Paul Fain has written an interesting news story about the idea of college for all. In it he says, "The backlash to college tends to be cyclical. But this latest iteration, in which pundits and politicians have questioned a supposed crusade for “college for all,” has been bolstered by the double whammy of a prolonged recession and a presidential election. Often lost in the debate is the distinction of what, exactly constitutes “college.” Critics of “college for all” often focus entirely on degrees, particularly the bachelor's degree, and neglect to account for other credentials, like certificates, which Obama and co. have been careful to include in their completion push. To listen to some, one might think politicians and foundations want every American to attend a liberal arts college, a far-fetched idea nobody has proposed." What may be getting lost in this prolonged discussion is the voice of the student. American democracy will confront an increasingly bleak future unless colleges make civic learning a central part of students' education, says a report released by the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement. "This is a moment of serious reckoning for our democracy," said Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and one of the members of the task force that produced the report, "A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy's Future." It was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education. It calls for colleges to renew their commitment to civic education at a time when higher education is talked about chiefly as a means of job training. Civic learning and democratic engagement should become explicit goals of college, and take more forms than civics courses, the authors say. For example, every discipline should teach relevant civic issues and debates. In the same vein, S. James Gates Jr. and Chad Mirkin have written an op-ed piece on STEM education. They say, "This year a report issued by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, on which we serve, concluded that if the United States is to maintain its historic pre-eminence in the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—and gain the social, economic, and national-security benefits that come with such pre-eminence, then we must produce approximately one million more workers in those fields over the next decade than we are on track now to turn out. At first glance, that may seem to be a daunting task—but it doesn't have to be. At current rates, American colleges and universities will graduate about three million STEM majors over the next decade, so an increase of one million would require a whopping 33-percent increase. Yet the report's lofty goal can be seen as quite feasible in the light of two other statistics: First, 60 percent of students who enter college with the goal of majoring in a STEM subject end up graduating in a non-STEM field. And second, reducing attrition in STEM programs by 10 percentage points—so that half of freshmen who enter college with the intention of majoring in one of those fields complete college with a STEM degree—will produce three-quarters of the one million additional graduates within a decade."

Metacognitive thinking has come to be described as thinking about thinking by most of us. Matt Birkenhauer wants us to apply that to our teaching by making thinking visible. He suggests that we become "helicopter instructors" mimicking the best of what helicopter parents do, which is basically "pestering." I am not sure I would agree with him but the basics of his idea bear further discussion. Many of our students at LU are not only first-generation but may not have ever thought that they would be attending college. Some of them may have decided at the last moment to pursue a college degree. We know that without the proper preparation for anything, you typically set yourself up to fail. Realizing this, then the pestering or hovering that Birkenhauer recommends may have merit. We should certainly offer to mentor our students and that is a form of hovering. Asking questions to prompt deeper thinking and perhaps advanced planning can only be beneficial for our students. As we prepare to offer the first sections of the University Success Seminar or LMAR 1101, we should begin to think of "intrusive" ways that we can influence our students, who incidentally have a lot on their minds. Here are just a few ways that you can begin to build an engaged relationship with your students that may pay off in the form of higher retention and graduation rates for LU. Remind them that this is not year thirteen of high school. College will require less time of them in the classroom but subsequently more time on things like homework, reading, and pre-class assignments. They will more likely experience being in larger classes in college. This can create problems for them but also opportunities to network extensively and usually larger classes allow them the opportunity to work in groups, a valuable life-skill that will be used in the workplace. The negative may mean less personal attention in some cases but they should be encouraged to make the effort to talk with you. College is typically less concerned about attendance although some folks still capture this information. The idea here is to help them realize that they are “driving the bus.” That means they need to create a schedule and attempt to stick to it to help them manage their time wisely. Finally, you should remind them that they may have come from a culture that valued standardized tests but college requires them to think critically using empirical and quantitative methods. They will be asked to communicate their thoughts in various ways and they will be evaluated. Don’t forget to remind them that the rewards on the other side are substantial both economically and otherwise. The National Survey for Student Engagement (NSSE) captures data from students at over 800 universities across North America. The survey is administered to first year and fourth year students and the results provide a sense of how a given university is perceived by both commencing and graduating students. The data can be mined for all sorts of things. Some interesting trends have merged recently related to designing teaching and learning spaces, something that has been the focus of CT+LE as well as several University-related groups. Learning spaces that support student learning, according to results from NSSE, should be designed for active and collaborative learning. Student-faculty interaction should be enhanced rather than impeded by the layout. Instructors and students should always be able to hear one another as well. Technology should be realized as a valuable tool but not the panacea to all of our ills. Classrooms designed to enhance learning sends a clear message to our students that we are committed to their success.

Are you finding it harder than ever to attract and keep your student's attention during class? Have you noticed that your students are more easily distracted than in the past? Attention Deficit Trait may be the culprit. First introduce by Dr. Edward Hallowell as a very real but under-recognized neurological phenomenon, the core symptoms are distractability, inner frenzy, and impatience. ADT sufferers have trouble staying organized, setting priorities, managing time, and staying focused. We have continued to research the effects of ADT and have uncovered interventions that have produced positive results in the classroom. Dr. Todd Pourciau will present results of some of this research at the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum conference this coming October in San Antonio. This topic was previously discussed in a post in April that highlighted the idea of switching in the brain (what many have described as multi-tasking). Our research begins with the assumption that you cannot change something if you are unaware of its existence. In this case, many students are unaware that forcing their brain to switch very quickly between many tasks is actually "training" this behavior. Obviously this type of habit is not conducive to deep learning that is required for complex tasks in a college setting. Dr. Joe Kraus contends that we are creating and encouraging a culture of distraction mostly linked to the plethora of technology available to everyone. This phenomena illustrates that teaching is a complex process that requires its practitioners to continuously learn and practice and the CT+LE is here to help on that front. Dr. Naomi Eisenberger argues that the brain reacts to social pain much as we react to physical pain. She lists five social rewards and threats that are deeply important to the brain: autonomy, certainty, fairness, relatedness, and status. It explains why people receive feedback in a negative way because it is an attack on a person's status. This aligns with research by Dr. Barbara Gross Davis that grades are a sigh of approval or disapproval and can be taken very personally. She says, "If you devise clear guidelines from which to assess performance, you will find the grading process more efficient, and the essential function of grades–communicating the student's level of knowledge–will be easier. Further, if you grade carefully and consistently, you can reduce the number of students who complain and ask you to defend a grade." What would classrooms look like if teachers asked fewer questions and students asked more? That is the premise of the book Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions by Dan Rothstein and Luz Sanatana. They argue that is our adult learners are not asking questions in class or even learning how to refine that skill, how will they ever participate at a more macro level as active citizens of a democracy? They suggest that it also explains why many people never ask questions when visiting a doctor or a banker.

