Here are the two powerpoints that we used during our retreat. I have added our brainstorms about possible writing assignments for and obstacles to service learning. On the obstacles side, I have also added notes on Carol's comments about how to overcome those obstacles:
Our beloved colleague, Kelly--the Dean--Hagen, found some inspiration in our conversation and went out exploring on her own. Here is a link to the cool tool she found and another link to what she created:
A colleague asked me for a list of some non-discipline specific resources that I monitor to help me improve my teaching. This was tough for me because I already focus on lots of material in my fields--composition (NCTE), American literature (SEA, MLA), and American Studies (ASA). But I decided to collect some bookmarks that I have been checking out over the past few years and some of the books I have been reading and searching for.
By the way, I make no claims to visit all of these resources regularly, but I think it is safe to say that I visit most of them at one point or another each year and most frequently during summer and winter breaks when I am really thinking about reworking my teaching approaches.
The Web
General Resources on Education Issues / Not Specific To My Discipline or Even College Teaching! Often these sources, by keeping me up on what is going on in the world of education, put me in touch with pedagogical practices and curricular innovations in unexpected ways.
Always good to follow for general news, but also regularly features articles on teaching practices at various levels--never in depth--but just enough to prod me into my own explorations and questions.
I do not have a subscription, so I often have to find places other than my home to check out the for pay articles, but I find myself frequently following up on and/or playing around with ideas that I find in these three sections.
This may not seem so obviously connected to pedagogy, but I have found Pew an amazing resource for data on a whole range of social and educational topics as well as on the process of surveying and thinking critically about surveys themselves. I have used this site in almost every class I have taught over the last few years. And I have also used data from this site in all sorts of pedagogical and curricular discussions.
What started as a personal passion has evolved for me into a source for all sorts of interesting ideas about education and teaching. A few months ago, for example, I found this wonderful article on the cultural reasons/values/philosophies behind college education in the United States:
I heard about Sal Kahn via a few different venues--NPR, the Huffington Post, and Bill Gates, so I started checking out the videos and became a bit addicted. I am still trying to figure out how and why this stuff works, but I think some exciting rethinking of the role of the classroom is coming from this (students study on their own using these videos and then come to class to practice at high schools that have begun using these materials--that sounds an awful lot like what I have been trying to get them to do for years!!!).
This site is for pre-college, but I find it a good barometer of what the hot topics are in education. For this reason, I keep popping in looking for some inspiration.
I hate to blow our own horn, but I think this site is an amazing resource--I am especially wowed by the range of resources, from videos to blogs. And I am a regular reader of my hero Lisa Lane's blog: Lisa's (Online) Teaching Blog
An amazing organization with amazing resources, the College Research and Learning Association strikes me as one of the most vibrantly engaged groups of professionals concerned abour reading skills and student success.
Bain's summer institute on what the best teachers do is terrific, and I think the book is a wonderful thought / conversation starter (see below). This site moves around a bit each year, so you may have to google it rather than follow a static link.
Skip Downing's site is mostly focused on selling his workshops and books, but they are good workshops and books! More importantly, the site has a student success resources list that I have frequently found cool ideas on and a link to a brief, sometimes useful, email list
I like this short NEA HIgher Education focused newsletter. Each issue includes a focusing on a pedagogy with some basic sources for further exploration: a great indepdendent investigations starter!
I also like the NEA's annual higher ed journal--it provides the interesting mix of theory and practice that they claim as their purpose--another useful springboard.
Focused on California Community Colleges, the Research and Planning Group collects and shares a wide range of resources on its site, many of which deal with best instiutional and pedagogical practices.
An interesting group that focuses on new trends and best practices--a have found some interesting publications, papers, and case studies here.
University Centers For Teaching and Learning
These have become de rigour over the last decade, but to me some rise above others. Here are a few of the sites I visit regularly for resources and ideas:
Searle Center for Teaching Excellence: Resource Page
Over the past five years, these are the general texts about college teaching that I find myself returning to again and again.
Bean, John. Engaging Ideas (new edition coming out this year!!)
