Archive for the 'Faculty Development' Category

Institutional Growth at The Schwartz Institute: 1997-2007

Published
by
David
on April 8, 2008
in Assessment, Baruch College, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs) and Faculty Development
. 4 Comments

In BLSCI’s application for the TIAA-CREF Hesburgh Award, we made use of the writing diagnostic assessment data to demonstrate the many ways the Institute has grown over the past 10 years.

As Figure 1 and 2 below show, BLSCI fellows support faculty teaching a number of distinct Communication Intensive Courses (CICs) across a variety of disciplines. As Figure 2 shows, the largest representation of faculty teaching CICs is in departments that have traditionally placed a heavy emphasis on both written and oral communication, such as English, Modern Languages, Marketing, Management, Performing Arts, Sociology and Anthropology. However, the institute has also supported CICs in departments that have not traditionally incorporated communication intensive elements into their curricula, such as Accountancy, Natural Sciences (e.g., biology, chemistry, and environmental sciences), and Computer Information Systems.

Figure 1

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Figure 2

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When we look at these data and hear about all of the great work going on at the Institute during our staff meetings, what we often don’t take into consideration is the amount of expansion that has taken place over the past ten years. As Figure 3 demonstrates, the number of faculty supported by BLSCI has steadily increased, reaching a peak of 144 last year. The number of faculty currently teaching CICs is nearly three times what it was ten years ago. Despite some minor fluctuations, the number of sections of CICs has also increased dramatically. Specifically, as shown in Figure 4, the number of sections of CICs offered last year is nearly five times as many as there were in 1997.Figure 3

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Figure 4

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There is no doubt this kind of institutional growth contributed to BLSCI’s being awarded the Hesburgh award. However, the most interesting growth going on at the institute is arguably what happens on a more micro level among students, faculty, and fellows throughout continued mentorship and collaboration. Although we all get to observe this in our individual work, it’s often hard to demonstrate this kind of growth across the institute. As we keep on thinking about and celebrating growth at BLSCI we continue to think about ways to assess it. It’s my hope that this post will spark some ideas among readers on how we might approach this kind of assessment next semester.

Blogging at Baruch this Semester

Published
by
Luke
on March 10, 2008
in Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging, Faculty Development, Technology and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

Baruch faculty and students are making some unique and innovative contributions to the educational blogosphere this semester. Our goal in supporting course-based usage of weblogs over the past year has been to produce various models and prototypes that can be duplicated and built upon as the technology becomes more widely deployed throughout Baruch. In advance of the BLSCI’s rollout of Wordpress MultiUser at Baruch, I’d like to highlight the blogs we’ve helped launch in the past two months.

Anthropology/Sociology Faculty Working Group

AnthroSocDiana Rickard, Melis Ece, and I have been running a disciplinary working group with five faculty from Anthropology/Sociology who are using weblogs in their courses for the first time. The project includes seven individual course blogs, and the faculty also contribute their thoughts about using weblogs in their discipline to a shared online space. This project is a fascinating example of how course blogs, even in one discipline, can achieve a range of goals, from pre-writing for in-class presentations, to scaffolding research papers, to extending the classroom, to sharing and exploring related materials in an informal way. Each faculty member has a vision, and has structured their course blog(s) accordingly. It’s exciting to see a group of committed young faculty think through the implications of bringing their courses and pedagogical goals online. The home blog features commentary by our participants, and also houses both links to the individual course blogs and recent posts, which are fed in via RSS syndication.

Leonard Sussman: Digital Photography

SussmanOne of the great strengths of open source products such as Wordpress is the elegant ease with which participants in a course can share their work with one another. Prof. Leonard Sussman, of the Fine and Performing Arts Department at Baruch, gets major props for his willingness to run a prototype of a blog linked to and driven by Flickr.com, the image-sharing site (poetically, the Flickr blog is itself powered by Wordpress). Prof. Sussman was unhappy with the quality of in-class critiques his students have been delivering, and desired a space where they could share their work with one another, and, when prompted, do some pre-writing to develop the language with which to talk about photography.

