Outline of workshop activities

Fall semester: 6-7 meetings, keyed to a 13-week semester

Week 2: Locating thinking about teaching in scholarly contexts. Targeting and analyzing “problems.” Epistemologies and Curriculum Design. Share personal understanding of epistemology in the participant’s own discipline or sub-discipline formulated during May workshop and over summer with additional reading and reflection.

• What are key questions about the nature of the discipline and subquestions within the discipline, both enduring and current?
• How does a practitioner within the discipline frame pertinent questions or problems?
• What kinds of evidence and inquiry strategies count as acceptable in addressing pertinent problems?
• What kinds of argument are considered persuasive?

Identify key disciplinary concepts and habits of mind each participant wishes to develop in his students. Discuss pre-meeting readings illustrating disciplinary epistemologies applied to specific learning experiences. Identify a “problem” in your discipline you would like students to be able to solve and articulate its “well-structured” and “ill structured” aspects (see Joseph Petraglia, Reality by Design, Erlbaum 1998).

What are the difficulties you anticipate/have encountered in teaching students how to solve this problem, and what might you do to address these difficulties? Propose a simple preliminary learning experience intended to develop one or more of the key disciplinary approaches or practices. These experiences may be short papers, field work, laboratory experiments, role-playing exercises, or whatever fits the discipline and the course/level selected by the participant.

Week 4: Experimenting with a selected practice. Assignment design. Refine assignment designs. Trouble-shoot to assure that assignments are ready for implementation in Weeks 4 to 6. Look ahead to assessing effectiveness of the assignment.

Week 6: Assessing Practices, part one. Choosing/creating a strategy for determining relationships between teaching and learning. Scan Angelo and Cross as well as available examples of SoTL by Carnegie Scholars. Propose a mini-classroom assessment project relating to the assignment/disciplinary thinking skills which can be done in a short time during the current semester. Through peer-review strategies, trouble-shoot proposals. Discuss selected readings on evaluating qualitative data.

Week 8: Assessing Practices, part two. Studying data, reflecting on outcomes: Collect and analyze data. Share results in seminar.

Week 10: Recapitulation/Consolidation: Analyze a syllabus (including sequence of assignments) for a course that participant will be teaching second semester to reflect on connections between disciplinary practice/epistemology and instructional strategies. Revise to enhance student understanding of ways of knowing in the discipline.

Week 12: Expanded Application: Peer-critique proposals for more substantial epistemologically-based assessment project for second semester implementation in the course addressed in Week 9.

Week 13 or Finals Week (if needed): Expanded Application, cont’d.

Spring Semester: 4 meetings

Week 5: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Progress report on data collection/analysis. Peer review, trouble-shooting as needed.

Week 8: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Progress reports/reflection on assessment projects

Week 9: Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Progress reports/reflection on assessment projects

Finals Week: Submit drafts of Project Summaries. Preparation for “going public” at Faculty Development Day, SoTL Luncheon Series, Website.