We are currently updating the QEP Active Learning Manuel with new ideas. If you have tried some of the teaching methods that promotes active learning from the manual, remember to send us feedback. We want to share your experiences with your colleagues as we refine the Lamar way. If you have not received a copy of the manual, please contact a member of the CT+LE staff. There is additional help for those who are looking to promote responsibility for all LU students. The annual Faculty Development Blastoff will include a number of sessions focused on active and collaborative engagement for students including presentations by current and former ACES Fellows. Save the date of August 21 and look for more information later in the summer. Jason Jones has written a number of posts on his blog about David Allen's Getting Things Done. Allen proposed the method in his book released in 2002 and the four main tenets include: Get your thoughts out of your head; Convert your to-do list into a series of action items; Organize your action items by context; and, Review your list of projects, in-box, and action lists weekly. Nels Highberg then took the concept and applied it for students in his blog post. Besides providing his students with a syllabus and schedule, he says, "I now end each class meeting by going over an Action List that I have posted on the course blog or management system (my school uses Blackboard), and each list item is formatted as a GTD action item. I start with an action verb that states what exactly should be done, the same kind of format I use on my personal action lists. I include all the things that are already on the syllabus and schedule (e.g., reading assignments), but I also include other things that students should be doing to handle the larger course projects." Lucy Taylor, Susan McGrath-Champ and Henriikka Clarkeburn's article Supporting Student Self-study: The Educational Design of Podcasts in a Collaborative Learning Context offers some solutions for supporting students during pre-class preparation and offering students communication from the teacher. Their article is about collaborative or team-based learning (TBL) which requires students to do their pre-class readings and preparation before coming to class and the researchers suggested that podcasts supporting the subject matter would provide the appropriate intervention to enhance student learning. They write, "The results of this study suggest that the combination of TBL and supportive podcasts guide students with their pre-class preparation. Most students agreed that TBL helped them learn progressively throughout the unit of study, and that it encouraged them to prepare for classes. The majority of students used the podcasts as they were intended, with some students also using the podcasts to reinforce ideas and revise." We want to recommend to two more new books that can be checked out from the MJGL. Dylan Wiliam's Embedded Formative Assessment argues that formative assessment is a process, rather than a tool, that should focus on improving teacher quality which in turn enhances student learning. Wiliam's says that we should focus on feedback that moves learning forward. He says that the word feedback "was first used in engineering to describe a situation in which information about the current state of a system was used to change the future state of the system, but this has been forgotten." He has a very interesting section that points out there are eight things that can happen when we give students feedback and "six of them are bad." Terry Doyle's latest book, Learner-Centered Teaching: Putting the Research on Learning into Practice, is filled with great ideas to optimize student learning. He argues that many faculty are already student-centered teachers but may not have the full conceptual understanding of the process to maximize results. Doyle urges us to share with our students that there is new research emerging everyday about how humans learn and remember. He says, "We need to help our students to begin learning in harmony with their brains."

CT+LE has donated three new books to the MJGL for circulation. The first is Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford's Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings. The authors identified five core communication skills that, when implemented appropriately, help students hold productive academic conversations in all content areas. Their strategies help to move the classroom from one dominated by lecture to an active learning space that encourages students to develop the life-long skill of asking questions and developing critical thinking abilities. The second book, Engage: The Trainers Guide to Learning Styles, is by Jeanine O'Neill-Blackwell. The idea of the instructor as trainer has gathered support due to the rapidly growing body of cognitive science research. She uses a four-step model for engaging all learning styles in any learning situation. Debate continues on the topic of learning styles but most agree that engaging all types of learners means the instructor must use a variety of teaching methods. The latest in brain research is used to validate her approach. George Lakey's Facilitating Group Learning: Strategies for Success with Diverse Adult Learners is the third book. We have received many requests for methods to help implement group-based work in the classroom. Collaborative work, the research shows, is very beneficial for all types of learning and is an important life-skill that translates well to the real world. Most of our students will be asked to work with diverse groups of people at their job. Lakey's use of compelling stories based on his experiences provides authenticity to this book. All of these books can be found on the CT+LE faculty resource bookshelves on the 6th floor of the MJGL. English teacher David McCullough Jr. has created quite a stir with his graduation address at Wellesley High School. McCullough says what a lot of faculty are saying about today's students but maybe with a little more eloquence. He says, "When every kid has soccer trophies and glowing report cards,you are not special. You are not exceptional.... No matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you ... you’re nothing special." While most people are focusing on McCullough's criticisms, it should be noted that he closed on a more uplifting note related to his theme: "The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you’re not special. Because everyone is." The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) invites proposals that examine the new contexts for student learning and explore evidence-based, student-centered strategies that seek to align the multiple definitions of and practices in student success with the end goal of providing all students, especially those from traditionally underserved groups, with a quality education. They also invite proposals that describe frameworks that bring all campus practitioners together within a single campus and/or with other campuses to support innovation and leadership, and strengthen students’ abilities to integrate, transfer, and apply their knowledge for the sake of their own lives and the common good. The annual conference will be held April 4-6, 2013 in Miami, Florida. The deadline for proposal submissions is Wednesday, July 18, 2012. The Journal of Learning Spaces has just published its latest issue. D. Christopher Brooks' article Space and consequences: The impact of different formal learning spaces on instructor and student behavior has some interesting thoughts that may cause you to want to redesign your classroom.

Congratulations to the members of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning FLC who will give a panel presentation at the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum 19th annual conference to be held in San Antonio October 4-6. The presentation Engaging Students with Course Content: A Cross-curricular Perspective from a Faculty Learning Community will be facilitated by Chiung-Fang Chang, JJ Chen, Charlotte Mizener, Vanessa Villate, and Christina Wilbur. As promised yesterday, here is the first book review. It is provided by Nick Viator, who works with the Office of Planning and Assessment, and the book is Maryellen Weimer's Learner-Centered Teaching:Five key changes to practice (LB2331 .W39 2002). Nick writes, "Maryellen Weimer, who is one of the nation’s most highly regarded educators on effective instruction and learning, offers insight on the topic of learner centered teaching as it relates to the college and university setting. As Weimer explains, learner centered teaching focuses on what the student is learning, how the student is learning, conditions under which the student is learning, student retention and application, and how the learning techniques assist the student for future learning. In order to be learner – centered, Weimer suggests that instructional design needs to be changed in five key areas. Each change is detailed throughout the chapters and offers instructors how to implement each change easily and thoroughly. The chapters, as the author states again and again, are the heart of the book. These five changes as discussed by Weimer are Balance of Power in the classroom, the Function of Content, the Role of the Teacher, the responsibility for Learning, and the Purpose and Process of Evaluation. The final three chapters offer instructors advice on how to implement the previously discussed strategies and techniques in to the classroom environment without resistance. Learner–Centered Teaching not only offers instructors a new angle for connecting with their students, but also a better understanding of how to connect teaching to the process and objectives of learning." James Lang has a fascinating article on student learning. He writes, "In January 2011, a trio of researchers published the results of an experiment in which they demonstrated that students who read material in difficult, unfamiliar fonts learned it more deeply than students who read the same material in conventional, familiar fonts. Strange as that may seem, the finding stems from a well-established principle in learning theory called cognitive disfluency, which has fascinating implications for our work as teachers. As the researchers pointed out in their article in the journal Cognition, both students and teachers may sometimes judge the success of a learning experience by the ease with which the learner processes or "encodes" the new information. But learning material easily, or fluently, may sometimes produce shallower levels of learning."

Less is more. By now you have heard this mantra from a variety of sources and hopefully one of them was CT+LE. But how can we use this to make our teaching lives more productive and efficient. Remember, the bottom line on teaching is doing everything you can to enhance the learning by your students. There is a terrific op-ed by Peter Bregman that informs our post today. He tells us that we should read two lists everyday as we begin our work. We are modifying his suggestion to make it pertinent to the education field. First make a list of what is important in your class. What is it that you want your students to be able to do when they complete your course? What should they understand and be able to apply? What information will enhance their lives? As Bregman suggests (and we concur), design your class around the things on this list. Now make a second list and place the things that you should avoid. This is the place where you might want to remind yourself not to stand and lecture for 50 minutes or not to put questions on the test about items you failed to discuss. This is the list that you want to use to remind yourself of the habits that are self-defeating or about the time wasters in your life (staring blankly at the Web for hours or stewing over one bad student rating in a class of 35). Sometimes the things we miss (or ignore) put us in the spot to see and hear the things that will make us successful. The trick (if there is one) is to look at the lists each day as you get started. When you are building your course, take a look at the lists. Organization is a good thing and can save us copious amounts of time even if it appears they are time-consumers at the start. The summer is a good time to begin this exercise. Remember, in order for things to become a habit, we need to start doing them on a consistent basis. Habits aren't necessarily bad so let's start some good habits as we look to the Fall 2012 semester and beyond. Have you thought about flipping your class? This has nothing to do with gymnastics, although the Summer Olympics are coming up. It also does not have anything to do with buying a rundown house, repair it and selling it quickly (although it might be a way to help our rapidly diminishing retirement funds). Flipping the classroom is very much about creating a student-centered course. It involves student's taking ownership of their academic experience. We have written about this concept in the past and provided you with some resources. Now you can plan to attend a session on this important topic at the annual Faculty Development Blastoff to be held August 21. The staff of CT+LE has just returned from the TFDN annual conference held in nearby Kingwood. In addition to presenting some of our own scholarship, we learned a number of new things from our colleagues and will be sharing some of that in workshop session planned for the next academic year. In the meantime, if you are looking for some student-centered learning experiences, formative assessment methods, or just some advice about teaching and learning, do not hesitate to contact us. Finally, we wanted to introduce you to a new feature that you will see very soon on the blog. We are going to be adding book reviews to our toolbox. If you are interested in writing a brief review about a book you have recently read or if you would like to review a book from the CT+LE collection, please let us know. Obviously the books we are looking for must be related to the scholarship of teaching and learning in some way.

