The response has been solid for the upcoming visit by Dr. Christy Price who will be at LU on March 8 and 9 to deliver two powerful workshops designed to expand your teaching toolkit. Price was named 2010 Georgia Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). In 2009, Price was named one of the top ten “Outstanding First-Year Student Advocates” nationwide by the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. The workshop on Thursday will be focused on influencing student motivation and their desire to learn. The Friday session will be focused on how you can build a learning environment that your students will not want to miss. Registration continues for both events. We are also encouraging everyone to take a look at her recent article The New "R"s for Engaging Millennial Learners. The Chronicle of Higher Education is offering a number of free webinars focused on improving the writing abilities of your students. This is an area that will receive some additional attention at LU in the coming months. You can get a jump start now by checking out the sessions. It is also a good opportunity to remind you that our Blackboard support includes the plagiarism-detection service SafeAssign. When someone receives a resume from a LU graduate in response to a job opening, what is it that you want that person to expect? What is the LU alumni profile? What are the ultimate learning outcomes we want all of our graduates to have when they receive their degree from LU? Those are the larger questions being pondered by the University's Core Curriculum Committee, composed of faculty elected by their peers to oversee the evaluation of the current core curriculum and recommend the new core to be implemented by 2014. Dr. Rebecca Boone is chairing this important committee. If you have comments or questions, you should contact your departmental representative. You might also want to take a look at the guidelines for this process being overseen by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. The Collaborative Alliance for Post-secondary Success annual conference will be held June 8-10 in Seaside, CA. They have just extended the call for proposals and are looking for submissions by March 6 on the following topics: fostering habits of mind; high school to college transition programs (e.g., AP courses, developmental education, first- year seminars, Expository Reading and Writing Course and Early Assessment Programs, AVID, bridge and stretch programs); serving returning students, veterans, and students seeking workforce retraining; connecting multicultural and multilingual students to the learning community (e.g. Puente Project); using data in program design and assessment; engaging students by incorporating technology, collaborative learning, and high impact practices; collaborations within and across institutions; using assessment to guide our work; engaging students in assessment; sharing our stories to advocate for change in attitudes and policies; and, the Basic Skills Initiative.

We are still finding new ways that Ken Bain's book What the Best College Teachers Do can be useful. His thoughts on conducting a class that were gleaned from his longitudinal study are very instructional. One of the common principles that emerged from the data is the idea of creating a natural critical learning environment. It is natural because students encounter the skills, habits, attitudes, and information they are trying to learn embedded in questions and tasks they find fascinating. He suggests beginning your class with an intriguing question or problem and then guiding your students to understand the significance of the question. We have used this book as a foundational document for the Active and Collaborative Engagement for Students (ACES) Fellows program and it has proven to be an invaluable resource. Whether teachers desire it or not, conflicts among students inevitably will occur in any classroom. David W. Johnson and Roger T. Johnson present evidence in their article Energizing Learning: The Instructional Power of Conflict that intellectual conflict is not only highly desirable but also an essential instructional tool that energizes student efforts to learn. Coincidentally, CT+LE will be sponsoring a workshop on dealing with conflict in the classroom. It is scheduled to be held on March 27 at 2:00PM. Look for details soon in your email box. Kathy Hoover-Dempsey offers the following tips on making sense of student evaluation. Pick a good time to do so, when you will have enough time to digest at least some of the information, have privacy, and can give yourself some mental ‘space’ to analyze the information. Track quantitative results. Consider how the summary rating received for each item fits with your own teaching goals and your department’s expectations for teaching. Look for patterns in students’ comments—identify trends, note what you have done well and what needs improvement. Take your experience into account. If you are new to teaching, the school, or even the course, you may still be learning about various aspects of being a professor, such as course design, teaching skills, student interaction, and departmental expectations. Take the context and characteristics of your course into account. Research shows that student evaluations often are more positive in courses that are smaller rather than larger, and elective rather than required. Also, evaluations are usually more positive in courses in which students tend to do well. CT+LE offers the perfect forum for critical self reflection in the form of the LU journaling program. If you are interested in joining this vibrant group of outstanding faculty, contact CT+LE.