Each student registered for his/her own Flickr account, and then joined a Flickr group called “Sussman Images.” When they submit an image from their own account to the group, that image automatically feeds into the course gallery, which displays images through a lightbox. The images also appear randomly in a sidebar on the front page of the blog, and Prof. Sussman can pull individual images into the main area of the blog for students to comment upon. He hasn’t gotten them writing just yet, but we’re happy to get the data flow set up, and think that this type of sharing, taking advantage of free tools readily available, provides one innovative model for bringing arts classes online.

Zoe Sheehan Saldana: Designing with Computer Animation and Computer Based Image Making

Art 3059

Mikhail has christened Professor Zoe Sheehan Saldana our first “blogfessor of the month” for her “Designing with Computer Animation” course blog. On this site, she’s taken the rotating header function that comes with the Neoclassical Wordpress theme and hacked it to accept Flash animations. She then had each of her students design an animated header for the site. If you go to the blog, and hit refresh, the header will change.

Our support for this project was limited to loading up the blog, giving Zoe administrative access, and tossing some ideas around. She did the rest. The result is, as Jim Groom has noted, “an awesome intersection of uses of this online space: sharing resources, publishing platform, collaborating on projects, and a class art gallery.”

Baruch Journalism: Writing New York and Online Newswatch

OnlineNewsWatchWriting NYFew fields have been as deeply impacted by the explosion of Web 2.0 as journalism. Undergraduate journalism departments are scrambling to develop online and new media components to their curricula, and we’re happy to be assisting Baruch’s program as it adjusts. We’re currently supporting two journalism weblogs. One is the continuation of a blog first launched for Professor Roslyn Bernstein’s feature writing course last year, called “Writing New York.” The second is Professor Vera Haller’s resource to help all journalism students follow developments in online journalism, called “OnlineNewsWatch.”

Feel free to check out these sites, and follow them as they build over the course of the semester. There’ll be much more blogging at Baruch in the days to come.

Finding New Contexts for the CPE Exam

Published
by
Olga
on February 15, 2008
in Faculty Development, Literacy, Resources, Uncategorized and Writing Instruction
. 0 Comments

Is there room for the CPE exam in humanities and social sciences classrooms? Should there be room?

Perhaps it is a common or at least recommended practice among professors to integrate CPE-like assignments into their courses if many of their students either have not yet taken or failed the exam.  Until recently I have not encountered in regular classes any assignments that came close to the CPE prompts.  I was in fact very surprised when the professor teaching the section of Great Works for ESL students shared with me her two-fold writing assignment that articulates the same goals and criteria as the CPE.  The subjects of this compare/contrast essay are of course literary texts.   I have not yet discussed the assignment with the students, but I am sure they’ll appreciate their professor’s effort to bridge the cold and scary CUNY testing world with the comfort of classroom learning.

Why bother when surely the tasks involved in the CPE exam require the level of critical thinking and writing abilities that develop gradually in different classes and through different activities in the course of their first few years in college?  But many students still dread the exam and postpone it for as long as possible.  Many do not always realize that attending a CPE workshop plays just one part, and probably not the largest one, in their exam preparation.  It is the work they do in their classes that truly prepares them for this test.  And perhaps reminding them about this through course materials that share the exam’s rhetoric would create a more positive and serious attitude not only toward the exam, but  toward college work in general. 

The Schwartz Institute wins the 2008 TIAA-CREF Hesburgh Award

Published
by
Mikhail
on January 18, 2008
in Baruch College, CUNY, Faculty Development and Higher Education
. 3 Comments

Boy, are we proud around Baruch these days. The Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute has been awarded TIAA-CREF Institute’s prestigious Theodore M. Hesburgh Award which recognizes outstanding faculty development programs focussed on improving undergraduate teaching and learning. Here’s TIAA-CREF’s boilerplate on the award, which comes with $20,000 for Baruch College:

The annual TIAA-CREF Hesburgh Award recognizes exceptional faculty development programs designed to enhance undergraduate teaching and learning. Named in honor of Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., president emeritus of the University of Notre Dame and former member of the TIAA and CREF Boards of Overseers, this award seeks to strengthen the teaching tradition at America’s undergraduate colleges and universities by acknowledging that an energized faculty is key to educational excellence.

