Years ago Paul Simon told us that “I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.” In essence, every Center of Teaching and Learning (CTL) has to decide what it wants to be. Is it a traditional nail being hammered into shape, or is it a proactive force doing the shaping?

In a previous post, we emphasized that “The Faculty Developer’s Most Important Question” is “to whom do you report” and the key to a CTL’s activities is “what matters most is what matters most to your boss.”

How do you want to innovate your Center of Teaching and Learning?

But the second most important question is: into what do you want to innovate your CTL? Yes, you have a mission, but that mission is general. Administrators, technologies, and even theories of faculty development will change over the years, but what you want to be able to do is to change at least with the tide or even better, ahead of it. In our way of thinking a CTL exists to provide pedagogical development to the faculty and has nearly nothing to do with disciplines such as chemistry staying current in their field. Sure, had we funding enough, we might want to co-sponsor a noted speaker in psychology or provide a venue for a campus-wide event, but a CTL’s focus MUST be on pedagogy.

Appropriately, our CTL’s mission is intentionally pedagogical in theory and practice: “Helping teachers help students learn deeply.” And while we do exactly what our boss—actually we serve a provost and a dean—wants, we have adopted the hammer approach and try to nudge them in the direction our experience and research tell us to go.

Related Reading: Innovating Faculty Development Lessons From Pedagogy Day

How do you know which direction to take your your Center of Teaching and Learning?

The question becomes how do you as director of your CTL know what direction to nudge them? Be deliberate—make a list of all the things that you think you could accomplish as a CTL. If you’re not sure of the possibilities, check out other CTLs or even the POD (Professional and Organizational Network in Higher Education) website. Then, given both your expertise and your unit’s budget, prioritize the list. Start small. It’s better to do a few things well and establish a good reputation than to create a mediocre unit that in its attempt to be all things does less and ruins your credibility.

How do you manage upcoming trials and errors.

Be ready for missteps. One of our original programs, for example, offered to send faculty to the famed Lilly Conference on College Teaching and Learning. What we encountered was a logistical nightmare in trying to get faculty to commit, to carpool, and arranging for their minute preferences (e.g., dietary). After a few years, we realized that so our effort was eating up almost 50% of our budget and we had no way of knowing the program’s effect on teaching and student learning. As a result, we modified the program into seven “Lillyships,” wherein we supported only those faculty who appeared on the Lilly program.

Another problem developed when we assumed control of New Faculty Orientation. As the University draws primarily from a 22-county region (we are a regional university), traditionally new faculty were sent on a bus tour of the region. While the trip may have been good P.R. for the University, it wasn’t helping our new faculty pedagogically, and it was costing us almost $3000. In fact, we inherited a New Faculty Orientation that had little to do with pedagogy (as we discussed in a previous post).

Related Reading: 3 Principles for Innovating The Faculty Development Experience

Conclusion

Back to our list. What did we convince our bosses we could do well? What would give them the biggest bang for the buck? Number one on our list was New Faculty Orientation. If the University were hiring between 50 and 60 new faculty per year—and academic churn is much greater now than when we arrived on campus—that meant every five years more than one-third of the faculty turned over. To effect a cultural change, it is much easier to start on the ground floor than with those who have settled in. In addition to new faculty, we also orient over 50 part-time faculty per year, almost 45 graduate teaching assistants, and the 60-plus cadre of instructors who teach the University’s first-year orientation class.

Two hundred instructors mentored in best pedagogical practices would be enough if that were all we did.

Next time we’ll discuss how we hammered how various other programs that reflected our primary pedagogical purpose.

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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By far our most important innovation for faculty development at Eastern Kentucky University (EKU) has been Pedagogy Day. Our last post discussed innovating New Faculty Orientation (NFO) in general, but this post will concentrate on the opening day of New Faculty Development.

