One of our goals as a Center is to engage SU faculty in conversation around the deeper questions of academic practice, based on national and international research into higher education. Events are open to ALL SU faculty.
Are you interested in exploring the key characteristics of the most effective college teachers? What do these teachers know and what do they do to challenge their students to achieve their deepest potential? Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do explores the findings of a 15-year study of almost 100 college teachers, representing numerous academic disciplines and universities, to answer these questions.
In this three-session Learning Community facilitated by Katherine Raichle (Department of Psychology and Associate Director of Leaning and Teaching) in the spring quarter, you'll work your way through Bain’s book, gaining valuable insight into the myriad ways that highly effective college teachers approach their students, scaffold their lessons and classrooms, and design their courses.
Over the four sessions, you'll learn how to:
This community is for any faculty member who is interested in learning how to improve their learning and teaching practices.
The four dates in Spring Quarter are:
Register by 9:00 a.m. on Monday, April 9.
Edwin Bridges’ The Prudent Professor is a practical guide for faculty at any age who want to prepare for the financial aspects of retirement, and not just let it happen. The book draws on the author’s own careful research and long personal experience in building—and protecting—his retirement funds. He describes with candor his own successes and mistakes and his short, concise chapters provide both the rationale and methodology to identify one’s own personal goals at each stage of one’s career.
In this four-session Learning Community, facilitated by Jacquelyn Miller (Center for Faculty Development) during spring quarter, we'll work our way through the chapters of the book to determine what might work best for you in your own situation.
Over the four sessions, you'll learn how to:
This community is primarily for any faculty member who is interested in retirement planning.
The Prudent Professor is 334 pages long, and reading will be split across the four sessions to be manageable for participants.
The four dates in Spring Quarter are:
Register by 9:00 a.m. on Monday, April 9.
Fulbright Scholar Program: Informational session for faculty and staff
LUNCHTIME WORKSHOP
Mon, Apr 23 | 12:20–2:00 | Student Center 210 | Lunch provided
Presenter: Athena Fullay | SU Host: Jacquelyn Miller
This session will be facilitated by Athena Fullay, Outreach and Recruitment Specialist at the Institute of International Education, the organization that oversees the Fulbright Program.
At the session you will:
If you are interested in learning more about the Fulbright Scholar Program, contact Jacquelyn Miller (University Liaison to the Fulbright Scholar Program).
The “Personal Intellectual Project:” Capturing, focusing, and (re)inventing your scholarly agenda
LUNCHTIME WORKSHOP
Tue, Apr 24 | 12:30–1:50 | Pigott 306 | Lunch provided
Facilitated by David Green
Depending on our career stage, our scholarly agenda can pose a variety of challenges. For many newer scholars, it can be hard to step back and identify exactly what it is we’re doing – and why it matters. For more seasoned researchers, in contrast, we often find our passions have shifted to new topics, or that we need to reinvent ourselves as scholars in somewhat different academic fields than where we began.
Difficulty in describing our research arc can affect our chances of winning grants, of being promoted, or simply of feeling in control of our own scholarship. It can lead us to take on projects that don’t exactly align with our expertise or intellectual curiosity, and to missing out on those that do.
In this session, we’ll provide a space for you to think through your own “Personal Intellectual Project”—the big-picture encapsulation of your different scholarly topics and agendas. For newer scholars, can you sense its form yet? Do you recognize the parameters you want to set to keep it manageable? For more experienced scholars, has your intellectual project evolved since you last considered it? What has changed and what remains the same? What projects might reignite your enthusiasm?
Pinnacle of the profession: Scaling the heights to full professor
PANEL DISCUSSION
Wed, May 2 | 12:30–1:50 | Pigott 304 | Lunch provided
Facilitated by Jacquelyn Miller
For many tenure-track faculty, achieving the rank of full professor signifies that they’ve reached the pinnacle of their profession. The process for reaching that pinnacle, however, often feels rather mysterious and perhaps even too daunting to consider.
Meet a panel of current full professors to discover how they successfully achieved this next stage in their careers. Learn about some of the best practices to follow or possible pitfalls to avoid as you consider your own academic path to the heady heights of full professor.
The session also includes a Q&A in a confidential environment.
The joy of failure: Turning a misstep into an opportunity for the classroom
LUNCHTIME WORKSHOP
Wed, May 16 | 12:30–1:50 | Student Center 130 | Lunch provided
OR
Thu, May 17 | 12:30–1:50 | Casey Commons | Lunch provided
Facilitated by Katherine Raichle
Faculty often seek consultation following an in-class misstep, expressing embarrassment as well as uncertainty about if, and how, to best address it with their students. Sometimes those missteps are content-related or terminological, at other times they are interpersonal issues or are matters of how we facilitated a situation in class. No matter how major or minor they may appear on the outside, these mistakes and missteps can easily challenge our confidence in class.
So how can we turn what we might see as personal “failures” into valuable learning opportunities for ourselves and our students? In this workshop we will address how to:
Mistakes are human, and we all make them, yet it can feel uncomfortable to take ownership of our missteps with our students. What if we modeled for them the value in recognizing and learning from “failing,” and demonstrated our own humanity in the process?