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Faculty Professional Issues
August 30, 2011
Using the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) to improve courses and student learning
Many faculty rely on an informal process in which they reflect on the success of teaching strategies or assignments throughout the term and think about how these might be improved. These reflections inform decisions the instructor makes when revising assignments and structuring the course in future terms. This strategy of ongoing reflection on teaching and learning can be an effective way to improve one’s teaching and improve the quality of student learning in a course.
An instructor who gathers documentation about how courses and assignments evolve over time will develop good materials to include in an annual evaluation or tenure portfolio to document the quality of teaching. A more systematic approach that includes formal assessments of student learning demonstrated in course assignments might produce high-quality evidence that revised teaching strategies are effective. An instructor could submit this scholarly work on teaching and learning for publication in a peer reviewed journal on teaching. These peer-reviewed SoTL publications could be included as documentation of research and scholarship in annual evaluations and tenure portfolios.
Finding the time and resources to implement a Scholarship of Teachinsg and Learning project in a course can be a challenge. The Assessment Grants offered by the Academic Programs Assessment Council include a category to support faculty SoTL projects. The faculty grants will fund up to $1,000 for projects in which faculty use assessment evidence to evaluate the impact of a change in teaching strategy or new activity on student learning related to program-level student learning outcomes in a required course in the degree program. For more information on Faculty SoTL Project grants, review the Request for Proposals and rubric used by APAC reviewers housed on the Provost Office web page (http://uwf.edu/academic/apac/). The CUTLA web site provides resources on how to develop a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning project (http://uwf.edu/cutla/sotl.cfm). Contact Claudia Stanny at CUTLA for a consultation on how to develop a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning project.
NOTE: Deadline for submitting an APAC Assessment Grant proposal is September 16, 2011.e of Denver (http://www.mscd.edu/cfd/).
August 23, 2011
Use an annotated syllabus to track your thinking about course design and teaching
The UWF Tenure and Promotion Guidelines (2010) include course syllabi as one example of artifacts that faculty might include in a tenure portfolio to document their contribution to high quality teaching. An annotated syllabus is an artifact that is based on a simple course syllabus and then grows in scope and in depth as instructors add annotations and links to additional materials. An annotated syllabus is an ideal mechanism for prompting and tracking your reflections about teaching and learning that contribute to good course design. You can also use an annotated syllabus to document the intellectual work you invest in teaching.
Another advantage to creating an annotated syllabus is the immediate and tangible benefit to course development. How often do you identify useful changes you might make to a course midway through the term? Changes might consist of better ways to design an assignment or modifications that improve an in-class learning activity. It is seldom possible to implement these changes during the term that you first think of them. Unless we capture these good ideas when they arise, we might not recall them or our rationale for making changes the next time we prepare for this course.
Annotated syllabi can motivate reflection on your assumptions about course design. Notations allow you to pose questions such as “is this textbook really accomplishing what I want from it?” or “does my policy about class participation motivate students to give their best?” or “is my grading rubric as clear as it can be about different levels of performance?” These notations will remind you to revisit these questions later, when you are more likely to have the time to explore other options for course design.
Annotate your syllabus in ways that serve your goals for improving the course and your teaching. Include annotations for questions you have about the course or teaching activities, to indicate where you are considering making changes, to explain the scholarly thinking that informed your decision about an aspect of the course design, or indicate assignments or other graded work that provide opportunities for you to assess how well students are achieving a desired learning outcome in the course.
Consider reading a book about instructional improvement or course design that could serve to prompt your own questioning about instructional choices. Some titles available from the CUTLA library that may be useful are:
- Ken Bain (2004). What the best college teachers do.
- Stephen Brookfield (2005). The skillful teacher (2nd ed).
- L. Dee Fink (2003). Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses.
- Maryellen Weimer (2002). Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice.
Creating an annotated syllabus
Save a copy of your current syllabus in Word under a file name that identifies it as your annotated syllabus. Open the Review menu in Word and use the comments feature to add annotations at relevant points in your syllabus. Add a date to each comment to indicate when you implement these changes to the course syllabus. You can add reflections on the impact of changes in later terms.
