.

• These issues overlap with SES, making the situation more delicate
• They also overlap sometimes with first generation students - and who they have to draw on when they are struggling
• Topic to teach: how to be an effective student
• But also - how to catch up students who haven't had opportunities to learn (math, reading whatever skill) to get them up to level with peers from better prepared backgrounds.
• Can address this from a program/major point of view
• Can also address this from a what to do in a classroom
• There are successful models for first year seminars to help students in these situations (an in addition course) that could be shared across the Alliance
• How to teach or encourage help seeking behavior.

Students have history of being taught in different ways. This means that students may respond to specific teaching strategies differently. How, as an instructor, to deal with this.

Building on the plenary speaker at the 2017 annual meeting. Maybe a lunch and learn to a broader group, with a follow up of some practice/practical experiences.

What are metacognitive skills we need to explicitly teach students. How to do this - with examples