The major, university-wide initiative, The Scholarship of Teaching & Learning at Western Carolina University, was formally begun with the 2003 Summer Institute for Teaching & Learning. The goals of SoTL at WCU are improved student learning, teaching effectiveness, faculty development and a profoundly collegial community of and for teaching and learning.

At the 2007 Summer Institute, May 14-17, faculty will engage in sustained inquiry about teaching and students' learning. They have the opportunity to choose one topic on which to focus and become a member of one of the Focus Teams, described below, led by a faculty facilitator. During the three days of the Institute, approximately 10 hours will be with one's team, with whole-group activities at the beginning and end of each day, and time for individual work.

The Summer Institute is sponsor by the IT Division, the Division of Educational Outreach, Academic Affairs, the Chancellor's Office, and the Coulter Faculty Center.

Goals of the Summer Institute on Teaching and Learning

1. Contribute to expanding the pedagogical imaginations of faculty participants
2. Encourage faculty to approach their teaching as an interesting and challenging form of scholarship
3. Promote interdisciplinary collaboration among participants
4. Support participants' innovation and experimentation in their teaching and their work with students 
5. Develop an open and collegial academic culture where dialogue and interaction among participants about teaching practices, resources, experiences and experiments with student learning are the norm

There also will be lots of good food. We will provide morning and afternoon snacks and lunch each day, with a wine and cheese social scheduled for one evening. There is no cost to participants for attending the Institute.

Focus Topics and Facilitators

How do we get beyond the approach of "teach, test, and hope for the best?"  This Focus Team will explore various formative and evaluative methods that can be used for obtaining regular and various kinds of feedback from students for the purpose of improving learning, including such things as classroom assessment techniques, student learning portfolios, creation of exams, in-class writings, etc.

This topic will be offered in two strands, each one focusing on strategies to design and teach online courses that optimize student engagement and promote the social construction of knowledge. Strand 1 is for participants who are in the beginning stages of the move to teaching online, and Strand 2 is for participants with relatively more experience in online teaching and interest in developing skills with advanced online tools.

A SoTL research project appeals to our desire to teach well and to our interest in learning more about how our students learn. Each member of this focus team will design a SoTL project to implement in a course in the fall semester. The first step will be to develop a good question about our teaching and our students' learning in one of our courses. We will devote much of our subsequent work to refining our question and identifying methods for collecting and analyzing evidence of students' learning. Participants will develop management SoTL projects for one of their courses in the fall semester and obtain support as they prepare presentations or manuscripts with which they will "go public" with their projects.

Reading is more than just a way to obtain factual knowledge, and writing is not merely a means of demonstrating what one has learned. Rather, reading and writing are fundamental methods for learning. "Writing is an exploration," observes the novelist E. L. Doctorow. "You start from nothing and learn as you go."

Participants in this focus team will explore ways to facilitate students' learning by studying the three Rs essential for learning through writing: reading, reflecting and responding. The goal is to develop strategies to help students learn how people in a discipline write and read. Consequently students will learn the discipline itself (even those students who claim they "don't read" or "can't write"). Participants will complete brief reading-reflecting-responding tasks and develop writing assignments for fall semester courses.

This focus team will address learning in Liberal Studies courses, including the First-Year Seminar and courses in the First-Year Core and in the various Perspectives. We begin by discussing characteristics of our students, including what they value, what they are dealing with ourside of class, how they learn best, and what they need in order to succeed. We will share personal experiences regarding teaching first-year students, and spend time tackling how to address specific concerns and problems participants have faced. This focus team is intended for those who value first-year students and recognize that investigation of their special needs is important to our own development as teachers, as well as to the success of our students. The goal is to learn how to help first-year students both develop confidence so that they can perform at high academic level and acquire learning strategies that will lead to high academic performance.

In Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses, Dee Fink urges us to "Design courses backward; deliver courses forward." The members of this focus team will experience how, from the beginning, designing courses based less on methods of teaching and more on intended student learning outcomes can lead to significant, enduring student learning. Those outcomes and learning objectives serve as the center for designing and delivering the course. Course design is thus one of the best ways to increase teaching effectiveness and strengthen student learning.