Deb Poese with On Course facilitated a fantastic training session for the LMAR 1101 instructors yesterday. Skip Downing's program, that is being used by numerous institutions, provides an exciting and creative platform that will allow LU students to experience active and collaborative learning. The personal responsibility aspect resonated with many of the attendees. Deb modeled all of the various active learning methods and demonstrated how they can be used to create student-centered learning experiences. The next training session for instructors is June 13 beginning at 9:00 AM. Those interested in attending should contact Ashley Boone. There is still time to submit your ideas for Faculty Learning Communities for the 2012-13 academic year. The High School to College Transition FLC is working hard to gather data from incoming freshmen and high school students. In time, they will use this data to help the University Undergraduate Advising Center and the Center for Academic Success. In addition, several of the FLC members intend to present their findings at conferences and will submit papers for publication. If you are interested in accessing the data once it is available, contact Drs. Tanya Goldbeck or Paul Hemenway. The staff of the CT+LE will be attending the Texas Faculty Development Network's annual conference this coming Monday and Tuesday. This year's conference is being hosted by Lone Star College in Kingwood. Once we return, we will be turning the information we receive into tools to expand your toolbox. "Teaching in the early years of an undergraduate degree will gradually cease to be via lectures and will instead take the form of online presentations produced by professionally trained presenters backed up by teams of academics. This online content will be paralleled by peer tuition (or teaching by questioning) which, when done well, is clearly effective, and the associated growth of so-called learning analytics. Lectures may well become special occasions in which the best-known academics make their presence felt. Meanwhile, small group teaching will make a come-back in all years, especially in the best universities. In other words, a new hybrid will take the place of the old, one in which I suspect that face-to-face experience and other forms of direct experience (like international experience) will actually become more valued." That is the opinion of Nigel Thrift who has written an interesting op-ed piece on the future of undergraduate education. As a leader in online education, we at LU already know some of this to be true. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has selected an architect of the University of California's online learning strategy to lead its efforts in postsecondary education. Daniel Greenstein, vice provost for academic planning, programs and coordination at the University of California system, will become director of the postsecondary success strategy at Gates. Nate Kreuter, a regular blogger for Inside Higher Ed, writes, "Don't blow summer off. Effectively, you aren't being paid for the time, but scholarly work still needs to be done. It’s also a good time to get ahead of preparing classes for the upcoming academic year. You may be on a nine-month appointment, but you aren't really 'off' during the summer." CT+LE is here all summer for those of you looking for help. Feel free to contact a staff member to set up a convenient time to visit.

The University Success Seminar or LMAR 1101 is on track for the pilot run this coming Fall semester. Notices are going out now to those who have been selected to teach the new course. Planning is in the final stages for the upcoming training sessions for all the LMAR 1101 instructors. The first training session will occur on Tuesday, May 29 in the Setzer Student Center Ballroom beginning at 9:00 AM while the second training session is set for Wednesday, June 13 at the same time in 127 Communication Building. Instructors are required to attend one of the sessions but are welcome to attend both. You can contact Ashley Boone or Melonee Fife for more information about attending these two events. Save the date of Tuesday, August 21 for the annual CT+LE Faculty Development Blastoff. Look for updates on speakers, topics, places and times on this blog throughout the summer. Congratulations to all of the new LU alums who received their degrees at ceremonies last Saturday. Lamar awarded 1,354 degrees including 27 for doctorates, 599 for master’s degrees, and 704 for bachelor’s degrees. For those involved with May Mini-Session, we encourage you to integrate active learning strategies into your courses as they can provide great benefits to students who are involved in this type of environment. Learning experiences delivered using think/pair/share or stop/start/keep doing are ideal to provide formative assessment feedback for the instructor when the amount of time-on-topic is extremely critical. CT+LE is here for you throughout the summer session, so do not hesitate to contact us. Kathleen Taylor and Annalee Lamoreaux in their article Teaching with the Brain in Mind note that "The brain uses analogy to connect new input to existing patterns: How is the current experience like some earlier experience? Being able to use the past to evaluate present situations is an evolutionary advantage that no doubt came in very handy each subsequent time our cave-dwelling ancestors faced things with fangs and claws. Even more significant, the brain’s “rules” (algorithm) for analyzing connections between new and old patterns become more complex over our lifetime. The phenomenal power of the human mind derives in large part from the fact that the brain learns to change its own algorithm to account for variations, contrasts, and more integrative metaphors, leading to more inclusive, creative, and flexible responses to unfolding experience." They conclude "Though too much stress greatly inhibits learning, insufficient challenge can also have a negative impact; a bored brain stops attending. The most successful learning environments from the perspective of developmental intentions are those that provide high support and high challenge. Scaffolding is an effective strategy that offers both. A scaffold is a temporary structure that enables builders to work beyond a level that is mostly formed in order to start construction of the next, higher level. Similarly, when adult learners construct new meaning, scaffolding enables them to operate beyond their certainties, at what Daloz calls their growing edge. The combination of high support and high challenge may be the “optimal” stress that enhances production of dendrites, which are the parts of neurons most responsible for the “connectedness” of neuronal patterns." The bottom line is to find the right balance between challenging your students while scaffolding onto past learning. Joshua Kim has written an interesting op-ed piece on MOOCs. He says, "In short, while I believe that MOOCS are wonderful for the people who teach them and can be wonderful for our institutions, I don't believe that MOOCs offer any sort of solution to increase access, raise quality, or decrease costs in the higher ed marketplace. MOOCs are a welcome addition to the puzzle, but if we are serious as a society about investing in the human capital of our citizens (and thus provide opportunities for economic self-sufficiency and even economic mobility) that we need to invest public dollars in higher ed. I worry that MOOCs are a distraction to this need for investment, and will divert attention from the systematic dis-investments we are seeing in post-secondary funding by government at all levels."

The Faculty Learning Communities Showcase held this past Monday was a great event mainly because of the outcomes each group presented. The effort from each FLC was evident as we heard one terrific idea after another. The top picture includes President Jimmy Simmons and Provost Steve Doblin talking with members of the Sustainability Across the Curriculum FLC. They offered up four unique ideas including creating an undergraduate minor on the field of sustainability, enhancement of the recycling program at LU, a plan to encourage the use of alternative energy vehicles, and proposing that LEED certification guidelines be used for all renovations or new-builds on the LU campus. If you would like to view the poster created by this FLC that outline their proposals, you can find them adjacent to the CT+LE suite on the sixth floor of the Mary and John Gray Library. The Active Research and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning FLC was much more individually focused on classroom teaching. FLC members have been implementing active learning into their courses and several of them have captured their student's reactions using surveys and classroom assessment. The High School to College Transition FLC is planning a full-scale survey to be collected

