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CENTER FOR
TEACHING &
LEARNING AT CONNECTICUT
COLLEGE
Small College Teaching & Learning:
National Workshops
and Presentations
Joy Shechtman Mankoff Center for Teaching & Learning
Peter Frederick's 10 Ideas for Faculty Conversations
Peter Frederick's 16 Reflections from 30 Years in Faculty Development
Transforming Teaching Cultures: The Need for Teaching and Learning Programs at Liberal Arts Colleges
Thursday, January 27, 2005
An Interactive Session as part of the
AAC&U Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, January 26-29, 2005
"Liberal Education and the New Academy: Raising Expectations, Keeping
Promises"
“Learning is least useful when it is private and hidden; it is most powerful when it becomes public and communal. Learning flourishes when we take what we think we know and offer it as community property among fellow learners so that it can be tested, examined, challenged, and improved before we internalize it.” - Lee Shulman (Change 1999)
Workshop Description | Rationale for Workshop | Workshop Facilitators | Contact Information
Workshop Description
This session asks academic officers and faculty at small liberal arts colleges to engage in collaborative group work while considering the following strategic issues for their home campuses:
- Why pursue faculty development programs on teaching?
- Who are the faculty on my campus and what do they want from these programs?
- Who should lead the effort to create and organize faculty development efforts?
- Is a center for teaching and learning necessary for creating community and transformation?
By sharing programming and administrative examples from their experiences as faculty developers — all three have helped lead successful faculty development efforts on their campuses —the session facilitators will also examine the following issues with the participants:
This interactive session will encourage new perspectives about the roles of teaching and learning programs and centers on small college campuses and foster deeper understanding about the critical ingredients necessary for transformational change. We will provide handouts and additional resources on a variety of faculty development programs. Participants will leave with a better sense of how to move forward in creating and sustaining a culture of teaching excellence on their own campuses.
Rationale for Workshop
Faculty members are life-long learners by design: they have to be if they expect to stay current in their fields. Disciplinary conferences afford professional outlets to discuss research, allowing faculty to remain critical practitioners in their fields. But how can we ensure that our faculty become critical practitioners of their teaching as they struggle to balance competing demands to publish, advise students, and serve on committees? How does a college share its expectations about faculty continuing to develop and expand their classroom pedagogies?
Small liberal arts colleges are known for the quality of their classroom teaching, and they usually attract faculty who share the tacit belief that teaching is the sine qua non of their faculty role. Yet, we have found that at liberal arts colleges it is possible to take good teaching for granted: Simply valuing good teaching does not lead to good teaching. Faculty need to be critical practitioners of their craft and critical practitioners share, discuss, and analyze their classroom practices. How do we make classroom practice visible — how do we make teaching (and learning) “community property”?
Workshop Facilitators
Richard Holmgren, Associate Dean & Director of the Learning Commons, Allegheny College http://learningcommons.allegheny.edu/
Kim Mooney, Director, Center for Teaching and Learning, St. Lawrence University http://web.stlawu.edu/ctl/
Michael Reder, Director, Center for Teaching & Learning, Connecticut
College
http://CTL.conncoll.edu
Contact Information
For more information about the session e-mail Michael Reder
For more information about the AAC&U Meeting visit: http://www.aacu.org/meetings/annualmeeting/index.cfm