You can view samples of annotated syllabi created by faculty at Metropolitan State College of Denver at http://metrofacultydevelopment.pbworks.com.
This tip is based on a teaching strategy submitted by Mark Potter, Director, Center for Faculty Development, Metropolitan State College of Denver (www.mscd.edu/cfd/).
April 19, 2011
Balance flexibility and fairness through course design
College students lead increasingly busy lives, juggling college courses, off-campus work schedules, family responsibilities, and other demands of personal life. When planning a course, consider the need to balance work and life, for your students and for yourself.
Maryellen Weimer (2006) encourages instructors to occasionally put themselves in their students’ shoes by taking a college course outside their field of expertise every few years. Attending an out-of-field course has several benefits.
- You will learn something new and interesting and will serve as a model for life-long learning for students.
- You might observe an intriguing new teaching strategy that might be adapted to teaching in your discipline.
- The experience of being a novice learner in a discipline with a vocabulary, approach to solving problems, or writing conventions that differ from those used in your discipline can help you identify areas in your field that present similar challenges to students in your classes. This experience might inspire you to provide more detailed explanations of difficult concepts or create additional opportunities for students to practice challenging new skills and improve their success in learning.
- Your experience with conflicts between class demands and the various professional demands associated with your own teaching, service, and research might sensitize you to the conflicts students experience and inform your decisions about setting deadlines when you plan a future course. Consider whether your course deadlines occur at the same time as those of other courses students are likely to take. Consider building in some flexibility for deadlines. Keep in mind that you must also protect your own workload and time management! Hold students to reasonable standards and deadlines, be compassionate and empathic to student requests for flexible arrangements for deadlines, but avoid granting special treatment to individual students unless extraordinary circumstances do require these unique adjustments. Reserve your right to determine boundaries or “lines in the sand” that cannot be violated without undermining course quality (Robertson, 2003).
This tip is based on a suggestion from Mark Potter, Center for Faculty Development, Metropolitan State College of Denver (http://www.mscd.edu/cfd/).
Robertson, D. (2003). Making time, making change: Avoiding overload in college teaching. Stillwater, OK: New Forums Press.
Weimer, M. (2006). Enhancing scholarly work on teaching and learning: Professional literature that makes a difference. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
February 1, 2011
Library online tutorials – not just for students!
The University of West Florida Libraries hosts a variety of online tutorials. The index page lists a variety of topics, ranging from basic search strategies through discipline-specific library research skills, evaluating scholarly sources, writing skills and good authorship practices.
http://library.uwf.edu/Research/OnlineTutorials/
Faculty can develop student skills with information literacy by assigning one or more of these tutorials to students. Many of these tutorials include an online quiz that assesses the learning outcomes for the tutorial. Results of these quizzes can be e-mailed to course instructors to verify student completion of the tutorial, use as a graded component of the course, or include in departmental assessments of program-level student learning outcomes.
Faculty will also find online tutorials (without quizzes!) that are useful for their professional needs. One online tutorial provides information about how faculty can find data on the frequency with which their scholarly work has been cited and information on rankings and acceptance rates for the scholarly journals in which they publish. These data are frequently included in tenure and promotion portfolios as part of the evidence to document the quality and impact of scholarly work.
The direct URL for the Faculty Promotion Resources tutorial is:
http://library.uwf.edu/Research/OnlineTutorials/FacultyPromo/
Each spring, CUTLA provides a workshop on preparing for tenure and promotion. A panel of administrators involved with the review process and faculty who were successful candidates in the previous cycle will describe the process, give advice on preparing a portfolio, and answer questions posed by future candidates. Check the CUTLA calendar for time and location each year. This year, the T&P workshop will be held on February 4, 2011 in Conference Center Room A. Lunch will be served at noon. Discussion will begin shortly afterward and run until 2 PM.
October 19, 2010
Maintain momentum on your research through collaborations with faculty and students
Balancing the demands of teaching, research, and service can be difficult at a regional comprehensive university, where faculty teach more courses than colleagues at a research-intensive university. Finding the time and resources to develop a research program can be especially challenging. Several resources are available to faculty at UWF that will help you establish and maintain a productive research program:
- The Office of Research and Sponsored Programs provides support with the location of funding for grants and assistance with budget development and electronic submission to grant agencies (http://research.uwf.edu/internal/index.cfm).