over the coming months. They are focusing on two specific groups: incoming high school students and LU freshman. The plan is to use the results of the survey to help guide several new initiatives at LU including the University Undergraduate Advising Center and the University Success Seminar also known as LMAR 1101. The main focus of the FLC was uncovering impediments to retention. Look for results from their survey later this year. The Creating an Online Course of Substance FLC dazzled us with examples of templates for courses using technology to deliver content. They also emphasized how effective online course can be for student learning. Here is good news for all of us who devote our lives to student learning every day. A new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics finds that education may not only improve a person's finances, it is also linked to better health habits and a longer life. For instance, people who have a bachelor's degree or higher live about nine years longer than those who don't graduate from high school. "Highly educated people tend to have healthier behaviors, avoid unhealthy ones and have more access to medical care when they need it," says the report's lead author, Amy Bernstein, a health services researcher for the National Center for Health Statistics. "All of these factors are associated with better health." The report also found that in 2010 24% of boys and 22% of girls were obese in households where the heads of the family had less than a high school education; the figures are 11% of boys and 7% of girls where the head of the household had a bachelor's degree or higher. Poor people sometimes live in less healthy communities with less access to healthy foods and places to be physically active, Bernstein says. "It's all interconnected." For those of you who are about to start teaching in the mini-session, here is a tip to get you started right from the first day of class. You should do three things that first period including presenting the syllabus to your students, introducing the course topic with the expected outcomes and at least some initial material, and require at least some students to participate. James M. Lang in his book On Course: A week-by-week guide to your first semester of college teaching, suggests that "determining how students can participate in the course, and can make their voices heard in and outside of the classroom, should factor into every decision you make in your pedagogy, including decisions you make about the first day of the semester." Building on the "Flipping the Classroom" concept, we would suggest that you create a video of yourself reading the syllabus and send it to your students as a reading assignment for the first day. You can even give a quiz, a low stakes formative assessment that will not only set the tone but allows them to see what your tests will look like from the first day.

We are celebrating the best of what the Academy has to offer today in the inaugural Faculty Learning Communities Showcase. Everything kicks off at 2:30 PM in the Setzer Student Center Ballroom. The formal presentations by each FLC begin at 3:00 PM. Everyone in the LU community is welcome to join us for this exciting event. Are you thinking of using lecture capture as part of your learning experiences next semester? If so, you might want to participate in an upcoming webinar. The University of Texas-Austin will be sharing best practices from their experiences with lecture capture, blended learning and active and collaborative engagement. The webinar takes place this Wednesday, May 16 at 11:00 AM and is free but you must register to participate. When you begin to talk about who is offering educational opportunities, the shorter list may be who is not. With recent announcements by Harvard, MIT, NBC, WalMart and now National Geographic the possibilities seem endless. The questions about quality and content are certainly weighing heavily on this topic. Online learning is part of the options currently available to students who are pursuing a college education. LU has been at the forefront of this option for a number of years and the options continue to emerge for our students with the addition of College of Business. The CT+LE will be offering a series of workshops in the Fall semester to provide faculty development opportunities for all who are interested in creating a blended class, online course or those just looking to upgrade their technology skills. Watch this blog for more information. Collaborative learning is an umbrella term for a variety of educational approaches involving joint intellectual effort by students, or students and teachers together. It has long been recognized as an effective approach to the learning process. It has been reported that a collaborative learning community plays a significant role in promoting learning, sharing knowledge, and social and intellectual involvement. Nicole Anderson and Chi-Cheng Lin, in their article Exploring Technologies for Building Collaborative Learning Communities among Diverse Student Populations, write that "Formats for collaborative learning include in-class activities such as peer teaching, writing groups, and seminars, as well as outside classroom cooperative activities such as team projects and study groups." Anderson and Lin discovered in their research that students responded most positively to the use of blogs as a learning experience.

As LU is deep into the final exam period, it is very interesting to watch the ever growing number of students frantically walking around the MGJL looking for a place to study. When they do finally settle, many of them are taking out a stack of note cards or reading their notebooks. Some are working on the blackboards that are provided in the study rooms. But I have seen a substantial number of them working in groups. I notice that they are "teaching" each other the various lessons they learned over the semester. It is interesting to watch them go from a video clip on the Web to notes they have collected on their e-tablets. They are constantly using various forms of electronic media and then engaging in conversations about problem-solving or other dilemmas created by new questions that arise. I am struck that they are not simply talking at each other but truly engaging in conversations. It is active learning at its best and we hope that they are mimicking what has been modeled in their classrooms. Now is a great time to begin to look at your course plans for the next semester. Your impressions of your current courses are still fresh in your mind. You are also about to receive feedback in the form of student ratings, many of you from the ACES survey which is used to measure the amount of traditional and active learning methods occurring in your courses. Whatever formative assessment you are using to measure how effective you were in achieving your learning outcomes is a really great place to begin but don't stop there. Dig deeper and take a look at the things that did not work so well. Start now to closely examine where your students seemed to lose their way. That is a great opportunity to take a learning experience and implement an active learning strategy or two. You will only become comfortable with the facilitator model if you begin to use it in your classes. It is through practice and critical self-reflection that we improve as teachers. Let us know how we can help. The end of the semester is also a good time for change to occur. Dr. Randy Smith, who has served as the Associate Director of the Quality Enhancement Plan or QEP for the past two years, has decided to step down from that role. His contributions can never be properly measured or appreciated. He has been instrumental in helping to improve the ACES Fellows program and we will miss his leadership. Taking his place in the Associate Director's position is Melissa Hudler. She is currently and will continue to be the Director of the LU Writing Center. Melissa brings years of classroom and online instruction experience to this task. She was also an ACES Fellow in the the first cohort. We are thankful that she has agreed to join us in CT+LE. Paula Krebs has written a terrific article on how failing may be one of the best lessons students can encounter. She uses the discipline of computer science to illustrate her theory. She writes, "Over the years I have pushed against my students' fear of failure in minor ways. When I taught first-year writing, I developed a grading rubric that allowed me to give students low grades in some categories and high grades in others, blinding them with numbers so they couldn't figure out a letter grade and would, instead, focus on the categories that needed improving." Massive open online courses or MOOCs continue to make headlines in light of the item we reported earlier about edX. “MIT and Harvard will use the jointly operated edX platform to research how students learn and how technologies can facilitate effective teaching both on-campus and online,” the universities said. Anant Agarwal, the president of edX, said the scale of the courses, along with the data-rich environments in which they will be held, should enable researchers to glean “How people are learning, what works and what doesn’t.” The founders of another MOOC platform, Coursera, said they plan to work with their own data and university partners to “understand human learning at a scale and depth that has been never been possible before."

We are exactly one week away from the inaugural LU Faculty Learning Communities Showcase. It will be held on Monday, May 14 at the Setzer Student Center Ballroom. The event begins at 2:30 PM with formal presentations being made for each of the four current FLC beginning at 3:00 PM. Judging by the excitement of the FLC members, this promises to be a terrific event. Everyone in the LU community (faculty/staff/students) are welcome to come and enjoy refreshments, fellowship, and to hear about what each of the four FLC have been working on this past academic year. If you are interested in creating a FLC for 2012-13, you can submit your ideas online from now until May 16. The FLC program has enhanced the sense of community among the participants and assisted the formation of networks and research groups. Several of you have asked for suggestions for summer reading. We are still very impressed with Ken Bain's book What the Best College Teachers Do which is very much about faculty development. We are just as impressed with Martin Seligman's latest book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, which is more about improving your life in general rather than career development although the ideas can be applied to any situation. Jean Twenge's book Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before is a great read and very focused on understanding many of the students enrolled in your courses. You might want to take a look at Skip Downing's On Course: Strategies for Creating Success in College and in Life. This is the textbook that we will use to teach the LMAR 1101 class this fall. If you are interested in submitting an application to participate in the Active and Collaborative Engagement for Students (ACES) program, you should pan on attending one of the two informational sessions. Both will be held in 622 MJGL. The first session will be on May 10 at 3:30 PM. The second session will be held Wednesday, May 16 at 3:30 PM. You can find more information or download the request for applications on the ACES website. Nik Osborne, the head of Indiana University's e-texts program, lays out how his institution plans to "disrupt" the traditional textbook publishing model with the help of publishers themselves. Five other universities will also be running pilots based on the model developed by IU through a program set up by Internet2's NET+ service. Participating universities will get McGraw-Hill e-texts, the Courseload reader and annotation platform integrated with their learning management system, and the opportunity to be part of a joint research study of e-text use and perceptions. Are you looking to create a massively open online courses or MOOC? Jim Groom, an instructional technologist and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington, says his open online courses are not about scale and efficiency but about imagination and anarchy. Groom decided to take his course on digital storytelling, DS106, into the open waters of the Web, inviting anyone, anywhere, to create, submit and comment on assignments. The reins have been slipping from his hands ever since, and Groom says he could not be happier. There is no textbook in DS106 and Groom does not lecture or teach media editing skills. In Groom’s section of the course, in-person attendance is optional. The instructors consult with students about the design of the course and its website. Two of Groom’s students are building out a new section of the DS106 website where students can vote up each other’s work. Levine and his students are in the process of planning another area where students can remix each other’s work. “The students are in many ways running and designing this as it goes,” says Groom. The weekly assignments, which make up 30 percent of the final grade, are created by the students themselves -- the 75 enrolled at Mary Washington and the hundreds of others participating free on the Web -- and aggregated in an assignment bank on DS106's website.

