Part B: Self-Designed Activities
As a focus for your self-designed activities, choose one of the
following three options.
In your application, identify five
activities that will serve as a focus of study and development for
your work. Write a paragraph for each in which you discuss the
purpose, nature, and scope of the activity. Indicate how you will
document that you have completed each activity (i.e., what artifacts
you will produce, such as written pieces, videotapes or photographs,
audiotapes, posters, etc.). Also indicate who might be assisting you
with each activity. This assistance might come from your mentor, but
just as likely you might be involving fellow graduate students, other
faculty, or staff. These five activities can be tied quite closely
with the mentored teaching that you do for the program. The following
categories are listed to help you generate ideas for activities.
Syllabus design involves dozens of
interesting decisions, including issues about equipment and supplies
in addition to textbook selections, development of assignments, and
creation of a course calendar. In chapter three of his book What
the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain lists thirteen questions
that teachers should ask themselves as they prepare to teach. See the
appendix for a list of these questions.
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Accommodating
diversity and providing equality in the classroom: learning
strategies, intellectual development, first language, culture, race,
gender, age, and a host of other considerations
Investigate what is known about
student learning in your discipline. What is the profile of students
who major in your field? Do you and others in your field have concerns
about this profile? What are the effects of age, gender, ethnicity, or
second language issues on the process of learning in your discipline?
How will you adapt your teaching to accommodate these effects?
Consider tracking the effects of
alternate uses of office hours (such as required office visits, group
visits, or office hours held in places other than your office).
How do faculty develop academic
advising skills? Investigate the role of personal counseling in
teaching and how faculty develop counseling skills.
What ethical issues occur in your
discipline’s research and teaching (falsification of data, plagiarism,
treatment of research subjects, for instance)? How do ethical issues
affect teaching? How might you teach the complexities of intellectual
honesty to students?
Find out how careers in your
discipline differ among the settings of community colleges, liberal
arts colleges, religious institutions, research universities, military
academies, etc. What resources do the assorted professional
organizations (disciplinary and/or organizations devoted to higher
education) offer you? The University of Wyoming belongs to COPFFN (the
Colorado Preparing Future Faculty Network), which sponsors programs
throughout the year to investigate some of these issues. Your
participation in COPFFN events could constitute one or more of your
activities. Contact the director of the Ellbogen Center for Teaching
and Learning if you are interested in COPFFN activities.
Write a professional resume for the
job market. Prepare one or more teaching statements (your philosophy
of teaching or your approach). Write an outline for the “job talk” at
an interview. Analyze the job market in your field: where are most of
the teaching jobs? Are their regional patterns or differences? What
are the international opportunities?
In your application, identify five
activities that will serve as a focus of study and development in this
program. The five activities should have a distinct emphasis on
distance learning and teaching. Write a paragraph for each in which
you discuss the purpose, nature, and scope of the activity. Indicate
how you will document that you have completed each activity (i.e.,
what artifacts you will produce, such as written pieces, videotapes or
photographs, audiotapes, posters, etc.). Also indicate who will be
assisting you with each activity. This assistance might come from your
mentor, but just as likely you might be involving fellow graduate
students, other faculty, or staff. These five activities can be tied
quite closely with the mentored teaching that you do for the program.
The following categories are listed to help you generate ideas for
activities. See the categories in the Classroom Learning and
Teaching Option for additional ideas.
Investigate the importance of
distance learning in your discipline. How long has it been a factor in
the delivery of teaching? What institutions or what people have taken
the lead? Is your discipline on the cutting edge, an early adapter, or
a reluctant player?
What delivery methods are in favor
and out of favor in your discipline? What are the benefits and costs
of distance learning technologies? What additional personnel and/or
resources are required to effectively accomplish teaching and learning
at a distance? What additional skills are required to teach at a
distance?
How are teachers utilizing blogs,
wikis, chat rooms, email, and other forms of electronic communications
for class-related activities? What are the benefits and disadvantages
of the various course management systems (online platforms) available?
In addition to the dozens of
decisions involved in classroom syllabus design (see the discussion of
this category in option 1), distance teaching and learning involves a
set of other considerations mediated by the distance factor. What
learning theories are applicable in online environments? How do
considerations of time and space in distance learning change a
syllabus? How can hybrid courses be used effectively? How does
teaching at a distance change the way we think about the “seat time”
associated with classroom teaching? What is a “semester” or a “term”
in distance learning? What is the “classroom”? How do we keep
students actively engaged in learning at a distance?
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Accommodating diversity and
providing equality in the classroom: learning strategies,
intellectual development, first language, culture, race, gender,
age, and a host of other considerations
How
does distance teaching and learning change notions of culture,
language, ethnicity, gender, age, etc? Which of these factors become
less or more important in distance environments? In these
environments, do patterns of power and silencing differ from those
that occur in on-site classrooms? What kinds of resistance do students
display in these environments?
Distance teaching and learning
change the familiar (office hours) into something entirely different.
How can students be helped one-on-one at a distance? What are the
dynamics of personal counseling when conducted at a distance?
What interesting ethical issues
surface in an online environment? With videoconferencing?
With synchronous or asynchronous chat lines, blogs, and other
web-based communication networks?
In your discipline, what is the
importance of distance teaching and learning in the lives of faculty?
What are the differences among community colleges, liberal arts
colleges, research universities, religious institutions, military
academies, and exclusively online institutions? What kinds of
resources are of most use for developing teaching expertise in
distance learning?
Write a professional resume for the
job market that is tailored for distance teaching and learning.
Prepare one or more teaching statements about distance learning. Write
an outline for an online “job talk”. Analyze the job market for
distance teaching. Who is advertising? Where are most of the teaching
jobs? Are their regional patterns or differences? What about
international jobs? What is the status of electronic resumes or
e-portfolios?
In contrast to the development of
five activities described in the other two options, this option
involves the completion of an original research project related to
teaching and learning. You should include the results of your research
in the portfolio (in a paper or a poster presentation, for instance).
Ideally, your project will be ready for public presentation at a
conference or in a submission for publication. You can conduct this
research based on your own teaching, or you can co-author with your
mentor or with another faculty member, investigating something related
to their teaching. For Part B of the application, write a proposal
for your project that contains the following three parts:
Identify a problem or an issue
related to student learning that warrants some investigation. Write a
brief narrative about why this problem interests you and what has led
you to want to conduct some research. Many of the categories listed in
options 1 and 2 above contain ideas for projects in the scholarship of
teaching and learning.
Your final project will need to be
grounded in the research of others. In your proposal, outline what you
know so far about this research and what kind of literature review you
hope to accomplish. Indicate the names of some authors and some
sources (journal titles, books, websites, etc.).
Outline your research plans. Your
plans might include, for instance, the development of an assignment by
which you will track changes in student learning. Give some specifics
about how you might do this tracking. If your plans involve surveys or
focus groups, give some specifics about numbers and the population you
hope to survey. Indicate if your research plan should include
submitting an IRB proposal (Institutional Research Board). Outline
your time frame for the research.
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