"Design courses backward; deliver courses forward."  This Focus Team will experience how designing courses by starting from intended student learning outcomes, instead of methods of teaching, can lead to greatly enhanced and enduring student learning. Understanding how student learning takes place and how, then, to specify those outcomes is a critical first step to successful course design. Those outcomes, and associated learning objectives, serve as the center around which the course is designed and delivered. Course design using this approach can increase teaching effectiveness and enable successful student learning.

How do we provide technology-rich experience in our face-to-face courses? The focus team will assist members in making a beginning, increasing skills, and creating learning activities to enhance course content and strengthen students' technology competencies. Participants will have the opportunity to use what they learn in one or more courses.

The University's new Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) will guide teaching and learning at WCU for the next decade. Participants in this focus team will get a head start on implementing Synthesis within courses and beyond. Participants will identify opportunities for synthesis within a course, between courses, and beyond the classroom. In addition to gaining a greater understanding of our QEP and its implications for the WCU community, participants will explore specific activities and assignments to encourage synthesis within their courses.

What's new in the world of information seeking? How do we help our students keep up? How do we help our students weed through the thousands of articles, wikis, blogs, and webpages to find the best information? How do we help our students find, evaluate, and use information successfully? In this focus team, we will:

• Explore ways to customize the way we search for, retrieve, and use information
• Develop and share strategies for teaching information literacy skills to our students
• Develop effective research assignments to use in our courses

The emphasis of each of these focus teams will be on application-on how we can use whatwe learn in one or more of our courses. Each team's work will be intensive, hands-on and interdisciplinary.

Guest Facilitator

Dr. Alison Morrison-Shetlar
Interim Dean of Undergraduate Studies
Director of Karen L. Smith Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning
University of Central Florida
Professor of Biology
aims@mail.ucf.edu
Phone: 407-823-3544
Fax: 407-823-2355

Dr. Alison I. Morrison-Shetlar is Interim Dean of Undergraduate Studies, Director of the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning and Professor of Biology at the University of Central Florida (UCF).

In 1984 Dr. Morrison-Shetlar received her doctorate from Dundee College of Technology and was a Research Scientist at the Kennedy Institute for Rheumatology, London, UK. from 1984 - 1988. In 1988 she was invited to be a senior Scientist at the Max-Planck Institute in Dortmund, Germany and established and served as Head of the Molecular Biology Department. A move to the United States in 1993 brought her to teach and research at Wesleyan University and Trinity College in Connecticut and in 1995 she joined the Biology Department at Georgia Southern University. While at Georgia Southern University Dr. Morrison-Shetlar was a faculty member and Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching. She was also awarded the Board of Regents Distinguished Professor of Teaching and Learning in 1998 and again in 1999. At the university she was awarded the University Excellence in Teaching award, and the College of Science and Technology Excellence in Teaching award in 2001. Dr. Morrison-Shetlar joined UCF in 2002 as Director of the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning where she has built strong programs to support faculty and GTA teaching and learning success. see Faculty Center at UCF.

Dr. Morrison-Shetlar is co-author of Teaching Creatively: Ideas in Action (Outernet Publishing, 2001) with Dr. Mary Marwitz and has numerous publications on her scientific and educational research. She provides consultancies, workshops and keynote addresses nationally on teaching and learning with a focus on learning community development. Dr. Morrison-Shetlar has received over $3 M in grant funding for scientific and educational research and is involved in the assessment of many grants and projects nationally. She is founder and Chair of Florida Faculty Development Consortium (FFDC) and is Co-chair of the Southern Regional Faculty Instruction and Development Consortium (SRFIDC)

Outcomes & Dissemination
In addition to developing course materials to use during the coming academic year, faculty are asked to participate in the full 3 ½ days of the Institute, to engage in follow-up activities with the members of their focus team, to apply what is learned to one or more courses in the fall, 2007, semester and to, as Teams, faculty are encouraged to participate in the annual Scholarship of Teaching & Learning Faire in spring 2008.

Additional voluntary activities for focus teams to disseminate the outcomes of using the strategies/concepts with the WCU academic community could include writing an article for MountainRise, giving a Faculty Series presentation, creating a focus group web page, giving a presentation to departments or colleges, etc. The Institute focus teams also have the opportunity to consider becoming year-long Faculty Learning Communities for 2007-2008.

Each participant will receive a copy of Teaching with Your Mouth Shut by Donald L. Finkel and a variety of materials about teaching and learning in higher education and about the topic of one's group.