SoTL at Western

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The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Western Carolina University - Summer Institute 2006

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 2006 Summer Institute, May 15-18, 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

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.

As faculty at Western move more into online teaching, they frequently ask for assistance to ensure that their courses take advantage of what we know about effective online pedagogy. This team will research and explore what works through the creation of virtual environments (e.g. a virtual hospital, or a virtual forestry) which can be developed to enhance the online learning environment and to cross over courses within a program or programs. Team members will have the opportunity to work on the creation of a virtual learning environment related to their own courses/programs.

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. Much of our work will be devoted to the questions that characterize SoTL and to identifying methods for collecting and analyzing evidence of students' learning. The outcome of our work will be a framework for pursuing questions that really matter to us about our teaching and our students' learning .

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 the goals of WCU's Liberal Studies program and the experiences participants have had with first-year students. 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 that they can perform at a high academic level and acquire learning strategies that will lead to high academic performance.

Despite an astounding technological and “group-dynamics” revolution in collegiate teaching, lecturing steadfastly remains a significant instructional element. This Focus Team examines certain aspects of the lecture including – but not limited to – its academic origins, the enduring question of its relevance, and its revitalization through effective Socratic dialogue

"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 can we encourage academic excellence, foster civic responsibility, and promote the scholarship of engagement? Service learning, a special form of experiential education whereby students engage in organized activities designed to enhance their intellectual, social, and personal development while meeting community needs, is one vehicle. Participants in this focus team will research and explore service learning opportunities in their academic disciplines and work to incorporate these in one or more courses.

How do we provide technology–rich experience in our face-to-face courses (and why should we want to)? This Focus Team will assist members in making a beginning, increasing skills, and creating learning activities to enhance course content and strengthen students’ (and instructors’) technology competencies. On the one hand, the members of this group will have the opportunity to interact with some of the most cutting-edge tools in educational technology. On the other hand, the emphasis will be not on simply adding technology to the classroom, rather on using technology to enhance and redefine learning.

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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

Donna Crystal Llewellyn (BA, Swarthmore; MS, Stanford; Ph.D., Cornell)
Director, Center for the Enhancement of Teaching & Learning
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia
donna.llewellyn@cetl.gatech.edu

Donna Crystal Llewellyn received her BA (major in Mathematics and minor in Economics) with High Honors from Swarthmore College in 1980. She went on to earn an MS in Operations Research from Stanford University in 1981 and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University in 1984. Donna then studied in Bonn, West Germany with a National Science Foundation Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship while on leave from a tenure track position in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. From 1994 to 1999, Donna served as an Associate Chair of ISyE. In July 1999, Donna became the Director of CETL.

Donna's current interests center around education issues in general, and on increasing the participation of women and minorities in engineering and science in particular. She is the past Chair of the Women in Engineering Division of the American Society of Engineering Education, the past President of the Women in OR/MS Forum of INFORMS, and past director-at-large of INFORMS. She was the general chair of the INFORMS 2003 National Conference.

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 What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain 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