Do you use teaching practices that relate teaching and learning to our community and environment? How does the environment relate to our teaching and learning? The Sustainability Across the Curriculum Faculty Learning Community (FLC) is exploring those questions and more as they move towards having an academic minor available at LU on this topic. Drs. Tony Piereira and Matt Hoch are facilitating the FLC that is also discussing the possibility of creating a recycling program for the campus. The ecology of teaching and learning is certainly attracting attention worldwide and the International Institute for SoTL Scholars and Mentors annual conference will hold its annual conference May 31 through June 3 in Los Angeles, CA. Skip Downing, creator of the On Course program, says that successful students "accept self-responsibility, discover self-motivation, master self-management, and adopt life-long learning" among other things. The On Course program will come to LU in the Fall of 2012 in the form of the University Success Seminar (USS). Look for information coming soon about the opportunity to teach one of the USS sections. If you don't think you have time to attend all of the faculty development opportunities offered by CT+LE, Dr. James E. Lang offers another suggestion. He says, in his book On Course: A Week by Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching, to be nosy. If you see that a colleague in your department or perhaps someone who teaches a class next to you is having success, ask them what they are doing. We even have a group of folks, ACES Fellows, who have been through a year-long course redesign process. They are filled with great ideas that they tried so you get the benefit of their mistakes. There is a complete list of current Fellows and alums so send them an email, call them or drop by their office for a chat. CT+LE is also here and we accept walk-ins all the time. There is still time to register to attend the workshop Habits of Mind: What do Students Believe about Knowledge and Knowing? to be held on February 6 at 1:00 PM. Dr. Patricia Alexander is an excellent scholar who will share her thoughts on the idea of academic development as opposed to learning measured through high-stakes testing.

If you are looking for a way to create a learning experience that emphasizes personal responsibility and collaboration while helping your students develop critical thinking and communication skills, this idea might be right for you. Assign two research essays for the semester. The first should be fairly early in the semester and needs to be an individual assignment typically on a smaller issue of a larger topic. Have your students submit the essay for a grade and provide them with detailed feedback (which will come into play later). The second essay should be a group project. You will need to group students using their smaller issues into the larger topic collaborative groups. One of the components of the grading for the larger topic essay is to look at how well they integrated the feedback from the smaller issue essay. Remember to include a rubric for each of the essays. These learning experiences simulate real-world experiences as most of them will be called upon to execute very similar tasks when they join the workforce. It seems even places like Johns Hopkins University have caught on to the fact that teaching is integral to a student's college experience. Of course we are being sardonic, but a recent article about a new initiative at the institution known for its research prowess caught our eye. Here is one of the more interesting comments, "During a student panel, Hopkins professors asked their pupils what they needed from a lecture course. The aspiring scientists said personal interaction, genuine interest in the students and varied lesson plans are vital." Increasing the percentage of college graduates in the United States has become a collective aspiration of policy makers and advocates for higher education. But this push for quantity will mean little if colleges cannot demonstrate the quality of the degrees they confer, according to a report by the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability. The report stakes out four broad principles of assessment and accountability for a college to follow: setting ambitious goals for the outcomes of undergraduate education; gathering evidence about how the institution is faring in pursuit of those outcomes; using that evidence to improve learning; and sharing the results. Dr. Patricia Alexander, who will visit LU on February 6, proposes that "we reframe education as academic development, a reframing that demands meaningful attention to the socioemotional and physical well-being of all students as much as to their cognitive growth and advancement." You can find this and more in her most recent article Through Myth to Reality: Reframing Education as Academic Development published in the journal Early Education and Development (21,5). Better yet, plan to participate in a campus discussion at her faculty development workshop. Registration is now open.

Several people, including our Provost Steve Doblin, found the article Note to Faculty: Don't Be Such a Know-it-all to be very interesting. Despite the provocative title it really drives home the points we have repeated over and over again about student-centered teaching. In order for students to be successful they must take ownership of their learning by "trying-failing-persisting." A fixed mind-set reflects the belief that intelligence is a static trait. People who think this way tend to avoid challenges, give up easily, and see effort as fruitless. They also feel threatened by the success of others. "I think a lot of what we do in the K-12 arena gets students thinking this particular way," said Archie L. Holmes, Jr, a engineering professor at the University of Virginia. Two of the four Faculty Learning Communities (FLC) have already met in 2012. The participants are raving that the FLC format has created new opportunities for collaboration and has removed the feeling of isolation some our colleagues had felt in the past. We will be soliciting new ideas for 2012-13 FLC later this semester. Have you been looking to attend a teaching and learning conference but only have a small amount of travel funds available? The Teaching and Learning Technology Conference 2012 might fit the bill as this event is free to all attendees. There are no registration fees and all food is provided on both days of the event. Attendees are still responsible for travel and lodging to the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla. By the way, one easy way to access travel funds is by attending the various faculty development programs throughout the academic year. The Faculty Development Program provides all of the details. Contact a staff member of CT+LE for more information. Save the dates of March 8 and 9 and April 19 and 20 during the Spring 2012 semester. We will have some very exciting faculty development events on those days with guest speakers that will challenge and surprise you. Jim Kouzes, one of the nation's best researchers on the topic of leadership, offers the following bit of advice for those looking to become a better leader. "It's really two words: deliberate practice. The whole notion of talent has been highly overrated and will only get you so far. The rest is about hard work and deliberate practice. Carve out at least two hours every day to use as a learning experience of deliberate practice. That means developing a plan for improvement. Set a goal and engage in designed learning activities to help you achieve that goal. Make sure you pay as much attention to technique as outcome. Get some feedback on how well you're doing and then, based on that, reset your goals."