The call for applications for the 2012-13 cohort of Active and Collaborative Engagement for Students (ACES) is now open. We will be accepting applications through May 31. Two upcoming information session will be held in 622 MJGL: Thursday, May 10 at 3:30 PM and Wednesday, May 16 at 3:30 PM. Visit the ACES website for more detailed information or contact a member of the CT+LE staff for an application packet. Lee Bessette has written a fascinating blog post on peer-driven learning. Bessette says "This semester, I gave students the choice of either doing a traditional presentation over two classes or building something that they talk about for one class that the rest of the students could “play” with outside of class. One of the advantages of the peer-driven course is that the students know their material, which allows for a more immersive discussion, rather than a lecture that simply makes up the gaps in their informational knowledge. But, I have to be ready to jump in wherever the students are, instead of leading the students where I want them to go. It’s reactive, and I have to be able to react quickly, intelligently, and openly." At a recent CT+LE workshop the conversation turned to the idea of "flipping" as it relates to the classroom and active learning. Some folks seemed very open to the idea but some had concerns. What we learned from the fascinating conversation is that we could all use some more information to help us make a decision on whether flipping is for us. The folks at NC State have an ongoing project called FIZZ that focuses on flipping. Relying on the research that shows that engagement is at the core of student success, they have decided to focus on teaching instructors how to be more engaging while creating a classroom for 21st century learning. The Faculty Learning Communities Showcase will occur on Monday, May 14 from 2:30 until 4:30 PM in the Setzer Student Center Ballroom. The four FLC who have been hard at work during the 2011-12 Academic Year will be presenting their outcomes. In addition, you will have the opportunity to hear about plans for AY 2012-13. Come and enjoy refreshments and fellowship at the FLC Showcase. We are very excited to welcome Melonee Fife to the CT+LE. She is returning to LU after a recent stint at Sam Houston State and will serve as the office manager and coordinate all aspects of the QEP. Be sure to stop by and welcome Melonee who is located in 612 MJGL.

If you do a search on the Internet, we are willing to bet that the word retention would rank fairly high in the higher education sector. Figuring out ways to stem the attrition rate has become an obsession at most institutions of higher education. The good news is that it has sparked an increase in empirical research and what we are learning is very applicable. There is still time to attend the workshop on student retention that is set for today at 1:30 PM in the CT+LE Commons area. Come and learn about successful intervention strategies that you can use in your classroom or online environment. Registration is appreciated but not required. Classroom design has also become a hot topic for researchers who are looking to create the best environment for student learning. A number of faculty who teach educational technology courses in the Department of Educational Leadership will be showcasing student-centered learning spaces. The event, An Overview of Technology-Enabled 21st Century Learning Spaces, will be held at 1:30 PM on Thursday, April 26 in Landes Auditorium. David Jaffee has written a terrific op-ed piece on the detrimental effect that telling your students to study for the exam can have on their academic progress. He writes, "If there is one student attitude that most all faculty bemoan, it is instrumentalism. This is the view that you go to college to get a degree to get a job to make money to be happy. Similarly, you take this course to meet this requirement, and you do coursework and read the material to pass the course to graduate to get the degree. Everything is a means to an end. Nothing is an end in itself. There is no higher purpose. When we tell students to study for the exam or, more to the point, to study so that they can do well on the exam, we powerfully reinforce that way of thinking. While faculty consistently complain about instrumentalism, our behavior and the entire system encourages and facilitates it." Steven J. Corbett encourages us to shake up our lecture in his op-ed piece. "As a teacher of writing, and as a proponent of active learning, I have always disdained the traditional lecture. Yet, each term, for each course that I teach — from freshman "basic writing" courses, to graduate courses in teaching (and learning) college writing — I have always included a somewhat traditional introductory lecture on rhetoric. Sure, I give it all I’ve got in order to not only provide students the information I want them to use in their analytical work (content), but also to enact a living model of delivery (form) — what the greatest of the Greek orators, Demosthenes, declared the most important part of any speech. But this term I decided to shake things up a bit. I wondered what would happen if I turned over the reins of my prized rhetoric-lecture thoroughbred over to the hands and minds of the students to ride (deliver)," writes Corbett.

"An institution's capacity to retain students is directly related to its ability to reach out and make contact with students and integrate them into the social and intellectual fabric of institutional life. It hinges on the establishment of a healthy, caring educational environment which enables all individuals, not just some, to find a niche in one or more of the many social and intellectual communities of the institution." That is one of the conclusions shared by Dr. Vincent Tinto in his book Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition. It is also the topic of this week's faculty development workshop to be held on April 25 at 1:30 PM in the CT+LE Commons. Dr. Sherri Shoefstall will lead this solutions-packed workshop that is part of the Center for Teaching+Learning Enhancement's ongoing faculty development programming. Helping your students to succeed involves learning the proper skills necessary to identify patterns and trigger-events that can lead to student attrition. Faculty will receive participation credit towards the Faculty Development Program. Registration is encouraged but not required. Barry Leshowitz, Kristen Eignor DiCerbo, and Scott Symington in their article Effective Thinking: An Active-Learning Course in Critical Thinking write, "One explanation for the poor performance of students in reasoning and other higher-order thinking skills is the nature of the educational experience typically encountered in our classrooms. Educational researchers have long observed that instruction at all levels does not emphasize information-processing skills. Instead of making the development of reasoning a priority, most instruction forces a large fraction of students into blind memorization." They outline many active learning methods they were able to utilize in their class that focused on developing critical thinking skills as the course outcome. "In classroom exercises and real-world-based investigations, the students discover that knowledge of causal relations allows one to predict and control future events. This knowledge is fundamental to making the informed decisions that underlie effective problem solving," they conclude. Technological developments and financial forces have led to the increasing prominence of online education, which challenges the value of a physical campus for delivering a college education. William H. Weitzer asks in an op-ed piece, "What are the risks for higher education if institutions do not adapt quickly or significantly enough to this dramatic environmental change?" Clearly the demand exists for the current product that these elite institutions deliver, but for how long and for how many institutions? In The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out (LA 227.4 C525), Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring argue that educational technology and other factors place American institutions of higher education at great risk. They state that even as our traditional universities continue to perform critical functions, they also face disruptive innovations that are changing the educational landscape and they must respond. Their concern is: “If they cannot find innovative, less costly ways of performing their uniquely valuable functions, they are doomed to decline, high global and national rankings notwithstanding. University communities that focus their activities and measure success in terms of absolute performance rather that relative rank can enjoy a bright future. They can be the best in the eyes of their own students, faculty members, and public and private supporters. They can serve more of their chosen students at higher levels of quality.” Weitzer's comments echo those of Dr. George Mehaffy who visited LU last week. While Lamar University has been a pioneer in online education, there is much to be said about engaging in the community that exists on college campuses around the world. LU has been working to enhance both environments and is firmly committed to delivering teaching in multiple forms. Stay tuned as this conversation continues to evolve. As you being to administer the ACES survey to your students, we encourage you to take the time to explain the significance of the data being collected. Research shows that respondents are much more likely to take the time and give thoughtful answers if the results are tied to their personal concerns. Since we use the data gathered to improve teaching and learning, it is important that we increase the rate of completion in order to capture a true picture of what is happening in our classrooms and online.