What a great honor for all of us here at the Institute! Take a look at Baruch’s press release on the award. And here is a post by David on some of the supporting material we submitted as part of our application. Great work, Fellows. Next stop: the Nobel.

Writing Diagnostic Assessment: Some Preliminary Findings

Published
by
David
on December 5, 2007
in Administration, Assessment, Faculty Development, Funding and Higher Education
. 0 Comments

As many of you know, last month BLSCI applied for external funding from an organization that recognizes exceptional faculty development programs focussed on enhancing undergraduate teaching and learning. In order to make our case for the award, we included some preliminary results from the Writing Diagnostic Assessment data. I’d like to use this post as an opportunity to share some of these results with readers to demonstrate the effectiveness of the work that many have been doing over the years and get some feedback regarding ideas for future analyses.

When looking at the data, on average, students start the semester with scores on both the expectations and writing quality variables in the “middle” range (scores around 3). When we then looked to see if students’ scores significantly improved over the course of one semester in a CIC, there were no major findings. This was because many students started the semester out scoring high (scores from 4 to 5) on many of the variables, and thus did not have any room for improvement (as measured by the diagnostic scoring criteria).

However, when we looked at students who scored in the “low” to “middle” range on all of the variables (thanks Diana for this suggestion!) we observed statistically significant increases from the beginning to the end of the semester on all variables. These increases were consistent across disciplines and schools as well. The figures below illustrate the changes we observed in the data separately for the Weissman and Zicklin Schools.

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Although these results are based only on a subset of the data we’ve been able to clean, match, and analyze (~ 5,000 students), they nonetheless illustrate that the work of BLSCI in creating and implementing CICs seems to be paying off for students across the board. Although most probably knew or were able to sense this already, it’s always great to have “hard data.” We would love to hear readers’ thoughts on these findings and how you see these data stacking up next to the work you’re doing with students in your own classes. Also, as always, any general thoughts and/or questions on the assessment data are welcome.

Revision Workshop

Published
by
Olga
on November 9, 2007
in Faculty Development, Peer Review, Resources and Revision
. 0 Comments

 On November 30th, Cheryl Smith and I will be giving a revision workshop at the CUNY’s WAC meeting.  The description of the workshop is pasted below.  We were thinking about distributing a bibliography of current research on the subject.  We’re just beginning to put it together and would welcome any suggestions.  

Working with the Draft: Techniques for Helping Students Revise

WAC practitioners traditionally argue that the best way to use writing effectively in our teaching is to scaffold assignments, moving from low stakes (or informal) free-writing and pre-writing to more high stakes drafting and revising of essays.  But once students have completed their first drafts of an essay assignment, how can we use those drafts as a teaching tool?  A teacher’s careful comments can certainly guide students in their revision process, but relying on this single technique may not always help students develop as self-sufficient, powerful, and active writers.  How can we help them understand the most fundamental element of writing-revision-and grow as confident and careful readers of their own and their peers’ work?  The session will take participants through a variety of student-centered draft revision activities that can be used in courses across disciplines. 

WAC/WID Terminology, Parts II & III

Published
by
Mikhail
on August 8, 2007
in CUNY, Faculty Development, Pedagogy, Resources, Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing Instruction
. 0 Comments

As promised, here’s the rest of that useful WAC/WID glossary from the CUNY WAC/WID Handbook. Again, please feel free to comment on any of these definitions.

High-Stakes Writing
High-stakes writing assignments are expected to be completed according to formal academic and disciplinary conventions and usually count for a significant part of a student’s grade; examples include essay exams, research papers, lab reports, and critical response papers. This term is generally paired with the term “low-stakes writing” (see below), and distinguished from informal writing that is often exploratory and non-graded. In Britton’s framework, the function of high-stakes writing would be “transactional,” that is, to get the business of college done.

Journal
Generally informal, journals can be a productive place for students to record their thoughts, experiences, questions, and informal writings throughout college, in all disciplines, as well as in their daily lives. A variation on the journal is a “double-entry journal.” Students write in two columns: the first column contains quotations from a reading; the second column contains their reactions or responses to those quotations. Many variations are possible. Students might be asked, for example, to use paraphrases or summaries in the first column instead of quotations. Triple-entry journals, in which the third column might be used for peer responses, research questions, etc., are also commonly used.

