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CTLs Help (Sites of Engagement): A Message from the Editor-in-Chief
Get PDFFaculty might be all at different points in an institution’s efforts to enhance teaching and learning and/or at varying distances from those efforts, but these faculty impact a school’s approaches to teaching and learning nonetheless. For CTL workers, the idea is to help faculty members situate themselves with some degree of intentionality in regard to forces they might marshall toward advancing teaching and learning in their classrooms and across a school’s broader ecology. What a CTL does is help educators locate themselves in a nexus of best practices, draw attention to available tools and approaches, interrogate institutional histories and pertinent discourses, articulate and reexamine values and expectations; a CTL configures sites of engagement through which such resources can come together to form action in real time
Pedagogical Wellness: A New Direction in Educational Development
Get PDFMental health and well-being in higher education is currently a national topic of conversation. In response to the wellness and burnout challenges among our faculty and students, we created the Pedagogical Wellness Specialist (PWS) position at the University of California, Irvine. Designed to explore the intersection of wellness and pedagogy, the PWS is uniquely embedded in the CTL. In this article, we provide an overview of the state of well-being in higher education, offer the PWS position as an opportunity to enhance the CTL’s connection to the broader campus, reflect on the first year of implementation, and provide an example from Montana State University, Billings, that shows how pedagogical wellness can be adopted even without a formal position. We close with recommendations and lessons learned for other CTLs interested in adopting pedagogical wellness
Faculty-Driven Design: How a Successful Online Core Teaching Certification Was Developed, Implemented, and Revised Over Time
Get PDFWe developed a teaching certification for higher education faculty to provide participants across North Carolina State University with the pedagogical skills required to excel in their teaching endeavors. The certification has evolved; its current configuration is an online, asynchronous program of study that faculty can complete at their own pace over one year. The Office for Faculty Excellence administers then certification a Faculty Fellow facilitates the certification, providing support and guidance to the participants in multiple modalities. In this article, we discuss how the certificate was developed, administered, and revised over time, and we conclude with takeaways and practical implementation strategies for establishing and coordinating similar programs at other institutions
The CTL Assessing CTL: A Message from the Editor-in-Chief
Get PDFWhenever I think about assessment in higher education, two quotes come to mind. The first is sociologist William Bruce Cameron’s (1963) remark that “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts” (p. 13). At the same time, I also tend to think of the concluding lines of W. S. Merwin’s (2005) poem “Berryman.” In this piece, a young poet is speaking with his mentor and comes to ask him “how can you ever be sure/that what you write is really/any good at all,” and the elder poet responds:
… you can\u27t
you can\u27t you can never be sureyou die without knowingwhether anything you wrote was any goodif you have to be sure don\u27t write
Building a Strategic Plan That Guides Assessment: A Case Study from a Teaching and Learning Center
Get PDFIn this article, we make the case that a well-crafted strategic plan can guide the overall assessment of a Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). A strategic plan enables a center to assess holistically the degree to which it achieves its purpose an aligns with institutional priorities. Adoption of this approach enabled our center to collect assessment evidence that was relevant and meaningful given the center’s purpose, context, and priorities. In this case study, we describe how the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, Penn State’s CTL, clarified its vision and mission and used the strategic planning process to transform our daily work as well as the way we assessed and reported our center’s success. The identified strategic goals served to guide the day-to-day work of its educational developers and design programs that moved the center forward
Thin-Sliced Embedded Direct Assessment (T-SEDA): Measuring Impacts of Development Workshops on Participants\u27 Learning Gains
Get PDFHow can educational developers best formatively assess impacts of their services? Standard practices tend to rely on indirect measures, such as counts of participants and feedback surveys. This paper responds to recent calls for more robust approaches directly measuring outcomes. We describe how to implement a new, transferable, evidence-based approach for directly measuring instructors’ learning gains within and across educational development workshops: the Thin-Slice Embedded Direct Assessment (T-SEDA) Process. Although this approach does not measure longterm retention of learning or effects on future teaching behaviors, it significantly enhanced our toolkit for formatively assessing educational development workshops. Through case studies, we illustrate principles underlying our approach, impacts on instructors’ learning, and how we iteratively refine our programs and practices using the T-SEDA process. We also discuss lessons learned for fostering an inclusive, collaborative culture of formative assessment among educational developers