Remember that old Head and Shoulders TV commercial with the tagline “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”? What first impression do you want to make on your new faculty? Perhaps as an R1 institution, you want to stress the importance of scholarship. Our university is an historic teachers college with a 4-4 teaching load wherein the emphasis has always been on teaching. Therefore, we created a poster that reads EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING IS JOB ONE, which we also use on our website, and, appropriately, we label day one of NFO as Pedagogy Day.

Related Reading: 3 Principles for Innovating The Faculty Development Experience

Space Matters

We are great believers in Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that “The medium is the message,” so the space in which we hold NFO tells our audience as much as our words. When we first took over the program, NFO was held in an ornate lecture hall with the newbies lined up in rows and columns; the talking heads sat at tables in front of the room and talked from behind a podium. What was the special message if not that learning best occurred in a lecture format? Unfortunately, at the current stage of our faculty development evolution, active learning had been the dominant pedagogy for 15 years, but the space did not reflect that notion.

So one of our first steps was to transition NFO from the lecture hall to the wide open spaces of our Noel Studio for Academic Creativity. The Discovery Classroom consists of a large room with two-floor high ceilings complete with skylights that admit volumes of sunlight. Instead of rows and columns, the room contains tables on wheels and movable chairs. Interspersed through the room are smartboards, flip charts, computers, and monitors. The wall has been painted bright colors on which hang contemporary art pieces. A spiral staircase that seems a wooden representation of the DNA structure leads to the next floor. As we detail in Teaching Applied Creative Thinking (2013), brighter spaces produce deeper thinking students, and brighter spaces are created by four elements:

• Natural light
• Bright colors
• Flexible and comfortable furniture
• Writable spaces (23-4).

Instructor Placement

If our students—i.e., new professors—have these tools geared toward active learning, where do we place the instructors? Years ago at the Lilly Conference on Teaching & Learning at Miami we met Erica McWilliams, bought her The Creative Workforce, and bought into her theory in effective instructors being meddlers from the middle. In the aforementioned Teaching Applied Creative Thinking we modified her approach to what we call the mentor from the middle. As we said, “The Mentor-from-the-Middle, as a new paradigm for teaching, calls on the instructor to assume several roles: facilitator, coach, artist, critical reflector, model, and scholar” (60).

And do it all from the middle of the room. We also reasoned that if one mentor is good, why not use more, so now on Pedagogy Day the three of us begin in the middle of the Discovery Classroom, and throughout the two-plus hours we circulate throughout the crowd. Not only do we make eye contact, but we constantly touch upon the participants’ 18-inch-imaginary cylinder around them. In short, they invaded our physical space and now we invade their psychological space.

On a theoretical level, having three co-instructors sends a powerful message about collaboration (one of our creative thinking strategies) in teaching, something we did for over thirty-five years. On a practical level, while we have a “script” for Pedagogy Day, so much of what we do is piggybacking (another of our creative thinking strategies) off of each other’s comment as well as those of our newbies. The resulting spontaneity creates a remarkable flow (still another of our creative thinking strategies).

Related Reading: Why Successful Faculty Development Requires Innovation

Obviously, through our use of space and our instructional methodology, we are modeling key teaching strategies. No matter what we say to them, we have found through post-NFO surveys what they most remember is what we do.

Next time we’ll go into what we actually tell the new faculty.

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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Since it’s that time of year when New Faculty Orientation is almost upon us, we’re once again excited and renewed about the opportunity. Yet, a little over a decade ago when we took over new faculty development at our university, we didn’t like the plate we were served. All new tenure-track hires were put through a solid Monday-through-Friday week of activities that began at eight in the morning and lasted until five. Four days of sitting still in administrator-as-talking head information sessions were broken up one day by a five-hour bus ride, only occasionally with air conditioning and roller-coasting through the hills of eastern Kentucky. Mostly, new faculty were herded through HR, payroll, IT, benefits, ID picture-taking, parking, etc. with the result that by Friday afternoon their minds had been numbed by information overload, and the University had spent nearly $10,000 in the process.

Did you notice in this never-ending parade of indoctrination and torpor what key elements of a college professor duties weren’t even mentioned?