Language
To talk about writing is to talk about the uses and functions of language, as well as to talk about politics, history, and culture. All converge at CUNY, which is an extraordinary crossroads of languages: our students speak (and may write in) 131 first languages other than English.

Literacy
The term literacy refers to the ability to use language—to read, write, listen and speak. In recent years, educators and administrators have added “numeracy,” “multimedia literacy,” “information literacy,” and “quantitative literacy” to the literacies expected of college students. Of course, what it means to “use language” successfully is a cultural and political question.

Low-Stakes Writing
Low-stakes writing activities provide students with an opportunity to experiment with ideas, form, and style without the pressure associated with correctness. The term “low-stakes” represents the level of expectation that a student and instructor bring to a particular assignment, meaning that low-stakes writing should count very little (if at all) toward the student’s final grade, while high-stakes writing is presumably graded. Examples of low-stakes writing include: journals, reflective responses, and freewriting. Some argue that the more frequently students engage in low-stakes writing, the more confidence and expertise they will apply to formal, high-stakes assignments. In Britton’s framework, low-stakes writing would be “expressive.”

Minimal Marking
The principle behind minimal marking is that correcting each technical mistake is not the most useful way to respond to students’ work; minimal marking encourages a focus on the larger ideas the student is trying to communicate, and emphasizes responding to those. Faculty may choose to point out one or two recurring technical errors, but should focus their responses on the work as a whole. Many faculty are concerned that they spend a great deal of time marking and correcting grammatical and other technical errors, and proponents of minimal marking argue that this practice reduces the amount of time spent correcting, and therefore allows for a greater number of writing assignments. Moreover, some research has shown that students can be overwhelmed by too many comments, and have difficulty prioritizing and addressing them in effective ways.

Paper
Common college short-hand for a formal, graded assignment of a specific length. “Paper” covers a lot of ground, from “essay” to “report,” and is also often modified by adjectives like “research,” or “compare/contrast.” Some argue that WAC/WID provides a space for educators to reflect on the many assumptions that cohere around vague terms such as “paper” or “write” or “composition.”

Peer Review
Practice of having students read and provide comments and suggestions for each other’s writing. This is generally done in class in pairs or small groups. Also referred to as peer editing, peer review is often guided through the use of handouts or worksheets that assist students in reading others’ writing through various critical lenses.

Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of speaking or writing effectively, using the principles and rules of composition drawn from classical traditions, typically tied to the art of persuasion. Classical rhetoricians were interested in dividing rhetoric into its component parts. For example, Roman rhetorician Cicero identified five rhetorical components: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronunciato. Early scholars and teachers of composition tended to discuss and teach rhetorical modes: persuasion, description, argument, compare-contrast, etc. More recently, WAC practitioners have focused on the rhetorical nature of all language, emphasizing the rhetorical dimensions and methods of the various disciplines. (For a set of definitions of rhetoric offered by rhetoricians both ancient and contemporary, visit this site.) All these approaches share the fundamental belief that a speaker or writer will use any given language more effectively if s/he is consciously aware of its rhetorical dimensions.

Scaffolding
Scaffolding is a term drawn, primarily, from the work of Russian cognitive psychologist Lev Vygotsky, to represent the centrality of social interaction in the development of cognition. The term has come to be used within education to refer to the ways in which complex projects can be broken down into manageable pieces, with the instructor/expert guiding the students/novices through the entire process, and encouraging students to move to higher levels of expertise. Faculty can monitor how students are developing their ideas throughout, and provide assistance if students encounter obstacles.

SWE (Standard Written English)
There exist many language communities within the larger rubric of the English language. SWE refers to that form of written English that is agreed upon by most publishers, colleges, and standardized tests to be the most “correct” and thus most understandable by all speakers and users of English regardless of differences in dialect or usage. This variant is sometimes called “Standard American English” (SAE), as well. The debate about how to teach what students need to know to gain fluency in Standard Written English (see below) is an important, current cultural, political, and historical debate throughout the English-speaking world.

