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Category: Faculty Development

Published on Leave a comment on CAT+FD Welcomes New Faculty in Residence

CAT+FD is pleased to welcome Dr. Florastina Payton-Stewart for a three-year term as our new Faculty in Residence.

Payton-Stewart

Dr. Payton-Stewart is an Associate Professor in Chemistry, and is very passionate about teaching, mentoring and advising students. She has served as Associate Director for Center of Undergraduate Research and is a member of the American Chemical Society and the National Organization for the Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers. She is a 2017 Keystone Fellow and recipient of the HERS Institute Leadership Academy STEM scholarship.

She will work with our new faculty, planning and implementing support throughout their first year.

In addition to supporting CAT+FD activities and initiatives, the CAT+FD Faculty in Residence has primary responsibility for enhancing and leading programming for first year faculty. Duties include: assisting in the planning and implementation of new faculty orientation; facilitating new faculty mentoring; organizing and implementing the new faculty "brown bag" series; organizing and implementing a coherent set of workshop open to all faculty but focused on new faculty; assisting in grant writing for CAT+FD initiatives related to first year faculty development; and assisting in the assessment of CAT+FD's programs related to first year faculty development.

We are also glad to announce that Mr. Jeremy Tuman is renewing his role as Faculty in Residence for Service Learning for a two-year term.

Published on Leave a comment on FaCTS on Wiki Ed
Megan Osterbur, 2017 FaCTS coordinator

We were honored and thrilled to read this account of our FaCTS summer seminar from Wiki Ed:

For the ninth year, faculty at Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA) have come together to experiment with new pedagogy in their classrooms. Their group, the Faculty Community of Teaching Scholars (FaCTS), is funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and provides a stipend for participants to explore that year’s theme. The theme for academic year 2017–18 is “Making knowledge public using educational technology.” Dr. Megan Osterbur, who participates in Wiki Ed’s Classroom Program, helped organize this year’s group of selected applicants and saw a clear alignment with Wikipedia assignments. After all, Wikipedia serves as educational technology for student editors and is as public as knowledge gets in 2017.

Continue reading on the Wiki Education Foundation website.

Published on Leave a comment on Grant Writing Success

According to Robert Porter, a faculty member's first grant is often the most difficult one to get funding. "When they are new to the grant game," says Porter, "even scholars with fine publishing records can struggle with proposal writing." To address this often overlooked challenge, in 2015, thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Xavier's Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development began a new program called "Support for First-Time Grant Writing," as a means of providing Xavier faculty who have never served as the Principal Investigator on a grant the time to develop a strong proposal for an external grant to fund a scholarly project. According to Dr. Elizabeth Yost Hammer, Director of CAT+FD, "By providing release time for faculty to work on and submit that first grant proposal, this program will help faculty members sustain their research and scholarship even in the face of a heavy teaching load."

...continue reading "Grant Writing Success"

Published on Leave a comment on ICYMI: Engaging Students in Research with Dr. Suzanne Goodney Lea

A crowd of faculty joined us back in November for Dr. Suzanne Goodney Lea's fascinating workshop on "Engaging Students in Research: Lessons from Collecting Police Use of Deadly Force Data," presented by CAT+FD in partnership with the Center for Undergraduate Research.

If you missed the workshop, or if you'd like to review it, you're in luck, because it's one of the first presentations we've recorded with our shiny new Swivl.

Swivl

What's that, you ask. Why, it's the latest rotating robotic lecture-capture wonder-gizmo. It's truly slick, and must be seen in action to be fully appreciated.

We don't have the fancy Swivl Pro account which would allow embedding the video right here in our blog, but never fear! It's just a click away:

cloud.swivl.com/v/3c94db49eb75eabdc185a8770ddc4280

Note: There were some audio recording problems. We are not sure why the audio recording level dropped midway through. It is still audible but you may need to adjust your speakers. Our stalwart Technology Coordinator is in the process of contacting Swivl Tech Support to find out what they think may have gone wrong.

Many thanks to Dr. Lea for giving her permission to be our guinea pig.

By all means, let us know what you think!

Published on Leave a comment on The Thrivers and the Divers

Here is an interesting article in the Washington Post about high achieving high school students who bomb once they get into college. We all know things like socioeconomic class and, to a lesser degree, standardized test scores factor in.  However, this study used personality traits that correlated to academic success in college.

Two categories were created, the thrivers and the divers. The “thrivers” were those who did much better in college than their high school grades would have predicted. The “divers” were those who did much worse.

"What the divers had in common was a tendency toward rashness and disorder. In particular, they lacked a trait that psychologists call “conscientiousness.” Compared with the average student, divers were less likely to describe themselves as organized or detail-oriented, less likely to say that they are prepared, that they follow a schedule or that they get work done right away. Divers were also more likely to say they crammed for exams and more likely to score highly on measures of impatience."

It looks like all of us, especially our students, could benefit from mindfulness and contemplative practices. If only CAT+FD offered resources for those things...

