Faculty Spotlight: Mike Haeflinger (PTL English) shares his experience with introducing students to teaching practice in his course “Teaching Creative Writing in Public Schools.”
From the Bookshelf: This week we feature Graff, Birkenstein and Durst’s They Say, I Say, a required text in Rutgers-Camden’s Composition 102 classes and a useful one across the disciplines in teaching academic argumentation.
Conversation starters: Academic Commons hosts a conversation on game-based learning and highlights both its potential benefits and drawbacks.
Inside Higher Ed covers a new study that finds an increasing number of professors using social media in the classroom and finding that, though it increases the ease of communication with students, it also raises instructor stress levels.
From the Assessment Desk: Wooster College has collected learning goals from institutions across the country and arranged them by discipline, giving a useful snapshot for both individuals and departments about what what learning goals and plans can look like.
Featured Peer Teaching Center: Rider University’s Teaching and Learning Center features a large assortment of useful links with a particular focus on the difficult navigation of intellectual property issues in higher education.
Research Opportunity: CFP: Pedagogy, Special Issue On Reading – Pedagogy invites submissions from both established and new scholars in any field who are interested in examining reading’s “return” by considering questions such as the following. What does this return of interest (repetition? renewal?) suggest and reveal about how reading has been taught, and how it might or should be taught? What, if anything, does it suggest about the reciprocally reflexive relationship that might exist between reading and writing, and its potential advantage for teaching both reading and writing in college classrooms? What has made reading’s “invisibility” newly noticeable? What possibilities for the study of reading might this revival point to and open up? How is reading constructed in different ways in different fields? Where should those interested in reading now turn in order to move the conversation forward? And what, in each case, is meant by the word “reading”? Inquiries may be sent to donahuep@lafayette.edu.
Upcoming TMAC Events:
“Articulating Learning Goals for Your Course or Program” (Monday, November 4, 12:15 – 1:15 p.m., ATG-Faculty Lounge; pizza will be served)
Specific learning goals help students and teachers understand the purpose of a course in relation to broader departmental or program objectives. As we inch closer to meeting a University-wide expectation that all courses identify learning goals on syllabi, we will workshop how to formulate learning goals that foster student success.
“Assessing Your Assessment Plan: A Workshop for Departments and Programs” (Friday, November 15, noon – 2 p.m., ATG-Faculty Lounge; lunch will be served)
Many departments and programs have developed an assessment plan that has yet to be implemented through a full assessment cycle. But perhaps the plan itself merits revisiting in light of changed expectations and needs? This hands-on workshop allows chairs, program directors and others to take a fresh look at their present assessment plan (or refine a plan in progress).
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If you’re interested in writing or being interviewed for the Faculty Spotlight or have a link or topic you’d like to share, please email us at teaching.matters@camden.rutgers.edu.