Bain, Ken. What the Best College Teachers Do
Barkely, Elizabeth. Student Engagement Techniques
Fink, L. Dee. Creating Significant Learning Experiences
Angelo, Thomas. Classroom Assessment Techniques.
Stevens, Danielle. Introduction to Rubrics
Zull, James. The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning
Scrounging
I usually pick up three or four books a year on teaching in general to check out. Some of these I hear about from colleagues or friends, but many I found by scrounging around in Amazon.com or my local UC library for titles which I then order online.
In general, I do this by visiting amazon.com or the UC Riverside web site, looking up books I already know and love and then looking for related texts via amazon links or the UCR library subject headings...
Here's a quick video of my methodolo gy--nothing ground shaking, but I confess that I have stumbled across some of my most rewarding general teaching resources this way.
Worked on a brief voice narration for a video about MiraCosta's Basic Skills Initiative work, and I decided I wanted to save some of what I wrote for it here on my blog as food for thought, reflection, etc.
"Literally thousands of students graduate each year from our feeder high schools testing below proficient in reading, writing, and mathematics skills. With this in mind, teaching basic skills in central to MiraCosta's commitment to the communities we serve. When we teach basic skills students, we contribute to hope, change, and opportunity. For this reason, basic skills students belong at MiraCosta. They come from every community and cultural group represented on our campuses, and they participate in courses in every discipline and program."
For the past five years, California's Basic Skills Initiative has researched and documented best practices and provided some funding to initiate these efforts on our campuses. This best practices research indicates that colleges need to rethink how we teach in the classroom--employing new approaches and pedagogies -- and outside of the classroom--through counseling, tutoring, and other services. Ultimately, the state initiative seeks to help students successfully navigate California's higher education system. Whether returning directly the work force, continuing with career and technical education, or transferring to four-year colleges, basic skill learners can and will reshape our communities and our shared future."
Yesterday I led a syllabus workshop for faculty from Mt. San Jacinto Community College. They were great: energetic, creative, engaged. But I did not feel good about how the workshop went. I had some tech glitches at the that limited what I could show the faculty and the size of the group and limited time with them left me feeling rushed and a bit discombobulated.
For those who attended the workshop and would like more time to think and work through the ideas presented, here is a revised version of my Powerpoint (Download Syllabusworkshop )that you can download and review. You can also visit my syllabus web site. And here is a syllabus and a calendar from this semester that you may find interesting:
You can find other sample syllabus on my syllabus web site as well as links to some great syllabus development resources on the web.
Even with my concerns about how the session went, I still learned so much from facilitating this workshop. Here is a quick list of a few things I learned while purportedly "leading" a this weekend's workshop:
The Power of the Invitation: a math instructor shared an amazing invitation question for a College Algebra syllabus--I am going to butcher the language but it was something to the effect of "how can we identify the unknown?" or "how can we determine the undetermined?" or something supercool like that (how sad that I am mutilating her genius!). Her question reminded me how exciting this practice of identifying a guiding question (this is Ken Bain's idea, see his wonderful site for more) for our courses can be. I have been thinking about how Bain's idea of the invitation connects to James Zull's thoughts about teaching, learning, and the brain. I think that is material for a future post and perhaps even a new workshop...
Rethink How My Syllabus Presents My Assessment Policies: During yesterday's workshop, I realized that the sample syllabus I was sharing does not do a very good job of highlighting the assessment practices that really define my comp course as the students experience it. Specifically the "infinite rewrite" and "outside of class conference based essay grading" elements appear as minor points on my assessment page when I should be highlighting in some creative ways--text boxes, quotes from students, pictures, etc.
Alignment: One of the ideas that came up in yesterday's workshop--within one of the smaller circle discussions--was the role the syllabus plays in helping the instructor stay focused and organized over the course of the semester. My online teaching hero Lisa Lane recently posted about the struggle to align what we are doing in the classroom / learning space on any given day with our broader objectives. This is definitely a challenge, but the better we achieve this oh so allusive goal, the more sense our course will make to our students. I have been trying to do that in my 202 courses by introducing some visual representations of key ideas that we cover in the course into the syllabus. My goal was that we would return to those pages in the syllabus again and again during the semester. Although including that material in my syllabus has helped me stay focused (and I have frequently used these terms and these frameworks in class discussions and assessment), I have not physically returned us to the syllabus itself to reconnect students with those key visual tools. I think one key step I need to take is to create posters for the classroom from those syllabus pages that I can refer back to each day as we encounter, apply, and explore these ideas.