Use of Narratives to Communicate Value in Educational Development
Get PDFIn the postsecondary educational context, the value of educational development can be challenging to convey. Currently used and widely touted performance metrics often prove inadequate for the scope and wisdom of this type of work and fail to reflect its value. Despite these limitations, there are rich, interdependent, and compelling experiences and informative lessons that do convey value and satisfy the drive to quantify impact. In this article, we draw on existing models and approaches to make meaning from evaluation and put forward a framework for eliciting narratives of experience to communicate value. Through this process, educational developers and leaders working in centres for teaching and learning can reflect on their activities, identify lessons, incorporate affective experiences, readjust goals, and celebrate achievements. They can do this in ways that evidence and communicate to academic stakeholders the value of their contributions and collective efforts
Using Google Analytics to Measure Engagement with a Teaching and Learning Centre During COVID-19
Get PDFPostsecondary educators and students were among the first affected by COVID-19 pandemic safety protocols and were required to transition quickly from face-to-face to unfamiliar remote teaching and learning environments. To support this transition, support staff at teaching and learning centres (TLCs) also pivoted their support strategies and developed and delivered more online resources and virtual professional development workshops. The purpose of this study was to examine whether the demands for online and remote teaching and learning support was evident in the Google Analytics data of the TLC webpages of a research-intensive Canadian university. To facilitate interpretation of observed trends, we aligned the timing of messages emailed to faculty and new resource launches on the TLC webpages to the analytics data. Results confirmed that TLC webpages are vital sources of information for faculty development, and targeted communications increased faculty engagement with teaching resources and professional development opportunities. As pandemic safety protocols ease and educators and students return to their postsecondary campuses, they will face new challenges. In response, TLCs must continue to monitor faculty engagement and their changing support needs, and they must continue to adjust approaches to offering information and professional development opportunities as necessary. The examination of website analytics data is just one measure that can support evidence-informed decision making for this purpose
Power Users and the CTL: What We Learned about Filtered Informal Learning in the Time of COVID
Get PDFOne common way faculty learn how to teach is through interactions with colleagues. However, this practice can result in the sharing of ineffective ideas or teaching strategies. This study introduces the term “filtered informal learning,” which refers to the informal sharing of best practices filtered through an authoritative source such as a campus Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). This study examines how “power users”—faculty who are familiar with, implement, and share best practices learned through formal CTL events—facilitated filtered informal learning during the emergency transition to online learning (ETOL) that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020. While this study takes place in a very unusual setting (in the midst of a pandemic), it offers a glimpse into how faculty and CTL staff may prepare for future challenges. CTL staff who worked with power users were significantly more likely to report an increase in workload relative to CTL staff who did not work with power users. However, CTL staff who worked with power users were significantly more likely to indicate that they were able to offer the same quality of service after the ETOL as they did before the ETOL. Open-ended interview questions given after the initial survey show that while power users are familiar with instructional technology, they are relatively less familiar with best practices and campus and federal guidelines for online learning. Regular meetings between CTL staff and power users can help familiarize power users with best practices and campus/federal guidelines
CTLs Vs. Greg Maddux: An Optimistic Message from the Editor-in-Chief
Get PDF?About a week away from my shipping this issue to our webmaster for publication, I felt compelled to thank Todd Zakrajsek once again for his contribution. As part of his special series for this journal, his contribution to this issue, I think, reclaims a sense of optimism for Centers of Teaching and Learning (CTLs). It certainly has been easy over the last two years to devote our attention to loss—loss of funding, of face-to-face programming, of projects that had been well underway. While I don’t for a second want to under-estimate the degree of loss many of us have indeed experienced, professionally as well as personally, I hope that this issue of JCTL might provide faculty developers with a moment to pride ourselves in what we have learned about ourselves and the possibilities of our work