A growing body of evidence from the classroom, coupled with emerging research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, is lending insight into how people learn, but teaching on most college campuses has not changed much. "Too often, faculty members teach according to habits and hunches," said Carl E. Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who has extensively studied how to improve science education. In large part, the problem is that graduate students pursuing their doctorates get little or no training in pedagogy or assessment. "When these graduate students become faculty members," he said, "they might think about the content they want students to learn, but not the cognitive capabilities they want them to develop." Christy Price will visit LU on March 8 and 9 to discuss the effects that this type of approach can have on student learning. You can register now to attend either of her workshops. In addition, the CT+LE provides individualized training in pedagogy and assessment. Now is a great time to give your students a mid-semester feedback survey. You can design your own short form or contact CT+LE for some samples. Your main objective is to gather information that can be used to make some mid-semester adjustments so that you are assured that real learning is occurring in your classes. The University Undergraduate Advising Center is moving closer to reality everyday. We will soon have a director and space is being renovated. Once in place, the UUAC will provide state of the art support aimed at improving our retention rates and student success. Coupled with the ongoing faculty development efforts of CT+LE and the continued implementation of the Quality Enhancement Plan, LU is solidifying its commitment to being a world-class teaching-centered institution. One of the most widely recognized benefits of a college degree is increased quality of life due to enhanced earning power. A college degree typically provides the foundation for our all important middle class. Recent U.S. Census Bureau data show that high school graduates earn an average of $1.2 million during their working life but a bachelor's degree increases that total to $2.1 million. A college degree also opens doors to many desirable professions since six out of ten jobs now require some postsecondary education and training. The U.S. Department of Labor also reports that the rate of growth for jobs requiring advanced skills will double over the next decade. In fact, the Institute for Higher Education Policy and the Carnegie Foundation note that a college degree accords additional benefits including higher savings levels, improved working conditions, increased personal and professional mobility, improved health and life expectancy, improved quality of life, better consumer decision making, and most of these benefits are passed on to their children. All good information the next time someone in your class asks you why they have to learn something. We recommend you take a look at Empirical Research in Teaching and Learning that is available on Google books. Besides having a chapter by our very own Randy Smith, there is a chapter co-written by Diane Halpern, who visited LU last semester, and a chapter about enhancing student autonomy by Johnmarshall Reeve.

We often reference the Millennial Learners and indeed will have two workshops by Dr. Christy Price aimed at engaging this set of students on March 8 and 9 but who are these folks? Michael Wesch, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University and his students think they know. Their Youtube video is very interesting and will certainly make you think about what you are doing in your classroom. The call for proposals for the 31st Annual Midwest Research to Practice Conference is now open. The conference will occur in Edmond, OK September 27-29. The conference provides a forum for practitioners and researchers to discuss practices, concepts, evaluation, and research studies to improve practice in the education of adults. Do you have your student learning outcomes listed on your course syllabi? Learning outcomes describe that students will be able to do and/or know as a result of their educational experience. In fact, the outcomes should be directly tied to your learning experiences and should be written in language that clearly states a measurable behavior or quality of student work. The staff at CT+LE is available to help you redesign your course which would typically include updating your learning experiences and outcomes. For additional help, you might want to take a look at Barbara Walvoord's book Assessment Clear and Simple. LMAR 1101, the seminar course that will make its debut in the Fall 2012 semester, is in need of instructors. A general announcement and invitation to apply to teach this exciting new course that promotes student success and provides the tools for them to navigate their college career will be issued in the near future. Did you notice that our sister institution, UT Austin, has issued a report outlining their plans to increase their graduations rate? The information contained in the document is very interesting and has some obvious lessons for LU. A few of the more interesting findings note that student success in the first year relies heavily on a successful freshman orientation and on strength in freshman advising. They also argue that the GPA achieved in the first semester is the single best predictor for graduating at all and one of the best predictors for graduating in four years.