Just Say No! I have to learn to say no to shorter sessions--they do not work for me and often confuse or frustrate the participants. I understand how colleagues want to put together rich programs of workshops and offerings, but my session simply does not work when compressed. I should explore presenting just parts of it--that could address some of this--but the key is for participants to have enough time to brainstorm and create--something that is not going to happen in the standard 75 minute session.
Increasingly
I am finding the Chronicle's technology pages worth monitoring--not
because they are particularly cutting edge but because they can tell
you quite a bit about which way the winds are blowing.
The key resources are their main technology page and their blog (The Wired Campus), which I find particularly interesting. Some samples follow below:
An interesting piece in the NY Times documents research suggesting that online learners tend to score higher in various testing programs.
Although
I have found retention numbers lower in my online and hybrid classes, I
have long felt that rapidly evolving technology is erasing the
liabilities in the online setting for me. As the article suggests,
chat, easy video, and social networking functions are making the online
setting much more appealing.
I have been experimenting with a social network based system for my onsite comp course (signsabound.com) and enjoying it so far.
Seeing this study summarized in the Times simply strengthens my resolve to keep developing my online skills.
This is a response to my friend Louisa Moon, who forwarded these rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read
that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no
more than 15 minutes.
I played by Louisa's rules--and then went back and added my comments, lamentations, and other notes...
Unfortunately, I did some cutting and pasting, so they are not in the exact order I thought of them (which would have been fun--but I cannot completely reconstruct that):
Ceremony (Silko)--an American masterpiece
Nine Stories (Salinger)--when I fell in love with literature
Jesus Before Christianity (Albert Nolan)--helped/helps me in my own search for social justice
Invisible Man (Ellison)--Luis Armstrong and Ellison--our two greatest modernists in one text
Sula (Morrison)--some of Morrison's best prose and most culturally resonant characters/metaphors
A Hundred Years of Solitude (Garcia Marquez)--I remember reading it over and over during my year in Peru
Song of Myself (Whitman): from lonely women watching naked men swim and whitman bathing a runaway slave's feet to the glories of blades of grass and barbaric yawps...
Bless Me Ultima (Anaya)--such a simple and beautiful gateway to helping younger high school students explore literature, art, and culture
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain): if only I had Huck's courage, Jim's wisdom, and one more chance to light out for the territories...
The Portable Thoreau: "Life Without Principle" and "Walking" would be enough even without Walden
The Portable Emerson: "Self-reliance," "Experience," "The Poet"--the texts every American since seems to be arguing with...
La Frontera / Borderlands (Anzaldua)-- what -- identity is a construct not an essential truth -- and that's exciting not scary?!
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson: much madnees is indeed divinest sense (especially when presented slantwise)
The Republic (Plato) -- am I in the cave--am I out--does it matter?
The Norton Shakespeare--Cheating, I know, but I could not face the pain of choosing
I cannot even begin to describe the horror of the many authors that I wanted to include but just did not make that first to rise to the top fifteen: ana castillo, luis alfaro, pynchon, de saint-expury, faulkner, baldwin, dubois, chesnutt, william carlos williams, sylvia plath, dostoyevsky, dickens, cooper, flannery o'connor, tolkien, arthur miller, edward albee, suzie lorie parks, willa cather...perhaps this was more painful than it was worth...
But looking at the list, many of the choices had to do with which texts I keep coming back to but also which books I have most enjoyed teaching.
I still remember...
discovering the world of Latino/a literature through Anzaldua and first teaching Bless Me Ultima to Upward Bound students...
the joys of teaching Sula (the phrase "magnificent desolation" which I picked up from Buzz Aldrin today seems so pefect for that book) to many different groups...
an amazing experience I had ending my American lit sequence last year with Ceremony--a book I had not read in years but was once again thrilled by its beauty...
watching students from many years of lit classes perform scenes from shakespeare...