- The Scholarly and Creative Activities Committee awards internal grants to faculty and graduate students. Information about the current grant cycles, including the Request for Proposals and critical dates for grant submissions and decisions, is available on the SCAC web site. (http://research.uwf.edu/internal/funding/internal.cfm).
- The College of Arts and Sciences hosts a web site for searching for potential research collaborators among colleagues at UWF. Create a profile for yourself on the Research Connections web site (http://uwf.edu/cas/researchconnections/). Search this site to identify faculty with relevant research skills and shared research interests who might collaborate with you on a research project. Collaboration is an effective strategy for preventing research and writing projects from falling to the bottom of your to-do list. Collaborations are also a great way of connecting with colleagues in your department or in other departments on campus. Contact Dr. Eman El-Sheikh for more information about Research Connections (eelsheikh@uwf.edu).
- Faculty who engage undergraduate students in their research activities will find additional support for undergraduate research from the newly-established Office of Undergraduate Research, directed by Dr. Pam Vaughan. For more information, visit the Office of Undergraduate Research web site (http://uwf.edu/our) or send an e-mail to OUR (OUR@uwf.edu).
Each fall, the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs facilitates a CUTLA Faculty Friday on finding funding for research. The current workshop is scheduled for Friday, October 22, 2010. Details and reservations for this workshop are on the CUTLA calendar.
September 7, 2010
Request feedback from your students about your course during the term
Model the use of formative feedback for your students and reinforce the credibility of the end-of-term course evaluations. Discuss the value for both you and your students of constructive, formative feedback about the class structure and your teaching. Point out to your students that evaluative feedback from students at the end of the term does nothing to benefit the students who are currently enrolled in the course. Faculty simply can’t correct a problem that they don’t know about. If they learn about a problem only after the term ends, the problem might be corrected in the following term and benefit those students, but it can’t possibly be resolved for students during the current term.
Consider conducting a mid-course evaluation.
- Create a short survey by creating a Form in Google documents. This option is located in the create new menu in Google documents. Your questions can be embedded in an email sent to students. Responses will be collected in an Excel file stored as a Google document.
- Invite a representative from CUTLA or a colleague to visit your class and conduct a focus group (e.g., a Small Group Instructional Diagnosis) to elicit student feedback on the course.
- Request written feedback in class through a Minute Paper in-class writing. Ask students to describe an aspect of the class or your teaching that has helped them learn, an aspect of the class that they would like to change (and why), and suggest something you might do to help them learn the material more effectively.
- Participate in the Teaching Partners program (http://uwf.edu/cutla/teaching_partners.cfm). Teaching Partners is a mutual mentoring program in which faculty conduct classroom observation visits and provide one another formative feedback about their teaching. The program includes a workshop on how to structure an effective classroom observation.
Not all suggestions or comments can be acted on (nor should all suggestions be acted on). Instructors can draw attention in class to those changes they make based on student suggestions and explain why some suggestions cannot be implemented (e.g., dispensing with exams or grading, ending an evening class half an hour early every night). The fact that you take the comments seriously and responded to those that you can reasonably implement strengthens students’ beliefs that you take course evaluations seriously.
This tip is based in part by a tip submitted by Michael Dabney, Director, Teaching and Learning Center
Hawaii Pacific University (http://www.hpu.edu/index.cfm?contentID=9473&siteID=1).
March 2, 2010
Using electronic tools to manage collaborations with students and colleagues
Current technology now provides a variety of tools that allow faculty to collaborate with students and colleagues. E-mail enables rapid communication and exchange of documents with collaborators. Faculty can now easily draft and edit a manuscript with co-authors on several continents by sending documents as attachments or sharing documents through other electronic forums. For example, Google Documents and Google Sites allow faculty to share and edit documents without exchanging large attachments in e-mail.