Former Cardinal Dr. George Mehaffy returns to Beaumont on Friday, April 20 to talk about the future of higher education. He will be speaking at 10:30 AM and 1:30 PM in the Landes Auditorium of the Galloway Building. His talk, Transformation in Perilous Times: Navigating our Way through the 21st Century, is timely given the current state of higher education. Mehaffy currently serves as the Vice President for Academic Leadership and Change for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. One of his most high profile projects was coordination of the Red Balloon Project that set out to re-envision higher education. He reflects on the project in a terrific article in Change magazine and notes "we have been struck by the challenge of change in higher education, especially at the institutional level. Substantive forces are at work to maintain the status quo, including extra-institutional expectations of states and accreditation agencies; institutional aspirations to achieve a different status; intransigent concepts of faculty work, especially regarding the nature of scholarship and service; frequently changing leadership; entrenched policies and procedures; and the array of issues competing for institutional attention." Registration for Mehaffy's two sessions, which be identical in content, continues for all LU faculty, staff, and students. As we draw near the close of another semester, you will be contacted by the Office of Assessment about completing the annual ACES survey. This instrument allows us to capture data related to our SACS accreditation and Quality Enhancement Plan or QEP. If you would like to discuss your results or would like to implement more active learning experiences in your course, do not hesitate to contact a member of the CT+LE staff. Tom Bartlett has an interesting article in CHE about the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from three journals in 2008 including Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. He writes, "For decades, literally, there has been talk about whether what makes it into the pages of psychology journals—or the journals of other disciplines, for that matter—is actually, you know, true. Researchers anxious for novel, significant, career-making findings have an incentive to publish their successes while neglecting to mention their failures. It’s what the psychologist Robert Rosenthal named “the file drawer effect.” So if an experiment is run ten times but pans out only once you trumpet the exception rather than the rule. Or perhaps a researcher is unconsciously biasing a study somehow. Or maybe he or she is flat-out faking results, which is not unheard of." CT+LE has recently donated three terrific books to the Mary and John Gray Library, or MJGL, that can help you improve student learning and they include Enhancing Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning by Maryellen Weimer, Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before by Jean M. Twenge, and Assessing General Education Programs by Mary J. Allen. All three are available to circulate and can be found on the recommended reading bookshelves at the CT+LE suite on the 6th floor of MJGL.

There are many reasons for incorporating real-life situations into instruction. Foremost are that applications of theoretical material in real-life situations make content easier to understand and that the relevance of content is demonstrated by real-life examples. If we are trying to connect content to real-life situations, our assessments must demonstrate face validity. That is, they have to model the situations in which the new knowledge and skills will be used. If we only test for knowledge the opportunity to demonstrate that learning is relevant is missed. The preceding comments are from Dr. Michael Theall's paper Related Course Material to Real Life Situations. Theall will be at LU on Thursday and Friday to deliver two thought provoking sessions. The Thursday workshop begins at 2:00 PM in the auditorium of the Dishman Art Museum. He will take the research on teaching and learning from the past six decades and distill it for you in an action-packed hour and a half. Theall continues the distinguished speaker series on Friday at 8:30 AM in the Landis Auditorium of the Galloway Building. Theall will address why he thinks that increased workloads, external pressures, a focus on disciplinary productivity, and new demands placed on faculty have weakened community and resulted in feelings of isolation and the loss of collegiality. Not content to merely comment, Theall will offer his ideas on how this recent trend can be reversed for the good of the institution and individuals. Registration is requested but not required. Adam and Jaye Fenderson have released their new documentary chronicling the lives of several first-generation college students. The makers of the film are a married couple who said that they found it difficult not to help the students they were covering. “We actually made a decision when we started thinking about the film that we were not going to intervene in the students’ lives,” Mr. Fenderson said. “It was very difficult to sit there and listen to them talk about what their counselor told them when we knew that it was wrong. It was difficult to even sit in some of the counselor meetings and hear the counselors be so brief and quick with these students and these students not get answers that they really needed.” An absence of college graduates in a family can result not only in a lack of financial support — many economic studies have suggested that college graduates make more money over time than high school graduates — but also a shortage of knowledge about the college admissions process. In the film First Generation, one of the student’s mothers is depicted as having no idea how to pay for college, and not knowing whether the cost is required to be paid in full upfront. The students, themselves floundering through the process, make misinformed financial decisions that limit their college choices and may even stifle their academic potential. The members of the LU Faculty Learning Community High School to College Transition is exploring many of the issues described in the documentary. Be sure to join us at the inaugural FLC Showcase on Monday, May 14 from 2:30-4:30 PM in the Setzer Student Center Ballroom. You will learn about the efforts over the last academic year of all four FLC. Lamar University has honored three faculty members with 2012 University Merit Awards in recognition of outstanding performance in the classroom. Award recipients are assistant professors John Zhanhu Guo, chemical engineering; Qin Qian, civil engineering; and Melissa Rusher, deaf studies and deaf education. While scholarship and service to the university and community are an important consideration in granting the Merit Awards, the most important criteria for selection are classroom performance and interaction with students, said Stephen Doblin, provost and vice president for academic affairs. CT+LE congratulates these teachers who focus their efforts on student learning. Look for an announcement in the future concerning this year's recipients and a collaboration with CT+LE.

Today’s Academic Minute features McGill University's Dr. Julio Martinez-Trujillo who shares his thoughts on how our brains allow us to focus on more than one thing at a time. His findings are very interesting as we have also been working on research geared towards helping students to learn how to focus their attention, especially as it relates to test-taking. His focus on multitasking brings to mind the recent conversations we had with Dr. Christy Price, who visited LU in March. She noted that many psychologists are now using the term switch tasking to refer to our ability to handle more than one task at the same time. In Texas, which has the country’s second-largest Latino population, experts say that closing the gap in college graduation rates between Latinos and Anglos will be critical to ensuring that the state has an educated workforce in the next 20 years. A report recently released by Excelencia in Education, a national nonprofit that promotes policies aimed at improving Latino achievement in higher education, shows that approximately 17 percent of Latino adults in Texas have an associate's degree or higher, compared with 34 percent of all Texas adults. The report notes that the graduation rate for Latino college students in Texas is about 10 percentage points lower than that of white students. The report also contains examples of what the authors feel will help Latinos to graduate. Florida's colleges are on high alert in the battle against what they fear is a growing number of tech-savvy cheaters. Smartphones and social networking have made cheating easier and more widespread than ever, some say. And experts add that if schools don't crack down on the dishonesty now, there could be long-term consequences for society. "Do you want to drive over a bridge designed by an engineer who cheated his way through school?" asked Jen Day Shaw, dean of students at the University of Florida. "Do you want to be operated on by a surgeon who cheats? If the students don't learn honesty and good values here, what are they going to do in the real world?" TurnItIn recently presented a webinar on this very topic. As we approach our final exam period, you might want to take half an hour to listen to the presentation. They are also offering a webinar on Thursday, April 12 at noon on the topic of Teaching Critical Thinking with Student Engagement. For those interested in teaching the University Success Seminar, or LMAR 1101, there will be three informational meetings during the month of April. The dates and times include April 13 at 2:00 PM, April 23 at 12:30 PM, and April 27 at 2:00 PM. All of the sessions will take place in 622 MJGL and no registration is required.

