“Success,” suggested Emily Dickinson, “is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed.” We’d like to add a corollary to the Belle of Amherst’s famous pronouncement. SUCCESS IS COUNTED SWEETER BY THOSE WHO OFT EXCEED.

Simply put, success begets success. The more you accomplish as a center of teaching and learning (CTL), the more you will be asked to accomplish.

As we pointed out in an earlier blog, the most important function you have is pleasing your boss. If you don’t, we know what happens, but if you do, your boss will come to you more often with tasks. When she started bringing in outside campus names to present workshops, we suggested she name her idea—hence, the Provost’s Professional Development Speaker Series was born. When the Provost needed help with setting up workshops on alignment and assessment, we offered to help because we knew her chosen developer, Dee Fink. Those workshops were so successful that we brought Dee back for our New Faculty Orientation. And the next time the Provost needed help with advertising and establishing workshops for her series, she turned to us. Just last semester, we set up a workshop for which almost 50% of our full-time faculty volunteered.

Sometimes when you put on a workshop, someone in attendance thinks you could present a specialized workshop for his/her college, department, or program. We have been asked to do redo the workshop we did for new faculty on pedagogy for half of our College of Justice and Safety. Another time we established a similar workshop for the library’s teaching staff at a summer retreat. Earlier this semester we held a successful workshop on metacognition that drew almost 10% of the faculty. Immediately, our retention team asked for us to explain to them how a student survey we developed on metacognition could aid student success. What we didn’t know was that beside the 50+ administrators in attendance, our presentation was televised to all our regional campuses. When Housing saw our success with professional learning communities (PLCs), they asked us to show them how to run PLCs within the dorms.

Sometimes other superiors ask a favor. Because of our prolific output of writing, our dean has asked us to proofread various academic documents. One day the President of the University called us and said they had a mere six hours to write and submit an application to host a national vice-presidential debate. We took their draft, and in five hours the President had his document. That led to us having to rewrite a new brochure for the first year of the campus’ new Arts Center (we did get some choice seating out of that one). Another time our Title IX coordinator, knowing we performed classroom observations of faculty instructors, asked us to observe her presentation and make some recommendations for improving it.

Sometimes when they have nowhere else to go, administrators come to us. When, for instance, the person who ran the Bachelor of Individualized Studies (BIS) program suddenly retired, the Provost at the time, having no place else to turn, asked us to administer the BIS. That was ten years ago, and the BIS is still part of our strategic plan even though our main charge is to work with faculty, not students. Ten years ago also, a group of faculty honored as Foundation Professors (a rank above full professor at our university) formed a group known as the Society of Foundation Professors (SFP), but they needed an attachment to some extant campus unit in order to be funded. “Home,” Robert Frost famously asserted, “is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” If you were to guess where the SFP home has been since its inception, we’re sure our Teaching and Learning Center came to mind. And because success grows on success, when the Advancement unit on campus wanted to start a giving campaign through the SFP, they asked us to help. As a result, we created the popular series “If It Weren’t for Professor X . . . ” for the Alumni Magazine, wherein alums were solicited to send in testimonies about their favorite professor and donations.

Along the way, since our university does not have one, we’ve become the unofficial ombudsperson. And when some group uses our space for a meeting and can’t make their tech work, you’d probably think their first call was campus IT . . . and you’d be wrong.

Is all the extra work worth it? The good news is that builds great good will; the bad news is that the X-factor takes up a lot of time and energy. In the long run, though, our funding has increased, and our CTL is mentioned specifically in the University’s new strategic plan.

And as Mae West once observed, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”

Author

Charlie Sweet is currently Co-Director of the Teaching & Learning Center (2007+) at Eastern Kentucky University. Before going over to the dark side of administration, for 37 years he taught American Lit and Creative Writing in EKU’s Department of English & Theatre, where he also served as chair (2003-2006). Collabo-writing with Hal Blythe, he has published well over 1000 items, including 15 books; of his 11 books with New Forums. Meet Charlie.

