Every few years, I offer the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence’s (SITE) Course in College Teaching. This spring with Chas Brua of Schreyer, I plan to offer it once again. Each time it is offered, I try to give it a slightly different spin so that long-time faculty participants can still join in and gain benefits. The first year, we did the traditional SITE program joining another cohort at the main campus virtually. A few years later, we replicated the program locally but offered different levels of participation so that casual participants could join in the conversations without the need for completing tasks towards the certificate. The third time, I added an optional action research component where faculty could explore a burning classroom issue, try an intervention and collect data. These early projects also paved the way for a SoTL conference and more formal SoTL projects that followed.
This year, we have a large group of new faculty who are interested in getting together to talk about teaching, and so it seemed like good timing to offer this again. I’ve found an interesting and more recent text that may end up guiding us this time around – Assessing and improving your teaching: strategies and rubrics for faculty growth and student learning (2014) by Phyllis Blumberg and Maryellen Weimer which looks like a really good framework for us.
My early plan, after consulting with Chas, will be to start with a general conversation about how we view our teaching with stories about “The best of times; The worst of times” followed by a conversation and shared planning for the remainder of the program. I don’t want it to be too prescriptive so we can get a broader participation and reach many goals. In the end, it will be nice if people would like to present their work, insights, growth to the campus at an event in spring.
Planning and running the CCT is always a lot of work, but it’s also very rewarding and I’m looking forward to it once again!
UPDATE 3/3/2017
We are just about to have our 4th session in the series and it has become a nice action research approach. Each faculty member has chosen an issue in their teaching that they would like to address. They’ve spent time exploring different interventions and will be hearing more about ways to collect data as they try the new approaches in class. Finally, they’ll each write a report that we’ll share out to the larger community explaining the issue, the context, their intervention, data collection and lessons learned.
At the same time, we’ve been reading and discussing Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do (2004) Harvard University Press . Session 5 & 6 we’ll be doing peer reviews and sharing out the project reports. I’ve enjoyed it, and I expect we’ll have something really great to share once we finish up.
