A faculty learning community is a group of cross-disciplinary faculty (usually 6–12 people) engaging in an active, collaborative program that meets regularly to support each participant's professional development (definition adapted from Miami University, OH). Depending on the chosen book, learning community participants may pick a focus project and agree to apply the ideas, try out innovations, and report back to the group on what they have learned.
The Center for Faculty Development provides you with a copy of the book, refreshments, and a designated “host” for your learning community. At each gathering, you’ll discuss key insights from the assigned reading, questions that arise for you while reading, and, when appropriate, the progress you're making on your own project.
Any Seattle University faculty member, part-time or full-time, can participate in the program.
The Human Element: Overcoming the resistance that awaits new ideas
Tuesdays: Oct 11, Oct 25, and Nov 8 | 1:30–2:45 | In person | HUNT 160 | Coffee and tea will be provided
Facilitated by David Green
Do you have a new idea or innovation you’d like to introduce at SU? Are you wondering how to bring your colleagues on board?
Common practice says that the best way to convince people to take up a new idea is to heighten the appeal of the idea itself. But what about the discomfort and hesitations that hold us back from changing?
In their book The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas, authors Loren Nordgren and David Schonthal call the former approach “fuel-based” and label the latter “frictions.” They explore four important frictions (inertia, effort, emotion, and reactance) and introduce readers to corresponding strategies that will help their ideas shine.
In this three-session Learning Community, facilitated by David Green (Center for Faculty Development), we'll work our way through the chapters of the book, discussing where it resonates or aggravates, where it’s immediately applicable or requires some adjustment, and we’ll consider how it might aid our own attempts to bring colleagues on board with new ideas.
Over the three sessions, you'll learn:
If you’re involved in any change initiatives on campus – whether around curricular change, systemic change, or shared governance change – then the ideas in this book could help you feel more effective and enthusiastic in your work, as well as enabling your ideas to be championed more widely. This book is also well-suited to all faculty who are full of great ideas.
The Human Element is 210 pages long, and reading will be split across the three sessions to be manageable for participants.
This learning community meets in Hunthausen 160 on:
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