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A few posts ago we discussed the importance of a center for teaching & learning (CTL) developing unified programming—i.e., a central concern around which it revolves. We even made the comment that “Research demonstrates that isolated one-shot presentations have little effect on the faculty.” For those of you wondering about that research, we have a major source for you, and we have an elaboration beyond the previous suggestion of milestone events for creating unity.

Related Reading: Creating Unified Higher Ed Faculty Development Programming

Key Faculty Development Programming Research

William Condon, Ellen Iverson, Cathryn Manduca, Carol Rutz, and Gudrun Willet recently published Faculty Development and Student Learning: Assessing the Connections (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016) that focuses on developing the golden link between programming offered by CTLs, the faculty absorbing that knowledge, and the resulting increase in student learning. Performing the research at Carleton College and Washington State University, the authors claim, “the research process led to the conclusion that the single workshop is not the correct unit of measure. The ethnographic and interview data clearly show the interaction of multiple workshops over time” (page 58). And the faculty subject concurred with that conclusion: “Faculty professed to like events that had their priorities straight—meaning events that faculty perceived as focused on important aspects of teaching. They tended to dislike events that were required or that they perceived as addressing more trivial topics, such as learning to use the new course management software. Faculty valued initiatives that provided support and that were iterative in nature” (page 127).

Possible Faculty Programming Application

One way to create this unity and iteration is through theming. Each CTL can craft a central motif around which much of the academic year’s faculty development programming can revolve—milestone events, presentations, and communities.

As we have stated previously, much of our early programming, especially in the fall, was really just an extension of New Faculty Orientation (NFO), offering campus shops that had no time to present their services during NFO an opportunity. Thus, the bulk of our programming consisted of giving the Counselling Center, the Office of Services for Individuals with Disabilities, Coo-op Education, and others similar groups an hour.

Related Reading: 14 Guidelines for Successful Higher Ed Faculty Workshops

Our major changeover came this past fall when we offered with our Media Producer to help these shops put their presentations on line where they could be viewed on demand. Our faculty development programming since has followed the unified and iterative model, but, of course, we have to follow the CTL’s prime directive and offer what programming our provost desires. As a result, since the Provost considers metacognition an important tool for student retention and success, we have been so focused the past two years.

This fall, as part of the Provost’s Speaker Series, Saundra McGuire, author of Teach Students How To Learn (2015), provided workshops on metacognitive strategies for both students and faculty. On the faculty side, we had over half of the full-time faculty participate. In preparation for her coming, we scheduled two consecutive semesters of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) devoted to metacognition. In addition, we developed the ninth book in our “It Works for Me” Series as It Works for Me, Metacognitively (2016), collecting effective metacognitive strategies from not only our home campus but all around the country. In addition, for our spring semester ten-part Teaching and Learning Innovation Series (TLI), we are facilitating two workshops on “Incorporating Metacognition into Your Classroom: Concepts and Strategies.”

The remainder of the TLI Series stresses key pedagogical concepts, such as critical reading, intuition in the classroom, quality matters and teaching online, using SSPS for teaching and research, what great teachers do, planning and designing visual syllabi, what I learned at the SXSWedu conference, and how to use virtual labs in science classes. While all these topics do indeed center around pedagogy, even that focus does not seem tight enough.

Future Faculty Development Programming

We think that in the future we will have to stress some specific aspect or aspects (i.e., threads) of pedagogy. We came close with our thread of metacognition, but we would like to be more narrow next year. In fact, we are in the process of finishing a book for New Forums on Transforming Your Students into Deep Learners (forthcoming 2016), so our tentative plans suggest we will indeed structure programming around the major thread of deep learning.

Author

Dr. Russell Carpenter is director of the Noel Studio for Academic Creativity and Program Director of the Minor in Applied Creative Thinking at Eastern Kentucky University. He is also Assistant Professor of English. Dr. Carpenter has published on the topic of creative thinking, among other areas, including two texts by New Forums Press. In addition, he has taught courses in creative thinking in EKU’s Minor in Applied Creative Thinking, which was featured in the New York Times in February 2014. Meet Russell.

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As we explained in our previous post, the Weekly Assessment Report—the WAR—provides an excellent methodology for assessment. Unlike annual reports, the WAR provides a weekly snapshot of the activities that dominate our CTL’s schedule as well as an easy way to check on items that are registering less frequently. As a result, we can respond to challenges and opportunities immediately rather than being months late.

