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Tag: Faculty Development

Now that the chaos of August is past, September is a great time to invest in your professional growth. The energy of beginnings — new students, new courses, new colleagues — offers everyone an opportunity for exploring innovative teaching strategies, connecting with colleagues, and strengthening the practices that make your work most meaningful to you. Whether you need touchpoints for community and reflection, help considering AI's role in education, or finding focused time for your scholarship, this month's offerings provide multiple pathways for professional growth and collegial connection. 
Published on Leave a comment on September Opportunities at CAT+FD

Now that the chaos of August is past, September is a great time to invest in your professional growth. The energy of beginnings — new students, new courses, new colleagues — offers everyone an opportunity for exploring innovative teaching strategies, connecting with colleagues, and strengthening the practices that make your work most meaningful to you. Whether you need touchpoints for community and reflection, help considering AI's role in education, or finding focused time for your scholarship, this month's offerings provide multiple pathways for professional growth and collegial connection. 

For any event below, click on the link for more information. Some events require registration.

WEEKLY OPPORTUNITIES

  • Coffee & Chat, every Monday, 10:00-11:00
    Faculty can spend some time with members of the CAT+FD staff in our Conference Room for refreshments and conversation.
  • Fall Faculty Writing Group Lunch, every Monday, 11:00-2:00
    Members of the Fall Faculty Writing Group meet every Monday to write and dine together.
  • Walking Club, every Tuesday & Thursday, 8:30-9:00
    All members of the Xavier community are invited to gather outside the Fitness Center to get in some steps together.
  • Quarter of Quiet, every Wednesday, 2:00-2:15Members of the Xavier community are welcome in the Chapel's Meditation Room for 15 minutes of unguided contemplation. 

SEPTEMBER OPPORTUNITIES

  • Start-of-Semester Mindfulness Check-in, September 3 at 1:00 pm, CAT+FD Conference Room - 534AJoin us for an informal and open conversation about being more mindful and contemplative.
  • Create Engaging Video Lectures with Camtasia, September 3 at 3:00 pm, OnlineThis workshop will be led by Casey Seiter, Customer Success Manager for TechSmith EDU, an expert in educational video creation and digital storytelling.
  • SERG (Science Education Research Group), September 3 at 3:30 pm, NCF 568
    This monthly meeting provides space to share questions, concerns, and suggestions about pedagogy with colleagues in a supportive, multidisciplinary environment.
  • New Faculty Brown Bag, September 4 at 12:15 pm, Mellon Seminar Room - LRC 532BNew full-time faculty should attend these brown bags to learn about and engage with peers who understand the joys and challenges of the first year at Xavier.
  • Fall Faculty Writing Group Kick-off, September 4 at 5:00 pm, Mellon Seminar Room - LRC 532BFaculty enrolled in this semester's Faculty Writing Group should plan to attend. Dinner will be provided. 
  • Part-time Faculty Brown Bag, September 9 at 3:00 pm, Online
    CAT+FD welcomes all current part-time faculty to our monthly online gathering, designed with your busy schedules in mind.
  • Academic AI Statement Roundtable, September 10 at 11:00 am, Mellon Seminar Room - LRC 532B
    Engage with faculty, staff, and students to discuss the draft statement about AI use in academic settings at Xavier.
  • #LEX Advanced: Rubrics Reimagined: Save Time and Boost Feedback, September 11 at 3:00 pm, Online
    This workshop will provide you with strategies to ensure your assessments truly measure student learning in this rapidly changing educational landscape.
  • Academic AI Statement Roundtable, September 15 at 2:00 pm, Mellon Seminar Room - LRC 532B
    Engage with faculty, staff, and students to discuss the draft statement about AI use in academic settings at Xavier.
  • 2nd Year Faculty Luncheon, September 18 at 12:15 pm, Mellon Seminar Room - LRC 532B2nd-year faculty are invited to join their cohort colleagues for an informal lunch to reconnect and to learn about advising.
  • Build Your First AI Chatbot: Hands-On Workshop, September 19 at 2:00 pm, CAT+FD Teaching Lab - LRC 532AAll members of the Xavier community are welcome to join CAT+FD and the Library for an interactive workshop where you'll go from chatbot novice to creator.
  • Academic AI Statement Roundtable, September 26 at 10:00 am, Mellon Seminar Room - LRC 532BEngage with faculty, staff, and students to discuss the draft statement about AI use in academic settings at Xavier.
  • #LEX Advanced: Online Assessment Strategies in the Age of AI, September 30 at 3:00 pm, Mellon Seminar Room - LRC 532BDiscover how to adapt, innovate, and create online testing experiences that are both academically rigorous and genuinely reflective of student mastery.

OUTSIDE OPPORTUNITIES

CAT+FD is not a sponsor of any of the following. These links are provided to share additional professional development activities. 

