Highlights from Past and Current Faculty Learning Communities

 

Early Career (2011/12)
Members of the Early Career FLC in 2011/12 co-facilitated a well-attended workshop as part of MSU Denver’s Spring Forum on March 30, 2012. The title of the workshop was “Adopt-a-CAT: Engaging Students with Classroom Assessment Techniques.” The promise made to participants was that by the end of the workshop, they would be able to:

  • Explain what CATs are and why they’re useful.
  • Choose a CAT that is appropriate to the discipline and circumstances of their course(s).
  • Identify a CAT for immediate use in their course.

Materials prepared for the workshop include a PowerPoint slide deck (289 KB) that provides the framework for understanding CATs and a CATs Quick Reference Guide (26 KB).

During the workshop, participants were asked to complete a minute paper, answering the questions “what is the most important thing you learned in this session?” and “what questions remain?” This document containing the CAT minute paper results (32 KB) is a written summary of comments and questions (with answers provided) that was shared back with participants after the workshop.

 

Migration and Migrant Students in Higher Education (2011/12)

Members of the 2011/12 FLC on Migration and Migrant Students in Higher Education facilitated a workshop at the Spring Forum on March 30, 2012 entitled “Citizenship—the Other Diversity in the Classroom: Scenarios and Best Practices for Promoting Classroom Sensitivity to Citizenship Status” This PowerPoint slide deck, Classroom Strategies to the Topic of Immigration (2,566 KB), framed the discussion, and in an activity, pairs of workshop participants responded to hypothetical classroom scenarios (10 KB) with counterpoints and data provided in this immigration“myths” handout (45 KB) .

 

New Faculty (2010/11)

The 2010/11 New Faculty FLC collaborated on the “annotated syllabus” project, which makes public the intellectual work of teaching. The annotated syllabus is a format for prompting the reflection that goes into course design and for fostering a systematic approach to instructional growth and development. You can view the group’s annotated syllabi here. Members of the FLC also presented the poster (713 KB) “Annotated Syllabi: Making Visible our Collaborative Work in Instructional Development” at the 2011 Spring Forum: Teaching and Learning at Metro State.

 

Critical Conversations (2009/10)

The Critical Conversations FLC, which ran during the 2009/10 academic year, has published an article, “From Difficult Dialogues to Critical Conversations: Intersectionality in Our Teaching and Professional Lives” in volume 125 of New Directions for Teaching and Learning: An Integrative Analysis Approach to Diversity in the College Classroom.