You can read the full article here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/09/21/why-students-who-do-well-in-high-school-bomb-in-college/

And check out the CAT+FD calendar for the Monday Quarter of Quiet and Contemplative Inquiry Team here:

http://cat.xula.edu/events/?id=01495

http://xulacat.wikispaces.com/Xavier+Contemplative+Inquiry+Team

The Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development is pleased to announcement the recipients of this year's Support for First-Time Grant Writing awards.
Published on Leave a comment on Support for First-time Grant Writing Award Recipients

The Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development is pleased to announcement the recipients of this year's Support for First-Time Grant Writing awards. ...continue reading "Support for First-time Grant Writing Award Recipients"

Published on Leave a comment on Empowerment through ePortfolios

By J. Todd

The ePortfolio Process: Collection-Reflection-Interaction
The ePortfolio Process: Collection-Reflection-Interaction

The use of portfolios as an educational tool is not a new idea. Nor, in fact, is the idea of making portfolios digital. A quick literature search will find numerous articles discussing the benefits of using either traditional or digital portfolios, often focusing on the impact in discipline-specific settings. Portfolios are not only effective teaching tools, but also effective assessment tools. As the need to conduct college- or even university-wide assessment becomes more common, we've seen renewed and increased interest in digital portfolios — or ePortfolios as a way to assess a student's learning over the course of his or her academic career. ...continue reading "Empowerment through ePortfolios"

Published on Leave a comment on A Tool to Solve Your Teaching Problems

by Tiera S. Coston

As teachers, we all want to encourage the development and enhancement of the problem-solving skills of our students.  However, we may have to tap into some problem-solving skill of our own when attempting to create a classroom environment that is engaging, informational and effective in meeting the objectives of our courses.  Many times, this is easier said than done.  But, fear not.  The Eberly Center at Carnegie Mellon University has created an excellent resource that may help you to effectively address teaching issues that are commonly encountered in the classroom.  This Solve a Teaching Problem tool works as an easy-to-use, three-step process.  First, you identify the problem that is occurring in your teaching from a listing of issues that are divided into broadly-themed categories.  These categories include: Attitudes & Motivation; Prerequisite Knowledge and Preparedness; Critical Thinking & Applying Knowledge; Group Skills and Dynamics; Classroom Behavior & Etiquette; and Grading and Assessment.

Step 1.

Step 1

Once you identify the problem, the second step is to identify the possible reasons that the problem is occurring.

Step 2.

Step 2

Once you understand why the problem may be occurring, the final step is to explore the strategies provided to determine what may be effective in addressing the problem.

Step 3.

Step 3

It is important to note that these strategies are both evidence-based and practical.  However, as with any strategies, certain ones may work for some while being ineffective for others.  The idea is to think critically about what is happening in your particular class and use the strategies as a guide to create a plan of action for your specific situation.  Happy problem-solving.

Published on Leave a comment on Small Changes = Big Improvements

by Karen Nichols

James Lang's recent series in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the small changes that faculty can make to their teaching to improve learning in their courses has been compiled and can now be found on a single page of the Chronicle web site: http://chronicle.com/specialreport/Small-Changes-in-Teaching/44.

His tips include how to spend the first and last 5 minutes of class, how to help students connect your course content with the outside world, giving students some control over their learning plus several other tips.  If you like what you read on the Chronicle page, you may want to read James Lang's book:  Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, was published by Jossey-Bass: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118944496,miniSiteCd-JBHIGHERED.html.

Finally, the series in the Chronicle ended with an essay, not included on the above page:
http://chronicle.com/article/Small-Changes-or-Big/236839/

Still can't get enough?  Then join the conversation on Twitter at @LangOnCourse or using the hashtag #SmallTeaching.

Published on Leave a comment on The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Have you considered publishing work in the area of Pedagogical Scholarship or the Scholarship of Teaching? This is highly valued by the university if it reaches the stage of public dissemination. There are many topics we might have in mind to study, but just like any other scholarly endeavor, it must be planned out in advance, not just written up as an afterthought. There are things to consoder beforehand, especially if your discipline scholarship is very removed from the education and social science fields. Planning the project appropriately will help you avoid creating aspects that will significant affect, and even void, your data collection when tracing student learning and opinions. (IRB approval, anyone?)

If you missed the CAT+FD talk given by Megan Osterbur (Political Science) and Charles Gramlich (Psychology), they outlined the steps needed to be taken for successful scholarly teaching projects. The process begins with reflection and questions, then project design and data collection, and finally analysis and publication. The CAT+FD office is also uniquely qualified to help with this process, especially the project design and finding an appropriate journal as the new home for your brilliant work. The quote that Meg shared about this field really stuck with me and was so familiar when I think about my colleagues here at Xavier and what many of us do on a daily basis already.

“Scholarly teaching is what every one of us should be engaged in every day that we are in a classroom, in our office with students, tutoring, lecturing, conducting discussions, all the roles we play pedagogically. Our work as teachers should meet the highest scholarly standards of groundedness, of openness, of clarity and complexity. But it is only when we step back and reflect systematically on the teaching we have done, in a form that can be publicly reviewed and built upon by our peers, that we have moved from scholarly teaching to the scholarship of teaching.” (Shulman 2004, p. 166).

Please do not hesitate to contact the CAT+FD staff if you are thinking about advancing your scholarship in this field. Also, if you missed the presentation and believe this is a topic you would like to see offered again, please let us know in the comments below.
Cheers,
Stassi