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Of course, we weren’t immediately given the reins of this white elephant. As is the academic way, we had to get ourselves put on the New Faculty Orientation Committee (NFOC), then sit through endless hours of meetings dominated by administrators, PowerPoints, and tittering (higher education’s equivalent of laughter). Gradually, by volunteering to look into problems or put together part of the week, we were ceded some power. And each year we moved up the hierarchal ladder toward control. Eventually, various members on the NFOC decided they had performed sufficient university service, retired, or took another job, and, of course, we expressed a willingness to take over leadership.

One of the first things we did was to look at a few years’ surveys of what new faculty members were telling us about their week-long experiences. Then, studying at the obstacles to overcome, we identified our strengths and brainstormed various meta-principles for innovation in the experience of new faculty. In so doing we derived four sweeping ideas for change.

1. Simplification

As former professors of English, we had often taught Henry David Thoreau’s classic. In fact, his retreat to Walden (1854) was an experiment designed to confront life in order to distill it to its basic necessities, and because “Our life is frittered away by detail,” his motto became “Simplify, simplify.” Later, we came across Learning To Think Things Through (2000), wherein Gerry Nosich advocates reducing complicated things (e.g., college courses) to their “fundamental and powerful concepts” in order to help students learn them deeply.

Applying that principle to New Faculty Orientation, we decided to make two major changes right away to the traditional week-long program; after all, as long-time faculty members, we were very aware how much value professors place on time. First, we cut the number of days down from five to three, and then we lopped off the afternoons. Research had taught us that faculty more and more were viewing the profession as a nine-to-five job and that they were part of a generation raising millennial students—i.e., helicopter parents. Let’s give them time, we reasoned, to take their kids to some morning activity—usually school—and be there when it ended.

Related Reading: Why Successful Faculty Development Requires Innovation

2. Focus

In a previous post we pointed out that your unit’s focus/goal must be what your boss says it is. What do you do, though, when you aren’t given much direction? At most institutions, whether the goal is expressed or not, administrators are very happy to save money. One byproduct of simplification was that three days cost the university less than five, and eliminating a costly bus trip made financial dollars and cents.

Remember our description of New Faculty Orientation? What did you find missing? Our university’s historic mission was teaching (yes, it was once a teachers’ college), yet in the five days of indoctrination, not one word was said about teaching. We coined the motto EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING IS JOB ONE, made posters to that effect, and started signing our email with the phrase. We decided to devote one third of our week to teaching, and to stress its importance, we would lead with it. Day One became Pedagogy Day. In our next post we’ll describe how this day works.

3. Atmosphere

In our first attempt at our new three-day approach to new faculty orientation, we still had two-days with a host of administrators greeting faculty and telling them what was expected of them. Most importantly, we realized that even though many had once been faculty, they had gone over to a dark side, where the preferred method of instruction was the PowerPoint lecture (to be fair, that approach was probably the preferred pedagogy when they joined the dark side).

We decided that even these administrator-heavy days had to be fun and interactive. Furthermore, that which was basically pure background information (e.g., the history of the University, how the counselling center works) could be presented in other forms such as email or even a large three-ring binder. Topics that demanded greater treatment became part of our fall round tables (e.g., dealing with distressed students, the disabilities office, veterans affairs)—essentially a series of one-hour workshops.

These three meta-principles have served us well and have been melded into our unit’s mot — “Helping teachers help students learn deeply.”

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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Is the term “innovative faculty development” actually redundant? In our way of thinking, faculty development—mostly because of its youth—necessitates innovation. In fact, any new field depends upon creative thinking and its implementation into innovation to progress.

In our academic careers, despite a background in traditional studies in English, we have helped develop three new disciplines—pop culture (especially comic book theory), creative writing, and now faculty development. Our careers have coincided with the rise of these three fields as they, like us, got their start in the 1960s.