Laura McKenna has written a very interesting opinion piece for The Atlantic. She notes, among other things that, "After finishing their dissertations, PhDs are hired by a college, based on publication records, the reputations of their references, and the name of their graduate programs. If they happen to have picked up a little classroom experience through a temporary position, it is rarely considered by hiring committees. Unlike other educators, college professors receive no formal instruction on how to teach. Newly minted PhDs are expected to teach Introduction to Political Science or Macroeconomics to 35-200 students without training in classroom management, pedagogy, and assessment. They have had no mentorships or student teacher training. Would you go to a dentist who never learned how to drill teeth? In addition, their graduate education forced them specialize to such an extent that many find it difficult to convey the wide breadth of knowledge that is required in lower level, undergraduate classes, the very meat of a college education." Have you heard of course networking. A faculty member at Indiana University has created a social networking site that allows student to connect based on common courses. CourseNetworking, or The CN as it is described by the creator, "is a new social network dedicated to improved learning by connecting educators and students within a classroom and from around the world based on shared interests and class subjects. A free online platform open to anyone worldwide, The CN is a simple, easy-to-use system that lets students and teachers post and share classroom information and materials, collaborate on homework and socialize with their worldwide connections. The CN's mission is to change the way the world learns." The Quality Enhancement Plan, or QEP, at LU is focused on course redesign for the core curriculum. The initial thrust for implementation has taken place through the Active and Collaborative Engagement for Students (ACES) program. Three cohorts of faculty have been involved in the year-long process of creating courses based on the use of active learning. The faculty have redesigned their courses using learning outcomes that are focused on what they expect their students to be able to do once they have completed their course. The learning experiences used by the ACES Fellows are significant and innovative. Once the Center for Teaching+Learning Enhancement was established in 2010, a second resource was added to the QEP. Faculty development programming over the last two academic years has focused on providing specific active learning methods that faculty can implement in their classes immediately. In addition, through the faculty development expert speaker series, our faculty have been exposed to national leaders who are actively conducting research on the effectiveness of active learning methods adoption and much has been revealed that documents the impact of course redesign focused on these methods. Recently the CT+LE has contacted a number of past participants of the various faculty development workshops and seminars. We are interested in hearing from more of you about your experiences with active learning in your classroom. If you implemented new methods, we would like to know what you experienced in your class in terms of student learning and teaching effectiveness. If you would like to share your experience, please contact a member of the CT+LE staff at your convenience. The programming continues with the upcoming visit of Dr. Micheal Theall of Youngstown State University. You can register now to attend both of his fascinating workshops to be held on April 19 and 20. In addition, you should mark your calendar to attend a Provost Special Topics Seminar: Transformation in Perilous Times: Navigating our Way through the 21st Century to be delivered by Dr. George Mehaffy, Vice President of American Association of State Colleges and University and a LU alum. He will be visiting LU on Friday, April 20, 2012 and will give his talk at two times: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM and 1:30 – 3:00 PM in the Landes Auditorium of Galloway Hall.

Being involved in an internship opportunity has proven to enhance the educational experience for LU students. Experiential learning also provides the skills that employers are looking for from our graduates. If you are looking for quality opportunities for your students or want to learn more about the current program, register to attend the Student Internships: Present and Future of Experiential Learning faculty development workshop this Wednesday (April 4). In this session, Deidra Mayer will facilitate a discussion about best practices, current legal issues surrounding internships, as well as the support offered through Career Services. Join us for what promises to be an enlightening workshop about this terrific opportunity. The session begins at 1:30 PM and will be held in the CT+LE Commons located on the 6th floor of the Mary & John Gray Library (MJGL) behind the CT+LE suite. The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education has released its debut report which is focused on the “completion agenda” and its heavy emphasis on workforce development, a fixation that the report said threatens academic quality and student access, as well as social mobility. The report, dubbed "Closing the Door, Increasing the Gap: Who's not going to (community) college?" focused on California, where a state task force has successfully pushed for the system to prioritize students who appear most likely to earn a credential. “Policy makers are narrowing the focus of community colleges to fulfilling a short-term work-force development role that prepares workers for relatively low-wage jobs rather than bachelor degree programs into which students could transfer,” according to the center. “This rebooting and narrowing of the community college mission to the lower rungs of that economy works against expansion of the middle class and building a strong economy.” The report said the reason community colleges are being forced to turn away students is simple: They don’t have enough money because of state and federal disinvestment. The 2012 U.S. Professors of the Year Awards Program—sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education—is accepting nominations for outstanding undergraduate teachers. The program, now in its 32nd year, is the only national initiative that focuses solely on excellent undergraduate teaching and mentoring. The program is open to educators in all types of undergraduate settings nationwide—public and private, two- and four-year institutions. Four national winners will each receive $5,000 and an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C., including an invitation to speak at the 2012 awards luncheon in November. State winners will receive complimentary attendance for two at the luncheon, along with recognition at the event and in the media. National and state award winners will also be honored at an early-evening congressional reception. Entries are due by Friday, April 16, 2012.

As you can see from the picture, we had a nice turnout for Dr. Timothy McNicholl's workshop Establishing Classroom Decorum and Dealing with Student Complaints. This was a timely topic in light of the actions of Florida Atlantic University student Jonatha Carr that has consequently set off a national discussion on civility in the classroom. It was our first time to use the CT+LE Commons space and it proved to be an excellent choice. The discussion during the workshop about First Amendment rights sparked a lively conversation in addition to the numerous personal examples shared by all of the participants. We always receive terrific feedback and try to offer a few examples for those who were unable to attend. Dr. Tess Pape, Nursing, plans to adopt the "use the minimum action needed to correct the situation" approach in her classes. Dr. Kaye Shelton, Educational Leadership (the winner of the door prize for this event), plans to list the consequences to ignoring her classroom rules in her syllabi. Sara Gubala, political science and a current ACES Fellow, will spend some time rethinking how she approaches testing in her classes. Dawn M. Kelsey and colleagues have an interesting take on incivility and it focuses on teacher misbehavior. In their article, College Students' Attributions of Teacher Misbehaviors published in the journal Communication Education (53,1), they reveal that students are not very forgiving of their instructors when those teachers misbehave. Students consider teachers to be authors of their own classroom successes and/or failures. Additionally, students appear to be relatively inattentive to issues and concerns that teachers often view as important mitigating factors, such as class size or class meeting time. Moreover, the results of the current study suggest that students care less about teacher demeanor than they do about how professionally and consistently teachers conduct their classes. On those occasions when teachers mess up or misbehave, they cannot make up for it by simply being charming (i.e., immediate). Even those teachers who employ all the right moves (e.g., eye-contact, close proximity, verbal immediacy) are not immune to students’ tendency to attribute internal causality to misbehaviors. The faculty development opportunities continue tomorrow at noon. Critical Self-reflection through Journaling will be held in the Private Dining Room of the LU Dining Hall at noon. The doors open at 11:30 AM, so grab your lunch and join us (no registration is ever required). The response has been very solid to the call for instructors for the University Success Seminar (LMAR 1101). There is still time to apply by contacting either Dr. Nicki Michalski or Dr. Todd Pourciau. Look for upcoming informational meetings as well.

Who is in charge here? Do you ever find yourself saying that after a particularly trying class session? If so, you might want to register for the faculty development workshop Establishing Classroom Decorum and Dealing with Student's Complaints. Dr. Timothy McNicholl is the featured presenter for the workshop that will be held on Tuesday, March 27. The session begins at 2:00 PM in the CT+LE Commons located on the sixth floor of the Mary and John Gray Library (MJGL). Dr. Dee Fink says (in his book Creating Significant Learning Experiences) that we should focus on providing students with significant learning experiences. He says that a significant learning experience has both a process and an outcome dimension. In a powerful learning experience, students will be engaged in their own learning, there will be a high energy level associated with it, and the whole process will have important outcomes and results. Not only will students be learning throughout the course, by the end of the course they will clearly have changed in some important way. And that learning will have the potential for changing their lives in an important way. Inside Higher Ed reports that 84-percent of students at a public research university believe students who cheat should be punished, yet two of every three admit to having cheated themselves. Most of the cheating students admit to involves homework, not tests, and they see academic misconduct applying differently to those two kinds of work. These findings were part of a study presented at the annual convention of NASPA: Student Affairs Professionals in Higher Education. Those results, coupled with the fact that many instructors devote little if any time to discussing academic integrity, led the researchers to an obvious conclusion: setting clear expectations, and repeating them early and often, is crucial. “It’s about communicating clearly in the classroom and spending time on the topic,” said Angela Baldasare, divisional manager of assessment and data analysis at the University of Arizona, about clarifying expectations and increasing the intrinsic values of assignments, “so that there’s something more to it than just a grade.” The study into the frequency and type of offenses, and the faculty policies and responses, surveyed more than 2,000 students and 600 instructors on the Arizona campus. Applications are now being accepted from faculty and staff who would like to teach the University Success Seminar. LMAR 1101, as it will appear in the registration material, is a cross-disciplinary, interactive, and reflective course that will teach students how to make the academic and social transition from high school to college. Through this one credit hour course, LMAR 1101 students will gain a better understanding of the responsibilities that come with making this important transition. Faculty and staff members who are interested in teaching LMAR 1101 must meet the appropriate SACS requirements which include holding a Master’s degree in any subject from an accredited four-year institution. Over the upcoming weeks, there will be several introductory sessions that will provide further information about this course as well as the selection process. Those interested in applying should obtain an application packet from either Dr. Nicki Michalski (nicki.michalski@lamar.edu) or Dr. Todd Pourciau (todd.pourciau@lamar.edu).

