Friday, January 25, 2008--"If you build it"

My blog post is late—and will be short!—and although I am dating it “Friday, January 25th,” it celebrates something that was not, in fact, formalized until Sunday. But nothing in the past week was more important!

The Stonehill College Board of Trustees took extra time to meet this January, and they did so “on retreat” in Marco Island, Florida. Many strategic future directions for the College were discussed and established, but I will leave it to the President to share that important information. I want to reflect on the incredible group of faculty members whose tenure and/or promotion cases were so unanimously affirmed by the Trustees. So why does this remind me of the phrase that echoes through Ray Kinsella’s mind in W.P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe (popularized as the feature film Field of Dreams)?

“If you build it, they will come.”

At least three aspects of building a culture struck me as I considered this year’s candidates for tenure and promotion. First—the sheer size of the group. We have been building the faculty over the last eight years, and this year saw eight faculty members move from Assistant to Associate Professor and four from Associate to Full. I know what pride the departments who nurtured these faculty members must feel about their accomplishments and about the kinds of institutional citizenship they represent. Ultimately, the Trustees sent the message that twelve faculty members received a further commitment from the college—and we all know that such a commitment energizes us to continue working toward an even more robust culture of teaching, learning, and scholarly excellence.

This particular group also reminded me of some interesting ways in which the support systems have changed at Stonehill—especially as they pertain to scholarly attainment. Whereas many colleges are setting higher bars for tenure and promotion only to see faculty members fall short, Stonehill is encouraging both junior and mid-level faculty toward the next stages in their careers. One faculty member promoted to Professor in this year’s group wrote me a note saying, “My research could not have been accomplished fifteen years ago when faculty were encouraged to conduct research with little support (financially or through time allotment).” And I think it’s not just the financial resources that have made a difference. You have made a difference to each other: building collaborative research projects, inviting each other to participate on research teams, co-authoring articles, applying for grants with multiple investigators, respecting the expertise that your colleagues can bring to the table.

Finally, I think we have worked together to build a process that treats people fairly, allows for some flexibility in the tenure timeline, offers a previously unimaginable level of transparency, and makes the work of everyone—but especially the Rank and Tenure Committee—much easier. (And let’s tip our hats to the Rank and Tenure Committee, whose hard work resulted in beautifully crafted letters of support for their colleagues.) This process truly works for the faculty.

You have built it, and people will continue to come. As we dream new dreams for the future, the faculty we supported this year will become the foundation for the next expansion in Stonehill’s remarkable saga.

Best regards,

Katie

Friday, January 18, 2008--Getting Centered

Welcome back! I hope the holiday season brought some rest—and some anticipation of the semester ahead. Those of you who know me well may be aware that I love new year’s resolutions—my husband likes to say: “The new you—again?” So when I write this week about “getting centered,” I’m thinking about how the cycles of the year let us resolve—again—to focus our energies on the things we care most about. But I’m also thinking about one particular new Center on campus that can help you to do that with respect to your teaching.

Like the best new year’s resolutions. I’m looking both backward and forward: back to the great start the Center for Teaching and Learning enjoyed last semester and forward to a number of new initiatives the Center will launch in the Spring semester. Back to a long history of Stonehill College faculty innovation in teaching—and forward to a new cycle of imagining what works in the classroom. I began the academic year on a similar note when I suggested, at Convocation, that:

Part of what we faculty all relish at the table of inquiry is the opportunity to be both teachers and learners—to taste and see new ideas, new practices, new ways of knowing. In the 20th year of the teaching award and the 60th year of great teaching at the College, we recognize that even teachers are continual learners as we formally establish a Center for Teaching and Learning and launch its exciting array of programs. We will continue to be taught by our students and by each other.

If you haven’t yet been into the Center, which is located in Duffy 114, I urge you to head over, to talk with the Director, Stacy Grooters, and to check out some of the resources and programs she has put together for faculty. If you aren’t quite sure what’s there for you, you can spend some time in the Center’s Faculty Reading Room or on the web at www.stonehill.edu/ctl. But let me take a few minutes to highlight some of the undertakings of the Center last semester and to preview what’s to come.

The Center has two major goals: to support individual faculty members in meeting their pedagogical objectives and to build a community of collaboration around teaching and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Last semester, Stacy continued the work begun under the auspices of the Davis Grant, and she also realized a number of new ideas. For instance, the Teaching and Learning Strategies Seminar continued, as did the New Faculty Lunches, which took as their focus topics such as “Student Collaboration,” “Formative Self-Assessment,” and “Increasing Student Engagement.”

In addition to these activities, there are many new developments in the CTL. Individual consultations are at the heart of what the Center can offer. Last semester, Stacy observed classes, gathered student feedback through small group interviews, collected written student feedback, and provided other consultation. Some of this feedback was designed to help a professor understand how a course was working and to brainstorm further strategies for success; some was used to assist a department with evaluating capstone courses. In all cases, the “consultation” focused on identifying the practices that best support goals that the instructor (or department) has identified for the class.

The CTL has funding that can assist faculty members with any number of goals related to teaching and learning. Indeed, in the first semester, over $4,000 was awarded in grants. Some of this funding assisted faculty to attend conferences such as the NERCOMP “digital storytelling” workshop, the American Educational Research Association conference, or the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages conference. Funding also had a direct influence on the faculty-student work in departments—through mechanisms such as a class newsletter or a literary magazine.

Happily, the Center also showed a predilection for celebrating all this good work! The Holiday Open House had about 35 people in attendance, and they raised a glass to the opening of the Faculty Reading Room. “The Wine, Cheese, and . . . Syllabi” event, planned for last Monday, was derailed by the snowstorm, but it will appear later in the calendar.

As if all this were not enough, Stacy came up with more creative opportunities for the Spring semester. Some of you have already agreed to be part of a Teaching Square, a group of four professors who observe each other’s classes--not to give feedback for improvement but to evaluate what they learned about their own teaching from the observations and subsequent reflections. Others among you may have signed up for one of the Pedagogy Reading Groups on either “Creating Significant Learning Experiences” or “Creating Social Justice Pedagogies.”

The schedule for faculty-led Teaching Roundtables also looks very exiting. Twelve faculty members and several guest speakers have worked with Stacy to create a rich Spring Semester of Faculty Roundtables on topics such as “Inclusive Strategies for the Diverse Classroom” (Monique Myers & guest Marcella Runell), “Working with TAs” (John Lanci & Alessandro Massarotti), “Community-Based Learning” (Patricia Leavy, Joe Favazza, & Nuala Boyle), “Communicating with Students” (Allyson Sheckler & Mary Joan Leith), “ Responding to Student Writing” (Scott Cohen & Marilena Hall), “Setting the Stage: Establishing Course Expectations” (Keri Iyall Smith & Erica Tucker), and “Teaching Portfolios and the Tenure File” (Craig Almeida & Stacy Grooters).

As I said at the outset, the success of the Center will be its resolution to look both forward and back. Many of the kinds of conversation the Center promotes have been happening at Stonehill since its opening days. But as the infrastructure and the faculty have grown, we are all spread out across campus. Good ideas—like the CTL—create a kind of centripetal force: they pull people's energies to a central location and give a focus to good work that might otherwise not be shared. We are often looking for new resources to aid our work, but the Center shows so many ways in which we can be resources to each other.

So, try out whatever fits: come to lunch, be part of a square, participate in a round table. It’s a new year, and we can all get centered.

Best regards,

Katie