But here we want to focus on faculty development. While the more formal structure we think of as faculty development began around 50 years ago, way back in 1810 Harvard University granted its first sabbatical, and many claim that action as the first instance of faculty development. In Creating the Future of Faculty Development (2006), Sorcinelli et al posit that faculty development has evolved through five ages:

• The Age of the Scholar (1960s-mid 70s)
• The Age of the Teacher (mid-to-late 70s)
• The Age of the Developer (1980s)
• The Age of the Learner (1990s), and
• The Age of the Network (21^st century).

Obviously such constant change necessitates innovation.

Factors That Make Faculty Development Respectable and Acceptable

In his “Afterword” to the second edition of Gillespie and Robertson’s A Guide to Faculty Development (2010), William Bergquist describes this fifty-year growth as “The Diffusion of Faculty Development as an Innovation” (406). Bergquist also identifies four factors that have made faculty development “respectable and acceptable on college and university campuses”:

1. “building a base of research evidence and interdisciplinary scholarship”
2. “constructing solid administrative support”
3. “building upon newly emerging institutional norms and values” and
4. “establishing a profession to guide the further development of the field” (409).

In short, the basic nature of a new field is change, and through innovation faculty development has sustained its progress. Interestingly, the Subject Index to Gillespie and Robertson’s book contains no heading for either “Innovation” or “Creative Thinking” as the assumption seems to be that these two concepts have provided the field’s firm foundation for fifty years.

Innovation Helps Faculty Respond to Changing Realities

Innovation will continue to undergird the maturation of faculty development because of the constant changing of higher education itself. Several forces are causing centers for teaching and learning (CTLs) to adapt. In fact, the term CTL is a bit misleading as every CTL we know is slightly different in terms of size, budget, composition, reporting responsibility, and mission. In our own short fifteen year history, for example, we have gone from a pure faculty-facing unit, lost our control of the university’s IT division, and recently merged with a student-facing studio for academic creativity. Innovate or perish has been our unofficial motto.

Change abounds for all CTLs. Due to the spiraling cost of higher education, many centers have been closed/funding has been cut. Other forces providing challenges have been identified by Gillespie and Robertson’s book by Lee:

• Sophistication of learning technologies
• Diversification and globalization of the student body
• Ascendance of assessment
• Networking (Sorcinelli’s term)—i.e., being asked to partner with internal and external units
• “Adjuncting” of CTL clientele: many institutions report over half of the professorate is part-time (30)
• Additional responsibilities.

Let’s investigate the last item on the list. We often joke that the “L” in TLC (the Teaching & Learning Center) actually stands for “landfill.” Each year we are “asked” to take on additional work (and, no, the budget never seems to increase). For instance, while we have always been in charge of New Faculty Orientation, recently we have picked up Part-Time Orientation and T.A. Training. This year we added the training of instructors in the First-Year Courses program. When the Provost’s Professional Development Series (i.e., putting on a major workshop such as Dee Fink’s Creating Significant Learning Experiences) was instituted two years ago), we made the arrangements.

Faculty development also has to respond to changing realities. For instance, faculty across the country are being asked to do more, while simultaneously research shows that new faculty treat professing less as a calling and more as a 9:00 to 5:00 job. As a CTL, we are still tasked with developing these time-taxed professionals, but how do we do it? Certainly, the traditional lunch-and-learn session has lost its luster. That sounds like a post for next time.

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 any self-respecting Trekkie or casual follower of the Star Trek TV-movie enterprise knows, the Prime Directive forbids interference in developing civilizations (e.g, don’t lose your phaser among stone-age savages on Planet X).

As faculty developers who have evaluated over 1000 classes, we’ve always tried to uphold the prime directive for classroom observation as much as possible. Yet, the longer we observe, the more we’ve come to believe we interfere.

Process for Classroom Observation

Usually when we observe, we have already met with the professor and determined some key pedagogical issues the professor desires us to treat. Traditionally we arrive early and slink to the rear of the class, most times without even an acknowledgement of our presence by either the professor or class members. On occasion a professor will introduce us, and some even say why we are there. In any case our role is always determined by the professor’s discretion.