How Weekly Assessment Reports Work

Here’s how the WAR works. Each Friday morning we type up a report by starting with the basic shell of our strategic plan. For instance, under Goal 3, Objective 1 states, “The TLC [The Teaching & Learning Center] will provide faculty and staff with cutting-edge pedagogy information/training.” The objective specifies a couple of aims. One, we are not going to go back and rehearse materials that have become commonplace. The faculty handbook places responsibility on individual faculty for staying current; our job is to help there, while faculty will have to learn the foundational material (e.g., what are Boyer’s four areas of scholarship) on their own. Secondly, the inclusion of the “staff” suggests why we often use the more inclusive term “professional” (e.g., Profession Learning Community). No, we do not use staff because we offer pure staff training in such things as proper use of chemicals, but because at our university the administrative staff (e.g., the Provost, deans, academic vice-presidents, director of Public Relations) actually teach everything from first-year to graduate courses.

At one time we were fulfilling Goal 3, Objective I through a series of what we called roundtables. When we were asked by our then dean to offer not only pedagogical training but in the fall to offer the roundtables as a way of various groups, especially those in our college (University Programs), to be able to present to the faculty at large what services they render, we envisioned these roundtables as active-learning workshops. Thus, back then, our WAR would mention talks by the University Co-op Education area, Study Abroad, University Counselling, and the disabilities office interspersed with workshops on flipping the classroom and SOTL. What we came to realize was that by spreading out the presenters’ areas, we had lost a sharp focus on our main mission (Helping Teachers Help Students Learn Deeply).

Therefore, this semester we inaugurated the Teaching and Learning Innovation Series (TLI) to refocus on the objective’s “cutting-edge” pedagogy. Instead of 20 presentations that ricocheted between service and pedagogy, we emphasized such obviously teaching concerns as critical reading, metacognition, intuitive teaching, quality matters, and designing visual syllabi. We also cut the number in half, figuring that offering half the number might increase attendance.

We made other subtle changes after looking through last semester’s WARs. We noticed that we had set up workshops on all five days, so any faculty member looking for continuity would be unable to find it. Therefore, this year we scheduled every event on Thursday afternoon. The registrar informed us that Friday classes were being scheduled less and less, and the most open times (i.e., fewest classes) were 8:00 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., so we chose 3:00-4:00. And to give us a better sense of who was attending, when we put out announcements of our events, we listed a registration URL. Furthermore, we created a logo for the TLI series, and after each event we emailed its participants a simple electronic evaluation. Finally, we created flyers, electronic and paper, for each presentation, handing out the flyer for event 4 at event 3 and including the flyers as attachments when we used the campus email system to advertise our series. Rusty, our master tweeter, took to Twitter to advertise and provide real-time updates of our programming.

The Weekly Assessment Report Results

Already this semester, attendance at our sessions has increased. Our workshop on metacognitive strategies, for instance, received over 50 registrants, so we had to move it twice to larger rooms that could accommodate such a crowd. In fact, that workshop proved so successful that we added a second session on metacognitive strategies for later in the semester. Another improvement has been an increase in email traffic. This morning, for example, we found an email from a metacognition participant with a source he “hoped” we mentioned at our next session.

And all this change came about in just one goal’s one objective. From the beginning we’ve said that so much of what we do at our CTL is in its beta stage. The WAR has provided us with an instrument to make informed changes on the fly.

Author

Ph.D Hal Blythe writes literary criticism to mystery stories. In addition to the eleven books he’s published with New Forums, Hal has collaborated on four books on a variety of subjects, over 1000 pieces of fiction/nonfiction, and a host of television scripts and interactive mysteries performed by their repertory company. He is currently co-director of the Teaching and Learning Center for Eastern Kentucky University. Meet Hal Blythe.

