Barbara Jacoby defines critical reflection as the process of analyzing, reconsidering, and questioning one's experiences within a broad context of issues and content knowledge. She claims that it offers a unique opportunity to allow students to enhance their critical thinking abilities. If you want to learn more about the process of critical reflection and how you can use it in your classroom, we are pleased to offer a 20 minute mentor podcast on this topic. You can borrow the dvd from CT+LE now. We have also recently acquired the dvd of a webinar presented by Dr. Ike Shibley titled "Balancing Challenge and Support in Undergraduate Teaching." This 90 minute dvd is packed with ideas and techniques that you can implement in your classroom immediately. The overall focus of the presentation is delivering learner-focused teaching. If you would like to borrow this dvd, contact the CT+LE staff as well. We want to encourage you to remind your students to complete their course evaluations. This provides valuable information that can help you become a better teacher. Hopefully this is a repeat of a survey you have used throughout the semester, if not in whole, at least in part through formative assessment. In this way, the final survey will demonstrate the improvement in instructional delivery your students have experienced through your self reflection. This is a topic we hope to explore more fully in the coming weeks so stay tuned.

Experts claim that assessment has three main purposes: to promote learning, to judge achievement, and to maintain standards. The Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) is concerned about all three of these outcomes. That is why the Active and Collaborative Engagement for Students (ACES) Fellows program was implemented. The focus is to create an environment that allows faculty to redesign their classes using active learning methods. The QEP is specific to the core and developmental courses but the Center for Teaching+Learning Enhancement provides programming for the entire campus community. If you are interested in learning more about yourself as a teacher, take a look at the services offered by CT+LE and let us know how we can help. In addition, we will be announcing several new opportunities that will help you use self-reflection techniques to improve your teaching skills. As life-long learners, we all know how important it is to continually evaluate our effectiveness. Eliana Osborn offers the following advice for instructors who teach at night or have longer classes. Get students out of their seats. Everyone groans the first time you make them head to the back of the classroom, but class is no time to get comfortable. After a minute of stretching, ask review questions. They don’t get to sit down until they answer one correctly. Keep things light. When you get to a few students left who are struggling to come up with answers it is a good idea to modify your questions accordingly. She notes that short activities are also useful in long classes. Try to break up that time into smaller segments: 15 minutes of review from last week, 15 minutes from the book, partner practice, whole-group review, more direct instruction, work with a partner, read in a small group, and individual writing time. It is more work to come up with a variety of activities but it leads to increased engagement and greater retention of content, which is the goal.

Problems are inherent in any organization. When people have to work together, differing opinions and strong personalities will eventually lead to conflict. In an increasingly polarized society opposing viewpoints seem to be the norm, not the exception. Unfortunately, that culture won’t build a successful academic institution. CT+LE will be hosting the webinar presentation of "Strategies to Build and Sustain a Successful Academic Unit" on Tuesday, April 26 at noon. The interactive session will last one and one-half hours. Please contact CT+LE for registration information. This webinar is recommended for department chairs, deans, and directors but is open to everyone. Bernard Fryshman has given us a lot to think about in his essay on the merits of trying to quantify everything. He offers that numbers fascinate and inform and add precision and authority to an observation (although not necessarily as much as often perceived). The social sciences face a challenging task, dealing with the behavior of people who have an unfortunate tendency to think for themselves, and who refuse to behave in a manner predicted by elegant theories. If you are putting together an application for cohort 3 of the ACES Fellows program, you should take a look at the book How Assessment Supports Learning: Learning-oriented assessment in action by David Carless, Gordon Joughlin, and Ngar-Fun Liu. They provide a number of active learning methods that could be implemented in your class to create a student-centered environment. The book is available for loan from CT+LE.

