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With the generous support of Baruch’s Provost’s Office, the Schwartz Institute’s Great Works Communication Fellows will pilot a faculty development seminar during the Spring 2006 semester. The idea is to work with Baruch faculty members who teach CICs, helping them expand and improve their communication-intensive teaching techniques. Over the course of the seminar, we plan to facilitate discussion, lead activities, and even assign homework on a variety of issues such as assignment, exam, oral presentation, and syllabus design; grading and responding to writing; Blackboard participation; group vs. individual assignments; in-class writing/communicating-to-learn techniques; and so on. (The irony has not escaped me that we are, in effect, hosting a seminar that revolves around the concept of communication-intensive courses in a communication-intensive fashion; at least we’re practicing what we preach!)

To get things rolling, at the end of last semester, we distributed applications to Great Works and LTT (Literature in Translation) faculty for a semester-long, three-meeting seminar, with a modest stipend. We are delighted to announce that we now have 12 faculty members enrolled.

So here’s what I’m wondering. The impetus for this seminar reflects an ongoing question among those of us involved in the development and honing of CICs: where’s the most efficient place for us to focus our limited time and resources – on students, faculty, both? For the past few years, Great Works fellows have concentrated on two methods: running in-class workshops, in which faculty request that we lead their class in a particular exercise, such as how to generate ideas for a paper or how to formulate a thesis; and leading out-of-class workshops, in which students enroll for similar workshops on their own. More recently, though, we’ve started to consider whether we might get better bang for our buck by targeting our efforts directly at faculty as well. Our thinking is that the positive pedagogical changes we’re working for will have to come, in the long term, mostly from the classroom itself, no matter how successful our “support” services are with students. So what do you think? By primarily working with students, are we just running in place instead of improving things more systemically? Should we balance our work with students with an equal emphasis on working with faculty? Would this be doomed in practice by the sensitivities and politics of upward-instruction (i.e. fellows “teaching” faculty about how to teach communication-intensive activities better)? My instinct whispers that each reinforces the other, but I would enjoy hearing comments from others, since most of us have some teaching experience, or have even led similar faculty development seminars.