WAC/WID Terminology (Part I)

Published
by
Mikhail
on August 7, 2007
in CUNY, Faculty Development, Pedagogy, Resources, Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing Instruction
. 2 Comments

Here’s more from the CUNY WAC/WID handbook. Useful stuff I hope. Please feel free to comment on any of these definitions. Parts II and III are forthcoming.

Common WAC/WID Terminology (Part I)

Audience
This term is used to define those for whom a piece of writing is intended. The identity of the audience shapes the writing, as writers adapt their tone and content to the situation. It is especially important to keep in mind the difference in audiences implied by discipline (the audience for a lab report, for example, is different than that for a performance review).

Essay
In the classical sense, an essay is a text in which the first-person singular comments upon—questioning, debating, arguing about—a subject. Although “essay” is often used interchangeably with “paper,” the term properly refers to a type of writing that blended the personal with the academic. As a verb, “essay” means an initial, and sometimes tentative, attempt—a “try.”

Expressive, Transactional, Poetic Uses of Language
Britton and his team developed a framework for classifying school writing, based on sociolinguistic theories of the functions of language (drawn primarily from the work of linguist Roman Jacobson). They were concerned that most school writing was written to the “teacher-as-examiner” and that students were not encouraged to try out the whole linguistic keyboard. The three categories of language function, according to Britton in Development of Writing Abilities, are:

    1) expressive—writing that is “close to the self,” representing the “ebb and flow” of a writer’s thoughts and feelings.
    2) transactional—“language to ‘get things done’ or participate in the world’s affairs . . . to inform, persuade, or instruct.”
    3) poetic—“writing as a verbal construct, a patterned verbalization [poem, story, song, etc.] of the writer’s feelings and ideas.”

Error
Error is closely connected to the study of grammar, basic writing, and ESL. Error analysis is a technique for identifying possible underlying causes of mistakes in sentence structure, verb form, etc. The identification of recurring “patterns of error” in a writer’s text is a widely used pedagogical tool to reduce a seemingly large number of errors to a handful of teachable categories of error (subject-verb agreement, possessives, etc.).

Freewriting
Freewriting is an informal writing activity in which students write “freely” without concern for grammar, punctuation, and other constraints. Freewriting is often considered a staple in composition pedagogy: typically, students are directed to write in class without stopping for a set period of time (usually just a few minutes). An instructor may specify a topic or leave it entirely up to the students. What is done with the writing varies widely: the texts may be read out in class to prompt discussion, or used as a source of ideas for another writing assignment, or not used directly by the instructor at all.

Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics
Grammar is the study of how words and their component parts combine to form sentences; the system of rules inherent in any language (from the American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd Ed). Grammar is structure, form, syntax; by the time children are four or five, they’ve “got” the structure of the language they hear all around them. Grammar needs to be distinguished from usage and mechanics. Usage refers to the way in which language is conventionally applied within the culture and reflects an awareness of one’s audience. Voice and word choice, for instance, will depend upon the formality/ informality of the writing situation and may derive from disciplinary standards as prescribed by particular style guides as MLA, APA, or the Chicago Manual of Style. Mechanics include the technical aspects of writing, such as spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.

Learning 2.0: free, fun, self-paced, and effective training in Web 2.0

Published
by
Kate
on April 5, 2007
in Administration, Blogs and Blogging, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Literacy, Technology, Web 2.0, What if . . . and Wikis
. 1 Comment

The article “Public Library Geeks Take Web 2.0 to the Stacks” on Wired.com describes a program where hundreds of staff members at North Carolina public libraries were asked to explore Web 2.0 in ways by trying out 23 things that were simple, yet meaningful and useful.

The result: Learning 2.0.

The impetus was the need for staff to know about Web 2.0 technologies:

When the IT director at North Carolina’s Charlotte & Mecklenburg County public library began training staff in the latest web technologies, she lured reluctant participants with bribes — a free MP3 player and the chance to win a laptop.

Six months later, the program they developed is the real prize. Learning 2.0., developed by public services technology director Helene Blowers, has become a surprise grassroots hit, available for free on the web and adopted by dozens of other libraries around the globe.

