SoCTL
It’s the fall—not officially, but certainly in the hearts and minds of students and faculty from Worthington to Ely, from Winona to Thief River Falls.
I was lucky last week to be back on a campus and in the company of faculty during this recent fall resurgence of life and introspection. Frankie Condon, CTL Campus Leader at Saint CloudStateUniversity, invited me to join her and some of her colleagues in a discussion about the definition and importance of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). In a group of 20, there were many ideas about SoTL, all of them unique, all of them valid.
So what is meant by the scholarship of teaching and learning? Simply put, it is, just as any research is, inquiry into issues that are significant to teaching and learning in your field and the dissemination of your findings to your colleagues. As I prepared for the SCSU discussion, I read a great article by Eileen Bender and Donald Gray, in the April 1999 Volume of Research & Creative Activity. They write “the scholarship of teaching means that we invest in our teaching the intellectual powers we practice in our research.”
Bender, Eileen & Gray, Donald. "The Scholarship of Teaching." Research & Creative Activity. 22.1 (April, 1999)
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Dates
to Remember
SEP 14-15: DISTANCE COUNSELING
Discipline Workshop Location: Century College, White Bear Lake
Sponsors: Center for Teaching & Learning, Minnesota Online, and Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act of 1998 State Leadership Funds
SEP 21-22: FIELD RESEARCH PROJECTS: Meeting the Environment in Your Courses
Discipline Workshop Location: Rainy River Community College and Voyager's National Park. Registration closes September 19.
Sponsors: Center for Teaching & Learning and Rainy River Community College
SEP 28-29: FINDING THE PULSE: Reading the Student
Discipline Workshop Location: Ruttger's Sugar Lake Lodge, Grand Rapids. Registration closes September 8.
Sponsors: Center for Teaching & Learning and Minnesota Association of Developmental Education (MNADE)
SEP 28-29: 5TH ANNUAL BEYOND BOUNDARIES: Integrating Technology into Teaching & Learning Conference
Location: University of North Dakota, Memorial Union, Grand Forks, North Dakota. Conference Information.
Sponsor: University of North Dakota
OCT 5-6: UNDERSTANDING CHINA TODAY: Opportunities and Challenges for Teaching and Learning
Location: Minneapolis Community and Technical College Registration closes September 24.
Sponsors: Center for Teaching & Learning and Minneapolis Community and Technical College
DATES FOR YOUR SPRING CALENDARS:
MARCH 1-3, 2007: RSP/ITEACH CONFERENCE
The annual Realizing Student Potential and ITeach: Best Practices in Teaching with Technology conferences have combined!
RSP + ITEACH = ONE GREAT EVENT!
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Teaching Tip
of the Week
"How do you get students to do the assigned reading?"
Students come to class unprepared if they don't see the relevance. Is your course reading overlapping, independent, supplementary or interdependent? To show the relevance try these strategies:
1. Use the phrase, "As you read in your textbook assignment for today,..." or the question "What was your reaction to the author's discussion of.....?"
2. Have the students write a one-minute paper at the beginning of occasional class periods on the most important ideas they got from the assigned reading. (Making it worth points may help as well.)
3. Use the occasional quiz on the reading at the beginning of the course to motivate students to read. (You can decide if they are worth points or not). A variation would be to give a quiz to learning teams to work on cooperatively.
Source: McKeachie, Wilbert. (2006). McKeachie's Teaching Tips. Houghton Mifflin.
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CTL Report
The Northeast Teaching and Learning Experience was a success! The regional conference, a collaboration between the Northeast State Colleges and the Center for Teaching and Learning, was held August 22, 2006.
Hosted by Lake Superior College, the event was held at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center. The purpose of the conference was to welcome faculty back to campus, and to start the 2007 Academic Year with a day full of presentations on best practices in teaching.
The majority of sessions were conducted by regional faculty, and a discussion on the topic of “The Educated Person” was introduced by the keynote speaker, Dr. Thomas Jones.
A total of 398 regional and statewide faculty and administrators attended the conference, and evaluations show faculty viewed the day as having contributed positively to their professional development.
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