The take away from the sessions delivered by Dr. Rebecca Cox last Friday was clearly connections. The need for community in all its varieties is a key to removing the lack of understanding between faculty and students. In order for retention rates to improve, faculty must get to know their students better. In order for attrition rates to go down, students must get to know their teachers better. Faculty and students must form a community that shares mutual goals. If you are interested in viewing the faculty session Understanding The New Student Learning Paradigm: How to Help your Students Succeed, please contact the staff of CT+LE. There was a nice turnout for today's informational session on the request for applications for cohort 3 of the ACES Fellows program. If you are interested in submitting an application, due May 13, please consider attending the remaining session on Tuesday, April 19 at 9:30 a.m. in 204 Social and Behavioral Sciences Building. If you are unable to attend, contact the CT+LE office to set an appointment. According to a yearly national survey of more than 200,000 first-year students conducted by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, college freshmen are increasingly "overwhelmed," rating their emotional health at the lowest levels in the 25 years the question has been asked. Such is the latest problem dropped at the offices of higher-education administrators and professors nationwide: Young adults raised with a single-minded focus on gaining admission to college now need help translating that focus into ways to thrive on campus and beyond. In today’s Academic Minute, Empire State College's John Beckem discusses how audio files are being used to improve communication between faculty members and students learning at a distance. Beckem is an assistant professor of finance and management studies at Empire State’s Center for Distance Learning.

Maura Pilotti has written an interesting review of Rebecca Cox's book The College Fear Factor. As you know, Dr. Cox will be at LU on Friday, April 15 and will deliver a session for faculty at 9:05 a.m. and one for students at 12:30 p.m. This is a terrific opportunity to participate in an interactive professional development seminar built from research data. If you are planning to send students to the afternoon session, CT+LE will be providing an attendance report so remind them to sign in at the event. By the way, there will be book signing opportunities following both events. The Quality Enhancement Plan approved by the LU administration in 2009 was designed to enhance the delivery methods of all core and developmental courses. The Active and Collaborative Engagement for Students (ACES) Fellows program is the outreach instrument for the QEP. We will be accepting applications for ACES Fellows cohort 3 until May 13. If you are considering applying to be an ACES Fellow, you should attend one of the two informational meetings being held on Monday, April 18 at 1:00 p.m. in 101A Education Building and Tuesday, April 19 at 9:30 a.m. in 204 Social and Behavioral Sciences Building. A research project by Rosemary Capps demonstrates that faculty who get to know their students personally and who validate them can provide a huge difference in relation to persistence and retention. She is also a huge proponent of faculty advising. Ms. Capps studied the lives of nine enduring students at an unnamed community college in the West. The students—six of whom were older than 25—were assigned to a developmental-reading class in the fall of 2008, and stayed enrolled at the college at least through 2009, even as many of their classmates dropped out.

The Faculty Development Speaker Series continues this Friday, April 15 with the visit of Dr. Rebecca Cox of Seton Hall University. The faculty session, Understanding The New Student Learning Paradigm: How to Help your Students Succeed, occurs at 9:05 a.m. in the John Gray Center Seminar Rooms A&B. Registration is requested to help us with the food and beverage needs. The session will be followed by a book signing as well and B&N Bookstore will have copies of The College Fear Factor: how students and professors misunderstand one another for sale. We urge you to encourage your students to attend the student-only session, Secrets Revealed: What Your Professors May Be Thinking About You, set for 12:30 p.m. in 206 Setzer Center. Linda Adler-Kassner, professor of writing at the University of California at Santa Barbara and president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, announced the release of the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing guidebook for faculty members who teach composition and writing. Probing the uses of nine different types of social media among professors, a recently released study found that professors consider YouTube the most useful tool by far -- for both teaching and non-classroom professional use. Nearly a third of respondents said they instructed students to watch online videos as homework, and about 73 percent said they thought YouTube videos were either somewhat or very valuable for classroom use, regardless of whether they use them currently. If you teach a core or developmental course at LU, we are hoping you are planning to submit an application for the 2011 ACES Fellows program. You should attend one of the two orientation sessions set for April 18, at 1:00 p.m. in room 101A Education Building and April 19, at 9:30 a.m. in room 204 Social and Behavioral Sciences Building. You can download a copy of the Request for Application now.