Despite the cold and rainy day, we had a nice turnout for the Alexander Workshop Revisited Lunch+Learn today. Xinyu Liu, Industrial Engineering, shared how he has separated the "wheat from the chaff" and adopted the teach less, learn more philosophy that Patricia Alexander discussed last Monday. Wanda Nicklebur, Professional Pedagogy, noted that making the connection with your students and knowing them by name can really enhance the classroom experience and produce a positive semester. Kurt Dyhaug, Art, shared some of the special challenges he experiences as a teacher in the creative arts. Overall the conversation was very positive and the event allowed each of us to fill in the gaps of our notes from the original workshop. Are you looking for ways to to increase your students’ willingness to attend class, their ability to maintain interest, and their desire to learn? If so, mark the dates of March 8 and 9. Dr. Christy Price, professor of psychology at Dalton State College in Georgia, will be at LU to deliver two powerful workshop sessions about engaging millennial learners. Look for an email from CT+LE very soon with more information. The call for proposals for the Sixth Annual International Conference on Teaching and Learning is open until February 27. This conference will be held May 9-10th at Oakland University in Rochester, MI. It is designed for faculty, instructors, academic administrators, staff, and students from post-secondary institutions. They are encouraging joint applications from individuals at different universities. If you meet (or want to hire) someone with a bachelor's degree in history, what qualities should you be confident that the person has? What skills should the person have? One of the persistent criticisms of American higher education is that most people wouldn't really know, and that one college's history majors would be so different from another's that the phrase "B.A. in history" doesn't really convey much. Changing that is the idea behind the Lumina Foundation's "tuning" efforts, modeled after similar initiatives in Europe, to work with states and higher education systems to define what various degree levels generally mean. The foundation aspires to link various degree programs as well, through its Degree Qualifications Profile.

Have you ever heard of the Preparing Future Faculty program? We were invited by Arizona State University's Graduate School to participate in their program which was held today. Five current LU faculty, including Drs. Paul Bernazzani, Brad Mayer, Dorothy Sisk, Amy Smith and Gleb Tcheslavski, presented their views of what it is like to be an academic. Their stories were compelling and very different. The overall themes that emerged included the support from their colleagues, relationship with the local community, and ability to be productive in this environment. All were drawn to LU because of the focus on teaching and they love that the classes are relatively small so that they can concentrate on building relationships with their students. In the end, the ASU audience of graduate students were very appreciative and our faculty enjoyed the experience very much. There is still time to register to attend the Alexander Workshop Revisited Lunch+Learn session to be held on Monday, February 13 at noon. The session will focus on extending the conversation that started last Monday and filling in the gaps for those who were unable to attend the original workshop. If you are looking for a concise research article that can help you improve your teaching performance, we recommend "Factors Contributing to Improved Teaching Performance." Whitney Ransom McGowan and Charles R. Graham performed a study designed to gain a better understanding of how faculty members become better teachers and make improvements in their teaching. Their results revealed that the top three factors leading to improvement were active/practical learning, teacher/student interactions, and clear expectations/learning outcomes. They also provide practical applications for change. Richard P. Keeling and Richard H. Hersh, longtime scholars and administrators, describe themselves as "friendly critics" of higher education, and have written a new book called We're Losing Our Minds that focuses on the quality of learning. Unlike many of academe's naysayers, they don't spend a lot of time trashing the faculty as overpaid and underworked or bashing administrators as fat-cat corporatizers. Instead, they make the case that too little of what happens in institutions of "higher education" deserves to be called "higher learning" -- "learning that prepares students to think creatively and critically, communicate effectively, and excel in responding to the challenges of life, work and citizenship." Keeling and Hersh engage in a dense but important discussion about how such development learning occurs. But, perhaps recognizing that the sort of "rethinking" they propose would require the sort of "systemic institutional change" that is difficult to bring about in higher education, the authors spend much of their time laying out the sorts of discussions in which campus administrators and professors must engage, jointly, to decide to make learning the "touchstone" priority, and kinds of practices and approaches that colleges might adopt to make it so.