Although technology creates many convenient tools for collaboration, it also creates vulnerabilities to the security of intellectual property and personal identity. When collaborating with students and colleagues in the UWF community, faculty are sometimes tempted to provide access to files on a computer or server by disclosing their password instead of using a more secure collaboration tool. ITS and CUTLA developed a new information website that discusses the tools currently available for electronic collaboration that will help faculty easily share files with students and colleagues without compromising password security.
The new web site is located at http://uwf.edu/cutla/password.cfm
Thanks to Sylvia Maxwell and Michael White (ITS) for contributions to this teaching tip.
September 1, 2009
Improving teaching through peer mentoring: Teaching Partners Program
An effective practice to improve teaching is to engage in informed reflection on one’s teaching practices. Faculty can obtain useful information about practices that work well in their classrooms and suggestions about areas that might need attention by asking a peer to visit their classroom and observe their teaching.
The Teaching Partners Program allows faculty to identify a peer partner to engage in mutual classroom observations. The process benefits the person doing the observation, who might observe and learn about a new classroom strategy, and the person whose teaching is observed.
For more information about peer observation and the Teaching Partners Program, visit the following URL:
http://www.uwf.edu/cas/partners/
Now in its second year, the Teaching Partners Program is open to faculty in all three colleges. Participants in the first year were pleased with the experience and collegial discussions of teaching. If you are interested in participating in the Teaching Partners Program this year, please plan to attend the organizational meeting at noon on Thursday, September 3, 2009 in the University Commons, Nautilus Chamber, Room 255.
September 30, 2008 (Bruce Henderson on campus Friday, Oct 3)
Balancing Demands While Teaching at the People’s University
In Teaching at the People’s University, Bruce Henderson describes the substantial demands placed on faculty at a regional comprehensive university: significant professional scholarship, evidence of a commitment to excellent teaching, and substantial service to the university, community, and professional discipline. He also discusses how faculty can contribute to the mission of a regional comprehensive university while building a coherent professional portfolio of scholarship, teaching, and service.
Bruce Henderson will be the keynote speaker at the mini-conference on Best Practices for Student Engagement in Face-to-Face and Online Classes on Friday, October 3. Join Bruce for a discussion of the expectations for scholarship, teaching, and service for faculty who teach in the unique environment known as a regional comprehensive university. The mini-conference will also include presentations by UWF faculty who will discuss effective instructional practices they use in their courses to engage students and promote student learning.
The Work of the Regional University: Doing Interesting Scholarly Things
Bruce B. Henderson
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Friday, October 3, 2008
University Commons Auditorium
See the CUTLA calendar for the full schedule for the mini-conference (http://uwf.edu/cutla/).
Henderson, B. B. (2007). Teaching at the people’s university: An introduction to the state comprehensive university. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing.
Henderson, B. B., & Buchanan, H. E. (2007). The scholarship of teaching and learning: A special niche for faculty at comprehensive universities? Research in Higher Education, 48, 523-543.
June 17, 2008
Mid-course evaluations are useful tools for getting information about what is and is not working well in your course. Instructors can make use of this formative feedback to make adjustments to the course to improve student engagement and learning. Give students a framework for this evaluation to encourage thoughtful, constructive feedback and discourage irrelevant comments about your hair style or wardrobe. Typical questions include:
What activities or course materials have helped you learn in this course?
Is there anything that is currently hindering your learning?
What changes (if any) would improve your ability to learn in this course?
These should be completed anonymously. Sort the responses into “things that are going well,” “things that might be changed to improve the course this term,” and “things that can’t be changed” and share these with your students. Although students might not be interested in the first category, sharing a few successes will direct student attention to positive aspects of the class. Identify one or two realistic adjustments based on comments from the second category. Students will appreciate your flexibility and willingness to make reasonable adjustments. Finally, explain why some items necessarily fall in the “can’t be changed” category. The course fulfills a particular role in the curriculum and yes, students are expected to be able to use statistical analyses to evaluate data. Students must use correct grammar in their writing. Courses must include tests or other evaluations of student learning. Include a humorous off-base suggestion or comment as a tacit example of the difference between constructive and unhelpful feedback.
Angelo, T. A., & Cross, K. P. (1993). Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for college teachers (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Updated 08/23/11