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Want a simple assessment tool for your CTL, one that tracks your daily activities while providing you with a detailed read-out of what activities dominate your unit? A few years ago our dean expressed both an educational and oversight interest in learning what our CTL—here it’s the Teaching & Learning Center–actually does—i.e., how can she justify continuing to support funding our unit? At first, we thought of our response as merely making our boss happy—what we’ve already discussed as the number one job of a CTL—but then we realized such a response had terrific P.R. value and it could serve as an effective assessment tool.

To create a weekly report, we used our CTL’s strategic plan as a template. The process was relatively painless since when we established our strategic plan, we followed our university’s format. First, list your goals:

1. GOAL 1: Effectively administer the unit (list here the over-arching university goals that this goal addresses).
2. GOAL 2: Provide venue/facilitation for the University (university goals).
3. GOAL 3: Provide high-quality professional development (university goals).

Next, the University asked us to run its Bachelor of Individualized Studies (BIS) Program, so we added one:

4. GOAL 4: Effectively administer the BIS Program (university goals).

Along the way, we also found we were being asked to perform various tasks that did not conform to our four goals, so a new category was tacked on:

5. Miscellaneous.

Under each of these goals, we created a list of objectives. For instance, Goal 3 of professional development has ten items:

• Objective 1: The TLC will provide faculty and staff with cutting-edge pedagogy information/training.
• Objective 2: The TLC will provide faculty and staff with scholarship training.
• Objective 3: The TLC will coordinate orientations for such groups as New Faculty, Part-Time New Faculty, First-Year Course Faculty, and Teaching Assistants.
• Objective 4: The TLC will administer the Faculty Consultation Program (FCP).
• Objective 5: The TLC will sponsor and coordinate several types of Professional learning Communities (PLCS) (e.g., traditional PLCs, Breakfast and a Books, and Creative Communities).
• Objective 6: The TLC will facilitate, when needed, specialized faculty and staff professional development workshops (e.g., our Teaching & Learning Innovations Series).
• Objective 7: The TLC will administer the Faculty Innovators (FIs) program.
• Objective 8: The TLC will liaise with the Council on Postsecondary Education’s (CPE) Faculty Development Workgroup.
• Objective 9: The TLC will collaborate with the Noel Studio.

Interestingly, these objectives have morphed over the past ten years with some objectives added, deleted, or synthesized. For instance, as we were writing this post, we noticed that over the years Objective 3 on orientations has expanded from its original single charge, New Faculty Orientation (NFO). When we began the Center, we were put on a committee of faculty charged with running NFO. Gradually, we came to realize that most of that group really didn’t want to be doing it, had no background in professional development, and were just overseeing a program that had been passed on down to them. Slowly, we suggested some changes that reduced the orientation’s length from five days to three and cut costs in half. Our most important change, however, was redirecting NFO’s focus to the importance of each professor’s major duty, teaching. When NFO became an efficient, cost-saving process, others around the University noticed. Part-time Orientation was added to our plates. Then the Dean of the Graduate School asked us to facilitate a session for his Teaching Assistants. Later, First-Year-Programs asked us to present their program, and recently the Student Success unit inquired if we can help them.

Success begets success, sometimes so much that we can’t handle all the requests.

Objectives come and go. Six years ago, for instance, the University asked us to address Senate Bill 1 that created a seamless transition between secondary and higher education. Thus, we created CARTE (though we can no longer remember for what the acronym stood). Also, the Provost has had several temporary initiatives we’ve been tasked with helping. And we’ve developed a few programs, such as Scholarship Week and the Pedagogicon, that have grown to major importance.

Next time we’ll explain how we use the WAR for assessment and provide some particulars.

Author

Charlie Sweet is currently Co-Director of the Teaching & Learning Center (2007+) at Eastern Kentucky University. Before going over to the dark side of administration, for 37 years he taught American Lit and Creative Writing in EKU’s Department of English & Theatre, where he also served as chair (2003-2006). Collabo-writing with Hal Blythe, he has published well over 1000 items, including 15 books; of his 11 books with New Forums. Meet Charlie.

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One question that comes up quite often with our oversight of all things under our auspices is: how involved should we as the Executive Committee be over presentations and workshops that occur under our general center for teaching & learning (CTL) banner or that specifically of the Faculty Innovators? One school of thought says treat them like your children who have to be given a certain amount of latitude to even fail, while another point of view claims that any event labelled as coming from us reflects upon us, and if it looks bad, we look bad.