  • 8th Annual Sparking Success Faculty Development Conference, Tulane University, January 7-8. Tulane University’s Center for Engaged Learning and Teaching (CELT) invites proposals for interactive breakout sessions for the 8th Annual Sparking Success: Faculty Development Conference, to be held Thursday, January 8, 2026. Sparking Success encourages faculty, staff, and graduate and professional students to come together, build community, and find inspiration for enhancing our lives on campus. Session proposals are due by November 1.
  • 32nd Annual HBCU Faculty Development Network Conference, Charlotte, NC, October 30-November 1. This year’s theme, “Turning Challenges into Opportunities: Advancing Faculty Development to Serve Dynamic Institutions,” invites faculty, administrators, and higher education professionals to engage in transformative dialogue and hands-on learning. Through workshops, plenaries, and networking sessions, the conference will explore innovative strategies in teaching, learning, leadership, technology, and student success—empowering participants to thrive in a rapidly changing educational landscape.
  • Brightspace D2L Academy. The D2L Academy is a version of Brightspace available to all members of the Brightspace Community where you'll find Premium (paid) content like Certificate and Subscription Training Courses, as well as FREE Courses, Downloads and Teaching Tools. The D2L Academy is also where you can connect with Brightspace Guided Training, and the Product Idea Exchange (PIE).

Published on Leave a comment on POD 2014 Leverage

by Karen Nichols
I attended my first POD conference last week and the theme was Leverage.  POD is our faculty development organization and such a wonderful group of people. I returned with a number of ideas and tools, not only for online teaching, but teaching with technology and general faculty development best practices as well.

I'd like to share a couple of links with you.  You'll be able to see the conference theme is well-used in a variety of ways.

One fun tool I learned about was 3M's Post-It Plus app. If you use post-it notes in workshops or classes and the students have to affix them to a board in order to see the responses from the entire group, this nifty app will allow you to snap a photo of the post-it-filled board. It then digitizes each note and allows you to organize them and share the board with everyone else. Here's a demonstration:

I'll be sharing more goodies from the conference in upcoming posts. Meanwhile, let us know if you try this app or find something that interests you in the conference links.

Published on Leave a comment on CAT Advice: Don’t Spend Too Much Time on Your Teaching

What? The Center for the Advancement of TEACHING, is telling me to spend less time on my teaching?

We all know that Xavier is a premier undergraduate university.  This is largely in part due to the dedicated faculty who put teaching first in order to help students achieve their goals.  However, we as faculty have goals too, and some of those goals extend from the classroom.  It is our job to balance those goals and obligations so that each facet of our careers can thrive.  So to that end, what are the best practices, and easiest pitfalls, that new faculty can fall into?

Dr. Robert Boice, Professor of Psychology at SUNY in Stony Brook, NY, has done extensive research polling and following hundreds of faculty members across disciplines and institution types and then charting their success in the tenure and promotion process.  Overwhelmingly, the most common problem among faculty was not spending enough time on scholarly writing (proposals and papers) but that was linked hand-in-hand with being over prepared for their classes.  When faculty were reporting spending nearly 30 hours a week preparing for class, it is clear that some other aspect of their job was going to suffer for it.  However, not all faculty suffered from this lack of balance.  Boice identified 5–9% of new faculty as "quick starters," who in their first few years were well on their way to promotion and tenure especially with respect to scholarship. Moreover, they also scored in the top quarter of peer and student ratings of teaching; so their scholarly success was not achieved at the expense of their students.

You can read a brief article from Chemical Engineering Education summarizing his findings here:

http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Columns/Boice.html

And if you think this might be helpful, you can find Dr. Boice’s book here (among other places):

http://www.amazon.com/Advice-Faculty-Members-Robert-Boice/dp/0205281591

However, at Xavier, it can be quite easy to quickly achieve a balance.  As I mentioned, one of our greatest assets, and your greatest resource, are our faculty.  Here are some tips to leverage the resources you have in order to prepare a better class, in a reasonable amount of time, leaving sufficient time for scholarship:

  • Ask for and accept help from senior faculty.  If someone has taught a course that is new for you, odds are they are happy to share their notes, slides, test, etc.  Certainly you will want to make the courses you teach your own, but there is no need to spend hours reinventing the wheel (or at least reinventing the diagrams on a PowerPoint slide).
  • Do not be afraid to protect your writing time. We all want to have “open door” policies to our students and be generally available to them, but that does not mean you need to be on call 24/7.  Do not fear your student evaluations suffering if you close your door sometimes to write.  As long as you are available without fail for your classes and office hours as promised, no one will fault you for attending to other parts of your job. (I personally was reluctant to do this years ago, and speak from experience that there was no negative effect on my student evaluations.)
  • Visit CAT. OK, you knew this one was coming.  There are many faculty resources here in CAT including a staff that is eager to help you, not only with your teaching, but with incorporating your teaching into your job as a well-rounded (and successful!) Xavier faculty member

-Stassi DiMaggio

Published on Leave a comment on A Series of Essays on Contemplative Faculty Development

I've just finished up a series of six essays for College Contemplative on the topic of "Contemplative Faculty Development."

  1. Greetings & Introduction
  2. My Story
  3. Stepping into Silence
  4. The Transformative Banquet
  5. Sustaining the Dialog
  6. What's Next

Read at your own risk; I apologize in advance for the length. Now I'm off to the Fifth Annual Conference of the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education to present on this same topic. Catch you on the flipside! And please don't miss our Nov. 14th workshop on Zen meditation.