Last semester, Communication Fellows assigned to the Great Works program at Baruch designed and facilitated at a three-session faculty development seminar. We met three Friday afternoons during the semester, with about 12 faculty members. The group explored ways of using communication across the curriculum (CAC), and participants shared ways of constructing communication-intensive assignments (including writing, speaking, and computer-mediated communication), techniques for responding to student writing, ways of using low-stakes writing to enhance the learning experience (as well as to enhance writing skills), and other topics of interest. I can only speak for myself, but I found the sessions to be engaging, useful, and fun.
This semester, there will be a new Great Works Faculty Development Seminar. You can get all the details and fill out an application here. As the application states,
This semester, we would like to continue the program by bringing together Great Works faculty members again to explore and share strategies for using written, oral, and technology-facilitated communication activities in their classrooms as tools for learning.The program will again function as a semester-long seminar, facilitated by the Institute’s Great Works team. Participants will meet three times during the semester. Between sessions, we will maintain contact via a blog, and participants will be asked to do some reading and preparation for each session. Each of the meetings will be three and a half hours long, including two 90-minute working sessions and a half-hour working lunch. We will conduct each meeting as a roundtable discussion and will rely upon the faculty to lead by sharing their experiences and expertise with others in order to generate ideas for teaching with communication-intensive methods.
Last spring, the Great Works Faculty Development Seminar participants communicated between sessions via Blackboard–in part, so we could talk about the usefulness of the medium in our classes. I’m pleased to report that this year, as the description states, the group will be keeping in touch via a blog. In addition to sharing ideas and methods that work, faculty willl also have a chance to try out blogging and see how the medium might work for their classes.
If you’re a Great Works faculty member (full-time or part-time), please apply. The deadline is Friday, September 8th (though obviously, if you see this later, please contact us via the links on the application anyway). There’s a stipend to compensate you for the time spent in meetings (three 3.5 hour sessions, with lunch provided) and doing some preparation in-between the sessions (reading, thinking, blogging). We hope you’ll join us!
For more information on the Faculty Development seminar, please see the information and application on the Institute’s Web site. I hope we hear from many of you who teach Great Works. Those of us who provide support for Great Works are really excited about the seminar this semester. It’s a great forum for colleagues to exchange ideas, which we don’t often get to do when teaching.
We would also like to use this blog as a space to hear ideas for other faculty development fora. There have been many suggestions for interdisciplinary groups, so please offer your input about what would work well to bring together faculty members from different disciplines to collaborate on communication-intensive instruction.
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