As we evolve our programs, we try to offer more and more guidance to those who in essence represent us. While the Faculty Innovators receive more basic training in everything from conducting workshops to consulting with faculty clients, we provide even volunteers with some basic presentation guidelines that are a living document. Every time we observe a workshop, we seem to add to or tweak our document.

Here are some fundamental guidelines:

1. In your presentation, no matter your content the main thing you should hope to accomplish is to be an effective model for good teaching. Everything you do should reflect a pedagogical best practice.
2. In that vein, plan for an interactive workshop, not a PowerPoint-supported lecture.
3. Any instructions, directions, or even presentation of fundamental and powerful concepts should take no more than five minutes.
4. Utilize two to three exercises that your audience can undertake. You can employ reflection, pair-and-share, or even larger group work. An alternative might be to utilize a single case study that covers your major points.
5. Whatever exercises your audience performs, be sure to plan for a report-out and reaction (by you and the other participants) to whatever is reported. Your audience must be made to believe that their input matters.
6. Where appropriate, intentionally utilize Bloom’s Taxonomy, and make your audience understand not only that you are using it, but why.
7. Structure your presentation around the basic classroom organizational pattern of C.R.I.S.P.:

• Contextualize: at the beginning make sure your audience is provided with the fundamental and powerful concepts (FPCs) you intend to cover. Clearly outline your Faculty Learning Objectives (FLOs) for the session. Demonstrate quickly why these FPCs are important to the audience.
• Review: tie your subject to materials previously covered in earlier sessions or are university themes. We, for instance, use the aegis of the Teaching & Learning Innovations Series (TLI), and we often tie to our basic campus milestones (e.g., New Faculty Orientation, the Provost’s Speaker Series, Scholarship Week, the Pedagogicon). The key notion here is that new knowledge is built on old.
• Iterate: make certain your fundamental and powerful concepts come up a few times and in different ways (e.g., PowerPoint, pair-and-share, or even Q & A).
• Summarize: Make certain you stop your workshop five minutes before the allotted time period ends so that you can simplify, synthesize, and strategize.
• Preview: if possible, know what event comes next in the series so that you can tie it to what you have done.

8. As with your own classes, arrive early and stay afterwards. Use the time to build rapport, answer questions, and even plant intellectual seeds.
9. Make the workshop entertaining. Be interesting and humorous. While some educational jargon is unavoidable, balance it with cultural and pop cultural allusions.
10. Use the Mentor from the Middle methodology. Rather than stay at the front of the class, mingle with your audience whether you are providing information or helping them with their exercises.
11. Communicate effectively. Speak clearly and slowly. Make eye contact. Show everyone your face. If you know some of your colleagues in the audience, use their names.
12. Make sure you provide a survey for your participants. CTLs should develop such an evaluation rubric as well as a methodology for transmitting it to your audience (e.g., hand out or send electronically).
13. Offer handouts during the session and when possible provide them electronically to participants. CTLs should develop repositories where such documents can be easily located.
14. Finally, the best workshops do not try to cover a broad area, but focus on a single, important aspect of a larger concern. They center on a fundamental and powerful concept that can be presented by a facilitator and applied by an audience.

Sweet, C. & Blythe, H. (2008). Keeping your classroom C.R.I.S.P. NEA Higher Education Advocate, 26(2), 5-8.

Author

Dr. Russell Carpenter is director of the Noel Studio for Academic Creativity and Program Director of the Minor in Applied Creative Thinking at Eastern Kentucky University. He is also Assistant Professor of English. Dr. Carpenter has published on the topic of creative thinking, among other areas, including two texts by New Forums Press. In addition, he has taught courses in creative thinking in EKU’s Minor in Applied Creative Thinking, which was featured in the New York Times in February 2014. Meet Russell.

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Over the past ten years we have averaged sponsoring two professional learning communities (PLCs) per semester. It wasn’t until we organized the Faculty Innovators, however, that we began to consider the concept of oversight. After we select, and sometimes train a facilitator, we have traditionally not observed him/her. Why? We could say that we haven’t thought about it, but the truth is that most of the PLCs have taken place in the faculty lounge outside our office, so we have been very privy to what’s going on.