Lately we’ve discovered an interesting phenomenon: the professors we observe seem to be much better teachers than either they or their chairs have led us to believe. They are knowledgeable, interesting, and engaging, and they tend more toward active learning strategies than the usual Sage on the Stage presentations. Why do these teachers appear better than advertised?

The Heisenberg Effect

We have always had a minimal grasp of the Heisenberg Effect, which states that the mere observation of a thing changes the thing being observed. While faculty development is not the same as particle physics, the principle still speaks to us, informing us that our mere presence alters the behavior of both teacher and student.

In our case, our mere presence seems to ramp up the effort of the teacher as well as the students—they are performing for an audience.

Does the Effect negate the validity of classroom observations? Not necessarily. Anything that bolster’s a teacher’s performance, if only for a short time, is worthwhile. And certainly making the professor more metacognitive in our reports and our follow-up conferences with the professor is useful.

But is our observation accurate?

We’ve found one cannot just observe—the whole observation must be placed in a context.  Therefore, one of our favorite tactics is to remain in class after the professor has departed–in Achieving Excellence in Teaching (2014) we encourage professors wishing to establish rapport to come early and stay late–and engage some of the students in a discussion. If the teacher lingers as we suggest, we simply meet with some students in the hallway. We have one major question: is the class we just observed typical of that professor? This post-class interview provides a check and balance by which we hope to overcome the inherent disadvantage posited by the Heisenberg Effect.

In one memorable post-class interview, students told us that the class we just observed was anything but typical. “Hell,” said a student, “it’s the only time all semester he’s provided us with handouts.” Another time a student told us, “He usually stands there in the front and lectures down at us.”

Truthfully, we can never overcome the Heisenberg Effect, but we do believe very strongly in expert observation (vs. pure peer observation). Though not perfect, expert observation is necessary to balance an almost crack-like addiction to student evaluations (e.g., IDEA) as the exclusive determiner of professorial competence in the classroom.

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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For years Charlie and Hal have shared an office. The first one there in the morning at around 7:30 opens the door and puts on a pot of our special-blend coffee. The open door and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee serve as an invitation for anyone—staff, colleagues, administrators, or students—to drop in for a chat. Likewise, when any of us go to class, we try to get there early, usually just as a previous class is letting out. We always stay late, sometimes talking with students as we move down the hall and back to our office.

No one had to tell us what we later learned from the research. Open doors will open hearts and minds. One reason we entered the teaching profession was the great rapport we had with our instructors from kindergarten through graduate school. Somewhere former Alabama football coach bear Bryant remarked that people don’t tie to an English class the way they do to a football team. The Bear was right, partially—people tie to people.

What is Faculty-Student Rapport?

When we wrote Achieving Excellence in Teaching: A Self-help Guide (2014), we preceded our discussion of best pedagogical practices with a section on dispositions, key attitudes necessarily present in highly effective instructors. One of those dispositions is rapport, which we defined as “a harmonious relationship that increases motivation, performance, and provides personal fulfillment for all affected—the faculty, the students, and the learning community” (40). In our way of thinking, without rapport the instructor was going to have a much more difficult time developing student learners.

How Online vs Offline Communication Affects Faculty-Student Rapport

In the Sunday (10 May 2015) Review section of The New York Times, Mark Bauerlein, an English Professor at Emory University, has written a provocative piece about the decline of rapport. In “What’s the Point of a Professor” Bauerlein points out that surveys find that today’s students have a positive attitude toward their professors. Of course they do, as the cynic in us feels compelled to point out since 1960 the percentage of college students has almost tripled from 15% “A”s to today’s rate of 43%. Baulerlein also notes at “61% of students said that professors frequently treated them `like a colleague/peer,’ which would be a good thing if we didn’t feel that some of that rapport had been purchased by a good grade.

Baulerlein then bemoans the students’ lack of face time with their professors. Beyond the 2.5 classroom hours/week, “contact ranges from negligible to nonexistent. In their first year, 33 percent of students report that they never talk with professors outside of class, while 42% do so only sometimes. Seniors lower that disengagement rate only a bit, with 25% never talking to professors, and 40 percent sometimes.”

