SoTL at Western

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The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Western Carolina University - Summer Institute 2005

The major, university-wide initiative, The Scholarship of Teaching & Learning at Western Carolina University (http://www.wcu.edu/sotl/), 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 2005 Summer Institute, May 16-19, 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 Distance & Continuing Education, 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 faculty
4. Support faculty innovation and experimentation in their teaching
5. Develop an open and collegial academic culture where dialogue and interaction among faculty 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, and there will be an informal evening banquet. There is no cost to faculty for attending the Institute.

The Institute will be held in the University Center, with electronic classrooms in Forsyth being used by two of the Focus Teams.

Focus Topics and Facilitators

The Learning Through Writing focus team will contemplate, practice, and create writing assignments that help make learning happen in the classroom. University students in all disciplines benefit from regular opportunities to develop their writing skills. When done properly, writing involves genuine labor. However, it also can be immensely rewarding. "Writing is an exploration," E.L. Doctorow said. "You start from nothing and learn as you go."

The members of this focus team will learn as they go-studying the three Rs essential for learning through writing: reading, reflecting and responding. Team members will approach the topic from both sides of the lectern: first, by adopting the role of student writers, then, by returning to the role of educators. The sessions will include completion of some brief reading-reflecting-responding tasks, then the development of writing assignments for fall semester courses.

A SoTL research project appeals to our desire to teach well and to our interest in learning more about how our students learn. Each members of this focus team will design a SoTL project to implement in a course in the fall semester. Our first step will be to identify a good question about teaching and learning in one of our courses and with our students. Much of our work will be devoted to the questions that characterize SoTL. These could include, but are not limited to:

1. "What works?" questions that seek evidence about the relative effectiveness of different teaching approaches
2. "What is?" questions at describing the features of approaches to teaching
3. "Visions of the possible" questions that lead to inquiry about what is most essential about teaching and learning in our discipline.

The outcome of our work will be a framework for pursuing questions that really matter to us about our teaching and our students' learning.

As teachers we appreciate the skill of critical thinking just as we value that of clear communication. As with writing and oral communication, however, we are tempted to avoid the actual teaching of critical thinking and devote our time and energy to exposing our students to course content.

In this focus team we will explore approaches to promoting critical thinking that encourage our students to use content in meaningful ways. With the assumption that we should both expose our students to content and focus on what they can do with the content, we will examine the literature of critical thinking, experiment with critical thinking exercises, and develop our own discipline-specific techniques to use in our classrooms.

How do we get beyond the approach of "teach, test, and hope for the best?" In this focus team, we will explore various tools that can be used for obtaining feedback from students to improve learning, including classroom assessment techniques (CATS), continuous quality improvement (CQI) techniques, and redesigned course evaluation forms. We also will discuss strategies to provide feedback to students, including the use of rubrics, assessing students' ability to think critically, and using portfolios to evaluate student learning.

The outcome for the focus team will be the design of a template to aid in developing course curricula that promote student learning and assessments that demonstrate the extent of their learning.

As Western grows, members of the faculty will continue to be challenged by the need to convert face-to-face courses to courses delivered wholly online. Helping faculty make the transition requires time and support. Therefore, the purpose of this focus team is to help team members develop an online course..

Focus team members will:

• Participate from a student perspective in an on-line demonstration of the team facilitator's course, which was converted from face-to-face to online.
• Explore the use of modules, discussions, assessment, Wimba voice direct, and Wimba voice boards as tools for effective teaching and learning.
• Develop for delivery an on-line course.
• Receive instructor and peer feedback on the course.
• Generate solutions to problems in online pedagogy that are present in the academic disciplines of the members of the team.
• Reflect on readings related to research on teaching and learning in the online environment.
  

While we have ushered in new and novel approaches to the delivery of information in the traditional classroom, lecturing remains the method of choice for most faculty members

This focus team will explore techniques that grab students' attention during a lecture. We will discuss how to make content provocative and inspiring through the use of dramatic illustrations, suspense and surprise. We will explore techniques that promote students' active learning: posing questions, soliciting student questions, and varying students' activities. In addition, we will consider how instructors can challenge students intellectually during a lecture and gain students' attention through verbal and nonverbal communication, dramatic behavior, and frequent variations of behavior.

University Computer Requirement: "Western Carolina University strives to ensure that students have access to the highest quality education, taking maximum advantage of the changes in information and communications technologies. Beginning with the Fall 1998 semester, all newly admitted degree-seeking undergraduate students are required to have an appropriate networkable computer." (Source: WCU website) Western was the first UNC institution to adopt such a requirement and take a leadership position on the importance of students developing computer proficiency across the curriculum.

Have you welcomed this opportunity to provide technology-rich learning experiences in your courses? Are you intrigued by the possibility but unsure how to begin? Would you like to increase your own skills? This focus team is intended for those who are interested in creating learning activities that both enhance course content and strengthen students' technology competencies.

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. Linda B. Nilson
Director, Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation
Clemson University

As founding director, Linda set up Clemson's Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation in 1998. She also teaches a graduate course called College Teaching at Clemson. She is the author of Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors, now in its second edition (Anker Publishing, 2003) and the co-editor of Enhancing Learning Using Laptops in the Classroom in the New Directions in Teaching and Learning series (Jossey-Bass, forthcoming in 2005). In addition, she has published many articles and book chapters and has presented sessions both nationally and internationally on assessing teaching effectiveness, designing a graphic syllabus, making useful student-peer feedback instruments, holistic grading, teaching large classes, and teaching with laptops, among many other topics.

Linda entered the area of instructional and faculty development in the late 1970s while on the sociology faculty at UCLA. After distinguishing herself as an excellent instructor, her department selected her to establish and supervise its TA training program. She then went on to direct teaching centers at Vanderbilt University and the University of California, Riverside.

Linda was a National Science Foundation Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she received her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in sociology. She completed her undergraduate work in three years at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

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, 2005, semester and to, as Teams, participate in the annual Scholarship of Teaching & Learning
Faire in spring 2006.

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 Groups also have the opportunity to consider becoming year-long Faculty Learning Communities for 2005-2006.

Each participant will receive a copy of Dr. Nilson's book, Teaching at Its Best: A Research-Based Resource for College Instructors, and a variety of materials about teaching and learning in higher education and about the topic of one's group.

Scholarship of Teaching & Learning at Western Carolina University

Coulter Faculty Center