Patricia Alexander, fresh off of her participation in the SERA annual conference, will be visiting LU on February 6. Her workshop will be held from 1:00 until 2:00 PM in 702 MJGL. Dr. Alexander, Mullan Professor of Literacy and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher in the Department of Human Development at the University of Maryland, will be delivering a workshop that will weigh potential differences between information management and knowledge building orientations to schooling and consider their implications for teaching, learning, and human development. She will focus on the role that these differing orientations have on students’ beliefs about knowledge and knowing and the resulting “habits of mind” they manifest in educational settings. Finally, she will explore the value of relational thinking strategies for bridging the differences between an informational-management and a knowledge-building orientation to learning and development. This workshop is part of the Center for Teaching+Learning Enhancement's distinguished speakers series. Faculty will receive participation credit towards the Faculty Development Program. Thanks to Dr. Kal Hamza of the Department of Counseling and Special Populations for helping to make this visit a reality.

The LU campus is beginning to show signs of life as the Spring semester rapidly approaches. This is your last weekend to prepare for your classes. I hope you have done your "spring cleaning" on your syllabi and infused them with some learning experiences that employ teaching methods that encourage active learning. As we move from the teacher-centered methods of the past to more effective student-centered approaches, we will start to reap the benefits of higher retention and graduation rates. If you are interested in using collaborative technologies to enhance your learning experiences, Jason Kalin has a terrific article you will want to access. He raves that we should encourage the use of the available collaborative technologies because it mimics what will occur in the real world when our students report to work. Kalin warns that although our students may be technology communicators, "many students consider these socially-centered online applications as neutral communication tools without learning, or even realizing, how to use these applications in rhetorically aware ways." Just wanted to remind you that our Blackboard support allows you to access SafeAssign, designed to eliminate plagiarism in student assignments. The service detects plagiarized works in student papers and delivers reports on such incidents through the Blackboard Learning System. SafeAssign checks assignments against databases of published articles and also scans the Internet for materials that might have been plagiarized. The interesting thing is that the more we use the service, it creates a database of LU material that is used to check your student's assignments. In this way, we are capturing the "viral sharing" that can sometimes occur in classes. The University of British Columbia Okanagan has issued a call for proposals for the annual learning conference Scholarly Approaches: Evidence-Informed Teaching and Learning to be held May 2 and 3 in British Columbia. Proposals will be accepted through February 29. Educators are invited to share their expertise and experience with the connection between research and learning. The conference intends to explore questions such as how can research inform my teaching and hence enhance the student learning experience; how do students learn best; and, what does the research say about approaches to teaching and learning that are most effective? Michael Theall urges us to help our students stay on track throughout the semester. He says "research on the dimensions of college teaching provides powerful evidence of the importance of helping students to organize their time. With respect to student achievement, the most strongly correlated teaching dimensions are organization and clarity. When teachers make clear how topics fit and how the assigned work can be efficiently carried out, they help students to construct accurate schemas and clarify the structure of the discipline. The result is better student learning and increased student satisfaction because that learning becomes more apparent."

With exactly 15 days until the Spring semester begins, now is the perfect time to take a look at your course offerings. Faculty who plan to try new ideas would be wise to take a closer look at their planned learning experiences. If you have three big ideas that you want to be sure your students are able to understand, integrate and synthesize into their broader knowledge base, now is the time to try a new teaching method that promotes active learning. Having your students take a personal stake in their education not only reduces the stress on you but helps them to grow as a life-long learner. Creating smart and creative citizens for the future benefits all of us. You can find many ideas on this blog but here are a few quick ideas to start the new year. Kathleen Cushman offers a number of suggestions in her book Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us About Motivation and Mastery (LB 1031.4 C87). She suggests that you remind your students that people who are seen as experts have worked hard to receive this acknowledgement. She also notes that "experts ask good questions, are curious, and want to know." They typically ask "what would happen if or why did that happen?" Cushman says that experts break problems into parts, rely on evidence, look for patterns, and consider other perspectives. Interestingly, she also found that most experts collaborate and welcome critique. Here is another idea offered by Skip Downing in his book On Course: Strategies for Creating Success in College and in Life which we plan to use in the University Success Seminar (USS LMAR 1101) in the Fall 2012 semester. Have you ever used a concept map to make notes? If not, you should try it and encourage your students to do the same. It promotes a different type of learning and really illustrates the connection between ideas and topics. Dr. Robert Leamnson has an interesting article in The National Teaching and Learning Forum that is a free download. It is a primer on learning and might be a good handout on day one of your classes this spring. Leamnson says, "a fundamental idea that you will encounter over and again, is that learning is not something that just happens to you, it is something that you do to yourself. You cannot be 'given' learning, nor can you be forced to do it. The most brilliant and inspired teacher cannot 'cause' you to learn. Only you can do that." The call for proposal deadline for the Scholarship of Teaching and Engagement Conference to be held on March 22 and 23, 2012 at Utah Valley University in Orem has been extended to January 15, 2012. All proposals will be peer reviewed and decisions will be made by January 2012. The theme for the 2012 Scholarship of Teaching and Engagement (SoTE) Conference is “Reaching New Heights through Engagement”. When faculty are primarily concerned with student learning and teaching methods are grounded in scholarly evaluation of what works and what does not, learning becomes a revitalized process for all involved, a celebration. They are looking for you to share your experiences and data about how to improve teaching, student learning, and community engagement. All disciplines are welcome.