How to Measure Learning Fostered By Faculty-Student Rapport

Certainly Internet communication between faculty and students has risen the past twenty years, but virtual time is not face time. As far as we know, no one has figured out a way to measure how much student learning has occurred because of a personal rapport, and we doubt such an assessment will ever happen. Nonetheless, our personal experience has taught us that it’s the personal relationships established with fifth-grade teacher Miss Dexter and Romantics professor Huntley that got us to this point in our careers. Had Mrs. Clark not sent that note home or Dean Gillum called our father, would we have succeeded?

We think not. A few years ago we started a series for our university’s alumni magazine that proves our point. In “If It Weren’t for Professor X” (no, not the head of Marvel’s X-Men), alumni wrote testimonials about their personal and professional lives being directly affected by specific college instructors. The series, however, died, and thanks in part to Bauerlein’s editorial we now understand one more cause.

Do we think student learning will suffer because of this lack of rapport? Yes. Do we think that we’ll ever be able to prove it? Probably not. On the other hand, as we type this post, our office door is open, and the strong aroma of coffee still wafts through the jambs.

About the 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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We begin Achieving Excellence in Teaching: A Self-help Guide (New Forums, 2014) by citing Gerry Nosich’s Learning To Think Things Through (2001). After citing much research on how little people remember and how fast they forget material, so he posits that instructors should focus not on dispersing quantity of information but rather the course or session ought to build around “fundamental and powerful concepts.” Nosich claims that a fundamental and powerful concept is “one that can be used to explain of think out a huge body of questions, problems, information, and situations. All fields have f&p concepts” (105-106).

Are Millennials Cyberslacker Students?

Recently, additional research has appeared that supports this pedagogical notion that less learning is more. In “A Generation of Cyberslackers”, Ronald Alsop gets into the territory explored by Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (2010). Alsop refers to the millennial generation born in the 1980s and 1990s as the Attention Deficit Disorder Generation because “they are more tightly tethered to their computers and phones, obsessively checking texts, email, and social media sites.”

“Researchers,” Alsop continues, “have discovered that “millennials are more likely than Gen Xers or baby boomers to report that their productivity suffers at work because of cellphone distractions and `cyberslacking’ on the Internet. Interestingly, Alsop reports, according to a 2013 survey of US and UK adults, millennials want to pay better attention, and “About 70% of them said they would be interested in learning how to strengthen their focus.”

Resources for Faculty Using Social Technology in The Classroom

What does this insight suggest about teaching? Obviously, reaching the millennial generation and penetrating this small attention span looms as a difficult task. Just as obviously, even without this research, instructors should be following Nosich’s theory of teaching the fundamental and powerful concepts. One other solution comes to mind.

The May 2015 issue of the Journal of Faculty Development (29.2), which was guest-edited by Rusty, is a special issue focused on “Social Media in Pedagogy and Practice: Networked Teaching and Learning.” Acknowledging the rise of social media sites and higher education’s growing interest in them, Rusty gets quickly to crux of the matter: “their instructional uses continue to both inspire and challenge faculty and students.”

This special issue of JFD spotlights “the most successful and promising strategies for integrating social media into the classroom while also considering the challenges these technologies present for teaching and learning.” Social media sites continue to provide spaces of opportunity for faculty willing to navigate them. The challenge is ensuring that they are safe, educational, and productive.

Various articles detail using Facebook, establishing guideposts for practitioners, integrating social media into writing classrooms, applying activities and assignments that support collaboration and community, employing digital portfolios, using social media to create surveys. In short, Rusty has put together a collection of key articles that might be thought of as the academics’ version of the Marines’ motto of “Improvise. Adapt, Overcome.”

Carr, Alsop, and this special issue of JFD concur that the influence of social media is not going to lessen, which in turn suggests that the next generation of students is going to have less of a traditional classroom focus. Instructors wishing to reach this group will need professional development that explores this invasive technology.

About the 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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