Got lunch? We did and today at the Lunch+Learn about classroom interventions that can improve retention, we had an interesting conversation with a varied group of individuals including department chairs, online instructors, and retention and enrollment administrators. Of course, the main purpose of today's event was to gather information for the workshop to be held on April 25. If you were unable to attend the Lunch+Learn today but would like to hear about interventions that can help in your classes, send your ideas to Dr. Sherri Shoefstall or contact a member of the CT+LE staff. You asked for it and we heard you. The next faculty development workshop is set for Tuesday, March 27 at 2:00 PM in the CT+LE Commons. Dr. Timothy McNicholl will be delivering a powerful session designed to help you establish classroom decorum and deal with disruptive student behavior. Registration is now open but look for more information in your email box very soon. Millennials, the generation of young Americans born after 1982, may not be the caring, socially conscious environmentalists some have portrayed them to be, according to a study described in the new issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study, which compares the traits of young people in high school and entering college today with those of baby boomers and Gen X'ers at the same age from 1966 to 2009, shows an increasing trend of valuing money, image, and fame more than inherent principles like self-acceptance, affiliation, and community. "The results generally support the 'Generation Me' view of generational differences rather than the 'Generation We,'" the study's authors write in a report published today, "Generational Differences in Young Adults' Life Goals, Concern for Others, and Civic Orientation." This follows closely on the heels and parallels the recently presented research by Dr. Christy Price, who was visiting LU last week. The millennial generation has been raised in a culture that places "more focus on the self and less focus on the group, society, and community," says Dr. Jean Twenge, author of the Millennial's study. "The aphorisms have shifted to 'believe in yourself' and 'you're special,'" she says. "It emphasizes individualism, and this gets reflected in personality traits and attitudes."

While reviewing the evaluation survey for the recent workshops presented by Dr. Christy Price, we wanted to share some of the comments collected. Some of the remarks for the Engaging Millennial Learners session included the following. Charlotte Mizener, music, noted that she plans to use the idea of turning the point of view on learning to a student-centered approach. Gayle Fairley, professional pedagogy, noted that she plans to use the feedback "sandwich" idea. Martha Rinker, psychology, found Dr. Price's statement that there are no neutral interactions with students very thought provoking. James Nelson, political science plans to incorporate more group work in his classes. Some of the remarks for the Extreme Arousal 2.0 session included the following. Numerous participants reacted to Dr. Price's discussion about the importance of the first day of class as setting the tone for the rest of the semester including Nicki Michalski, communications, Virginia Gummelt, social work, and Michelle Ozmun, theatre and dance, among others. Karen Neuhauser, economics and finance, plans to video the student presentations in her class and would like to implement a classroom response system. Cynthia McBride, English and modern languages, plans to use daily quizzes, consistent consequences, and reward points for reading to expand her active learning toolbox. Almost all of the participants over the two days noted that Dr. Price's Five R's for engaging the millennial learners, which include relevance, rationale, relaxed, rapport, and research-based methods, got them thinking about their current classroom interactions. Robert Talbert, who teaches mathematics at Grand Valley State University, suggests in his blog that we can improve student learning by focusing on asking questions rather than covering material. He says, "What’s been good about this approach is that it promotes an ownership mindset of the mathematics in the class. Students get very creative and engaged when they have some say in the proceedings and it’s not just parroting what they learned in class. The lab problems are created so that they apply what we’ve learned in class, but often students will find some creative workaround." Dr. Talbert also uses a classroom response system and has found it very effective. Do you remember the recess breaks you had back in elementary school? Do you know why we had these breaks? Martin Seligman explains, in his most recent book Flourish, that the idea of the basic rest and activity cycle (BRAC) is characteristic of human beings and animals who are typically awake during the day. On average, we are at our most alert in late morning and mid-evening. We are at the bottom of our cycle--tired, grumpy, inattentive, and pessimistic--at mid-afternoon and in the wee hours of the morning. So very biological is this cycle that death occurs disproportionately at the bottom of BRAC. He suggests frequent energy breaks in the classroom to restore intellectual energy. Registration is open for the Lunch+Learn on retention efforts to be held Monday, March 19 at noon in 108 Setzer Center. As LU focuses additional attention on increasing the graduation rate of our students, what can faculty do on the front lines to stem the attrition rate and enhance student learning? What are the red flags that indicate you should pull the intervention trigger? What are the trends emerging in this area? What is causing you the most frustration about this problem? This Lunch+Learn is your opportunity to build a workshop to address your needs. Come and share your perspective now so that we can provide you with specifically tailored solutions at the follow-up workshop planned for April 25.

Do you want to know how to improve the completion rate in your classes? Do you know the indicators you should be looking for in your student's behavior that signal potential academic problems? How much do personal problems play in creating impediments for our students? Did you know that there is a large resource of data-driven information on retention? All of these questions and more will be addressed at the next Lunch+Learn event to be held on March 19 at noon in 108 Setzer Center. Dr. Sherri Shoefstall will be facilitating an open discussion designed to uncover your unmet needs. Join us so that we can craft a workshop planned for April that will address your immediate needs in this important area. LU is focused on improving our retention rates but we need everyone to help with this effort. Registration is open and this is an approved faculty development event. Dr. Christy Price's visit last week was a huge success. Not only were the workshops well attended but the conversations have continued even during Spring Break week. If you were unable to attend either or both workshops, you can still reap some benefits as Dr. Price has provided her presentations to us. If you are interested in receiving a copy, please contact a member of the CT+LE staff. Upon your return next week, you will be receiving an email announcing that the application period is open to apply to teach the University Success Seminar (LMAR 1101) to be offered in Fall 2012. This announcement will be followed closely by information sessions so that all of your questions can be answered. We are looking for student-centered teachers who are committed to using active learning methods to enhance student learning. This foundational class is a cornerstone piece to the retention efforts at LU. Matthew Kahn is the first to admit his blog post was poorly crafted, insufficiently researched and offensive. The University of California at Los Angeles economics professor suggested on his personal blog that UCLA’s transfer students were often less committed to the institution than their peers who spent four years in Westwood. He added that the university should admit more of those students as 18-year-olds instead of sending them to two-year colleges where academics might be a “watering down" of UCLA coursework. Before long, the article had spread back to California and drawn the ire of administrators and transfer students – who make up 40 percent of each UCLA entering class and 30 percent of the student body. The issue is particularly fraught with tension in California because the state lacks enough room in its universities and as a matter of policy expects many who will graduate from four-year institutions to start at community colleges. Kahn -- who insists he likes transfer students and wants them to take his environmental economics courses – has started a national conversation about whether faculty are biased against transfers and whether students who spend up to half their undergraduate careers at community colleges can learn as much as their fellow students who spend four years at a university. What if the Federal Government decided to reward university teaching in the same way that it now chooses to reward research? Kiernan Mathews says that there is incongruity in the current reward structure, namely that foundations, policymakers, and executive officers are advocating a reform agenda that requires faculty to be more committed to better teaching, advising, counseling, and assessment. "Yet all of the impulses in the academy’s DNA are driving faculty and the institutions they serve away from teaching and into ever more grant-seeking and research activities," he says.