Overview of our Professional Development Workshops

• Teaching Workshop

  

  For institutions or individuals interested in converting from a traditionally-oriented classroom to one that is learner and learning-centered, this event offers the opportunity to grow and develop as an educator. Attendees participate in a learning community that mirrors an active learning, guided inquiry course. You’ll leave this event with renewed enthusiasm for teaching and a strong motivation to mentor the growth of your students and yourself.

  • Develop an understanding of an instructional design process that supports active learning, critical thinking, and assessment.
  • Learn to value the importance of self-assessment in the growth process and identify ways to make better use of specific assessment tools.
  • Act as researchers, deciding which strategies, tools and techniques work well (or not) in different learning environments.
  • Observe and learn top professional practices from the perspective of a student: analyze, learn, and apply new material.
  
  

• Activity Design Workshop

  

  By integrating learning theory into the design process, activities can be created that support active learning, guided inquiry approaches, thereby creating learning environments which challenge students to develop essential learning skills, even as they master content.

  • Define appropriate learning objectives, learning outcomes, and performance criteria for activities within a course.
  • Write critical thinking questions that support different levels of cognitive development.
  • Practice integrating a learning methodology and learning theory (cognitive models) into the design of activities   curricula.
  • Create skill exercises and problems that are meaningful, challenging, and raise the level of student learning.

• Assessment Workshop

  

  Assessment is critical for growing life-long learning skills and elevating performance in diverse contexts. This workshop offers the opportunity to enhance teaching and learning by recognizing the role of real-time and formative assessment as a catalyst for elevating teaching and learning performance.

  • Experience and validate new tools and techniques for performing quality assessment.
  • Improve your ability to perform high quality self-assessment.
  • Learn the design principles and processes for building appropriate assessment systems and data collection tools.
  • Embed formative assessment in classroom practices, instructional design, program design, annual review, and strategic planning processes and systems..

• Research on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning workshop

  

  Facilitators throughout higher education are being asked to become better researchers and scholars of their own practices—whether it be in disciplinary context, teaching, or other areas of (facilitator) performance. Since scholarly effort is a component of most tenure, promotion, and merit systems, it is important that individuals receive credit for additional research that is not published in disciplinary journals. In response to these increasing research demands, this event focuses on helping facilitators further develop their scholarly efforts, as it pertains to their role as an educator.

  • Improve your ability to use assessment data and other information as the basis for publishable research.
  • Strengthen your ability to conduct scholarship in various contexts, including outside your own discipline.
  • Work to develop a network of educators committed to advancing knowledge related to the scholarship of teaching and learning.