The Request for Applications has been issued for the 2011-12 Active and Collaborative Engagement for Students (ACES) Fellows program. Applications are due to the CT+LE office on May 13. Informational sessions will be offered on April 18, at 1:00 p.m.in room 101A Education Building and April 19, at 9:30 a.m. in room 204 Social and Behavioral Sciences Building. All faculty teaching core or developmental courses are eligible to participate. Research evidence overwhelmingly supports the claim that students learn best when they engage with course material and actively participate in their learning. Faculty who are planning to submit an application may want to read Arthur W. Chickering and Zelda F. Gamson groundbreaking article describing good practices in undergraduate education. In addition, there are a number of articles and resources for those looking to infuse active and collaborative learning methods into their classrooms. The journal New Directions for Teaching and Learning has a number of articles that are useful and practical. Melvin L. Silberman's book Active Learning: 101 Strategies to Teach any Subject is available from the Gray Library. Active learning shifts the focus of instruction from what should you, the instructor, teach and deliver to students to what do you want students to be able to do with course material. New research shows that faculty who are facilitators, collaborators, leaders, and organizers are having great success in helping students prepare for lifelong learning and making them more capable to work in fields where they must acquire new skills and knowledge regularly. For more information or resources about active learning in the classroom, contact the staff at the CT+LE.

The Science and Mathematics Teacher Imperative (SMTI), begun three years ago by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, is the largest national initiative devoted to producing more and better-prepared science and mathematics teachers. The SMTI 2011 National Conference (June 8-10) provides an opportunity for faculty from science, mathematics and education disciplines to share their successful programs or strategies. An assistant professor of mass media at Valdosta State University, in Georgia, was arrested last week on charges of battery after a confrontation with a student over extracurricular Web surfing during class led him allegedly to close the lid of the student’s laptop computer on her hands, according to The Spectator, the campus’s student newspaper. The professor, Frank J. Rybicki is free on bail. Several students told The Spectator that Mr. Rybicki was an excellent teacher who should not be punished for enforcing a rule against visiting Web sites unrelated to a class in progress. The university said it was investigating the incident and ordered students in the class not to talk about it. Campus counseling centers re­ported an increase in clients with severe psychological problems last year, but anxiety was students' top complaint, according to an annual report by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors. Anxiety surpassed depression as the top student complaint this year for the first time since the association's initial survey, in 2006; depression accounted for 38 percent of the counseling caseload in 2009-10. Some experts say students are feeling more anxious than ever as they feel greater pressure to succeed in college and make the most of their investment in a college education. Dr. Rebecca Cox will be talking about this and more at the faculty development session set for April 15 at 9:05 a.m. in the John Gray Center. You can register for the event now.

AFT Higher Education, the division of the American Federation of Teachers that represents more than 200,000 college and university instructors, professional staff and graduate students released an interesting report on what they think needs to be done to help college students have educational success. The report, Student Success in Higher Education, comes in response to ongoing criticism of the higher education system that has largely excluded the voices of faculty in the conversations. The document is threaded with warnings that colleges and professors will be unable to educate more students -- and to give them a meaningfully substantive education -- unless public investment in student financial aid increases and state disinvestment in public higher education ceases. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have announced a set of thorough guidelines for how schools and colleges should respond to allegations of sexual assault. Among them are that institutions should consider such allegations under the "more likely than not" standard of evidence, rather than the stricter "clear and convincing" standard that some now use. The guidance comes in the form of a "Dear Colleague" letter from the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights designed to clarify existing Title IX regulations. The letter provides a detailed overview of institutions' existing responsibilities under Title IX when dealing with complaints of sexual harassment and sexual violence. Registration has been steady for the visit of Dr. Rebecca Cox on April 15. There is still room for the 9:05 a.m. faculty session to be held in the John Gray Center. We are also hoping for a great turnout at the student session to be held in 206 Setzer Center at 12:30 p.m. The folks at the B&N Bookstore have informed me that they will have copies of Dr. Cox's book The College Fear Factor later this week. We will have book signing opportunities following both sessions.