Patricia Alexander delivered a powerful workshop yesterday as the more than 50 people in attendance can attest. The good news is it is not over. We will hold a faculty development Lunch+Learn (Alexander Workshop Revisited) on Monday, February 13 in the Private Dining Room of the LU Dining Hall. The doors open at 11:45 AM, the discussion start at noon and registration is now open. Grab a lunch, bring your notes from the session and join the dialogue. If you were unable to attend the original workshop, come and discover what you missed. Rice University is trying a new initiative hoping to drive the costs of textbooks down and save students money. A free online physics book, peer-reviewed and designed to compete with major publishers’ offerings, will debut next month through the non-profit publisher OpenStax College. Using Rice’s Connexions platform, OpenStax will offer free course materials for five common introductory classes. The textbooks are open to classes anywhere and organizers believe the programs could save students $90 million in the next five years if the books capture 10 percent of the national market. Erin E. Templeton recommends you try Wordle for introducing students to close-reading and the basics of textual analysis. She says that there are two things that make Wordle invaluable. First, "it’s free and very easy to use because it is an open web-based program so all students with access to a computer can use it. It doesn’t require specific hardware (read: iPad) or charge fees for accessing the site." Second, "it’s fun." Generating a Word Cloud is as simple as clicking on the “Create” link, pasting in “a bunch of text,” and clicking “Go.” Once the Word Cloud is created, students can then play with fonts, color schemes, and other visual variables such as whether they prefer the words to be laid out horizontally, vertically, or a bit of both. She notes that by using it in her literature class to "deconstruct and defamiliarize the passage, Wordle magically freed students from the summary trap and helped them to think about the text analytically beyond the constraints of plot. Word clouds do not have plots, at least not in the linear convention sense that allows easy summary, so analysis was suddenly less confusing." The Lecture Check (Mazur, 1997) is an active learning strategy that works very well in large classes, but is equally effective in smaller class enrollments. The first step is to deliver a lecture for 15 to 20 minutes, and then project a question for the class to see. Often this is a multiple choice item that is similar to the type of question that will be used on an exam. Students are asked to raise their hands as the instructor asks how many think ‘a’ is the correct response; how many chose ‘b,’; and so on. If most of the students have the correct response, the instructor simply continues with the course material. If, however, more than approximately 20% chose the incorrect response, the instructor has students turn to their neighbor and convince them of the correct choice. Finally, the instructor goes through the items again to see how many choose each alternative. If an unacceptable number still have incorrect responses, it may be wise to go back over the material. Students also can be called on to defend the selection they have made.

Are you looking to increase the use of social media in your classroom to improve your student's learning? You might want to listen to a podcast by Lisa Chamberlin. Creating an Online Course of Substance Faculty Learning Community has set an ambitious set of outcomes. They continue to meet, most recently to hear a stellar presentation by our own Dr. Kaye Shelton who gave us a blueprint for creating an online course. Drs. Nancy Blume and Cheng-Hsien Lin are facilitating this very active FLC. The outcomes for all four FLC will be presented in a showcase this coming May. Watch this blog for more information. There is considerable unrest in the academic world judging from headlines in two major higher education publications. First, the Elsevier boycott continues to expand. About 2,400 scholars have put their names to an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company's journals, including refereeing papers. Protesters say Elsevier is emblematic of an abusive publishing industry. "The government pays me and other scientists to produce work, and we give it away to private entities," says Brett S. Abrahams, an assistant professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "Then they charge us to read it." Mr. Abrahams signed the pledge on Tuesday after reading about it on Facebook. "Over the past 10 years, our prices have been in the lowest quartile in the publishing industry," said Alicia Wise, Elsevier's director of universal access. "Last year our prices were lower than our competitors'. I'm not sure why we are the focus of this boycott, but I'm very concerned about one dissatisfied scientist, and I'm concerned about 2,000." Then there is the recent summit held for those employed as adjunct faculty. Members of the New Faculty Majority, a group representing professors off the tenure track, say that "contingent" employment is problematic and exploitative. The statistics now indicate that non-tenure-track faculty, including part-timers, make up about 73 percent of the academic workforce. Leaders of the New Faculty Majority offered up a draft document laying out the goals and principles of what it hopes will be a broad-based effort by key players in higher education to improve adjuncts' lot. Intended to secure contingent faculty members better pay and benefits, more job security, a greater role in college governance, and assurances of academic freedom, the document calls for colleges to undertake sweeping efforts to improve adjuncts' working conditions, and for the adjuncts themselves to play a key role in guiding such change.