“The last thing we want is for people to come into our libraries and ask about Flickr or Second Life and be met with a blank look,” said Christine MacKensie, director of the Yarra Plenty Regional Library in Melbourne, Australia, which just finished a four-month version of Learning 2.0. “And they certainly won’t now.”

The program is inexpensive to run, but is fun and engaging. Hundreds of staff members signed on.

Recognizing that librarians need to know how to participate in the new media mix if libraries are to remain relevant, Blowers challenged her 550 staffers to become more web savvy. Using free web tools, she designed the program and gave staff members three months to do 23 things.

They created blogs and podcasts, tried out Flickr, set up RSS feeds, learned about wikis, uploaded video to YouTube, played with image generators and Rollyo, and explored Technorati, tagging and folksonomies.

“Librarian avatars were popping up all over the blogs,” said Blowers.

In the end, the library system found that they’d just trained their staff in new media with very little financial output (save some blog hosting and the mp3 incentives), without going to the trouble and expense of bringing in staff training, or forcing people to sit through classes.

Although her original goals for Learning 2.0 were touchy-feely “E’s” — exposing staff to new tools, encouraging play, empowering individuals, expanding the knowledge toolbox, eliminating fear — the effects were both practical and financial.

“We don’t have to wait for some training company to come along and say, ‘For $20,000 we’ll show you how this stuff works,’” said Michael Stephens, who wrote Web 2.0 and Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software. “Helene put it on the web so anyone can use that program.”

Libraries all over the world are doing just that — moving the entire Learning 2.0 program to their own websites. The program has been duplicated by university and community library systems in Sweden, Australia, Canada and Denmark. In the United States, programs are underway in South Carolina, Florida, Maryland and California. Even the Combined Arms Research Library, a military repository, is trying it.

It’s no surprise that now the 23 Things idea is spreading beyond libraries, to two realms cac.ophony.org readers are much more familiar with: higher education, and business.

Now Blowers’ program is spreading beyond libraries (even virtual ones, like the teen library in Second Life teen library in Second Life): A public relations firm wants to set up a Learning 2.0 program for its staff, and several universities and an elementary school want to use the system to educate teachers, she said.

Several years ago, I taught a semester-long course and some weekend workshops with Paul Allison and Ken Stein of the New York City Writing Project. We walked participants (mostly high school teachers, but also some CUNY and SUNY college faculty) through various experiences, from setting up a blog, editing a wiki, to using bloglines, del.icio.us and tags (this is a few years ago, mind you, when bloglines, del.icio.us, and podcasts were “new” new, or at least a newer new, not old hat, as they are now). Then, as now, new stuff was coming out every week.

The New York City Writing Project was interested in giving teachers a chance to blog, so they’d see if, and how, blogs might be useful for their students. They ended up finding out how blogs, flickr, podcasting, WiKis and all kinds of other web 2.0 applications could be useful in teaching literacy and communication skills, and they ended up using these, and other aspects of Web 2.0, in their classrooms. The 23 Things idea is very similar, though the 23 things could easily be tweaked to include the newest useful Web 2.0 technology, since good new stuff comes out all the time.

Perhaps the best thing about Web 2.0, and Learning 2.0 is that so many resources that work, like the 23 Things program, are free to use and free to build on.

Faculty Development Workshops: Think Small, Dig Deeper

Published
by
Nida
on March 12, 2007
in Baruch College and Faculty Development
. 1 Comment

Last week Diana and I ran our first faculty development workshop of the semester. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it was on helping students develop thesis statements. We both are pretty content with the turnout as well as the level of engagement. We found it especially helpful to keep the content of the workshop limited to a few major points and as many hands-on exercises as possible. In a workshop last semester we were so eager to give as much information about high-stakes writing as we could that we ended up overwhelming our participants a little. This time we decided to focus on one very specific but important issue (thesis statements) and go into more depth with it. First, we presented the faculty with examples of good and weak thesis statements and asked them to formulate essay questions that would generate each example. Then, we worked with their existing assignments by asking them what would be a good thesis statement that they would like to read in students’ papers and how they can revise their questions to generate that statement. We were all quite engaged in the exercises and even had fun.

Next one is on responding to students’ writing. Any suggestions?