Related Reading: The Great Professional Learning Community Experiment

Oversight a Challenge for Developing Faculty Innovators

This semester, though, the PLCs are being run across the campus, and we have lost contact.  Also, as we have tried to organize our recently launched Faculty Innovators (FI) program, we have become very much aware of accountability, of keeping records, and of assessment. So, just as we launched the FI program before we had it completely figured out, we have decided to develop some sort of oversight of the PLCs on the fly.

Related Reading: An Inside Look at a Faculty Innovator Progress, Part I

As a model for keeping track of PLCs, we used the faculty consultation process (our faculty mentoring program), especially the classroom observation portion. As for a procedure, we opted for asking PLC facilitators to invite us to join the group whenever we could, not as an outside observer but as a potential participant. When we perform classroom observations, we give the instructor being observed the choice of mentioning the class has a guest today, explaining why, or just ignoring the two-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. For PLCs, we wanted to be introduced to the group and allowed to participate.

The difference for us is that classroom observations are accomplished with students in the room, but in a PLC all participants hold faculty rank. Therefore, for a faculty member to be present and not participating might be deemed strange. Besides, we usually have an expertise in whatever subject the PLC is studying. Last week we decided to give our oversight program a trial run, especially since Rusty was one of those facilitating a PLC, this one on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL).

Focusing on The PLC Facilitator

Intrepidly, we sat down in a Monday morning PLC (also on SOTL) without a rubric to anchor the process.  In fact, developing a rubric was one of the purposes of this visitation. Obviously, the observation focused not on the PLC’s subject matter (and, yes, we were emailed the PLC’s study materials before the session), but the facilitator, with the participants as a secondary goal.  Immediately, we encountered an unforeseen problem.

Most PLCs use a graduate seminar as a model, and in many seminars the instructor turns the bulk of classes over to individual students to teach (haven’t we all heard that the best way to see if you really understand a subject is to teach it?). So when Charlie plopped himself in the seat, he found out that a faculty member other than the facilitator was teaching that day’s assigned readings. Charlie adjusted; after all, when a graduate student becomes instructor for a day, the job of the assigned teacher is make sure things go right—to bring up information and viewpoints being missed, to bring discussions that get off the tracks back on, and to keep order.

But how can a rubric be set up to address all such contingencies?

Undaunted, on Friday Charlie joined Rusty’s PLC. Grandmother used to say that “Comparisons are odious,” but in academia playing one PLC session off another helps develop the rubric. Rusty had also relinquished some of his authority to a fellow faculty member, but Rusty was also more of an interventionist than the facilitator of the first PLC. In fact, he was quite subtle in bringing the PLC back to the assigned chapter. PLC members, like effective facilitators, musty learn to maintain control, though that control is best when not noticed.

General Guidelines for PLC Rubric

As a result of this experience, we have been talking about some general guidelines that will eventually be part of a PLC rubric:

• Does the PLC facilitator maintain some measure of control of the session?
• Does the PLC facilitator start by contextualizing the session’s main lesson, or, in Gerry Nosich’s term, begin with the day’s “fundamental and powerful concept(s)”?
• Does the PLC facilitator help the session facilitator through the rough spots, especially in trying to make all faculty members present actual participants?
• Does the PLC facilitator provide all session facilitators with some tips (something else we will have to develop)?
• Has the facilitator preplanned the session so that each session is based on some outside resource/homework/reading?

Our overall point is that had we tried to create a rubric before actually observing some PLC sessions, we would have been missed a lot. Sometimes you have to take the risk of making up things as you go.

Author

Ph.D Hal Blythe writes literary criticism to mystery stories. In addition to the eleven books he’s published with New Forums, Hal has collaborated on four books on a variety of subjects, over 1000 pieces of fiction/nonfiction, and a host of television scripts and interactive mysteries performed by their repertory company. He is currently co-director of the Teaching and Learning Center for Eastern Kentucky University. Meet Hal Blythe.

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