Thanks to the facilitating skill of Maria Figueroa, Edward Pohlert, and Denise Stephenson our campus-wide journey with Laura Rendon’s Sentipensante (feeling / thinking) Pedagogy began last Friday on the final day of flex week. As lively and engaging as that discussion was, it was still only a first step — a warm up. Here are three other ways to continue the journey:
The students return today and that means it is time for another First Day of Class Edition of Joyful Tidings!
On the Web
The web has a vast array of first day advice for college teachers. The most comprehensive I have found is Carnegie Mellon’s site: First Day of Class. Vanderbilt’s teaching and learning center also offers a comprehensive but slightly more condensed take on the first day of class.
Marilyn Weimer offers some specific activity suggestions in a faculty focus article about the first day. If you like a grab bag approach from which you can pick out one or two ideas among a hundred or so, the University of Nebraska’s 101 Things You Can Do In the First Three Weeks of Class might be useful.
Last semester, the Academic Senate chose Laura Rendon’s Sentipensante (Sensing / Thinking) Pedagogy as one of two shared faculty reads for the coming year.
I would like to begin our look at the relationship between flex week and our teaching and learning discussion by reminding everyone that reading Rendon’s book is a great way to earn flex credit on your own schedule while joining a campus-wide conversation.
One Example
Not all initiatives originating outside our institution are hostile takeovers peddled by the professional educational initiative industry. Often, MiraCosta College faculty discover great approaches to teaching and learning through their independent research and participation in discipline related conferences and networks. Then, working through their departments and in partnership with their deans, faculty initiate curricular and/or pedagogy change.
Greetings MiraCostans:
At our TED talk style flex extravaganza ScholarScapes: MiraCosta Profs Share Big Ideas, Sociology Professor Sean Davis offered an introduction to Problem Based Learning in a talk he titled Learning By Doing.
The last few editions of Joyful Tidings have generated some interesting and illuminating responses . I am struck by the different cool ways people share. Some folks offer long reflections, some short. Some send me an email and some post to the blog. But everyone always contributes something interesting, something worth reflecting on, something that advances the conversation.
In this message, I offer an extended look at the work one of our colleagues has been doing with active learning in her classrooms. I hope some of you will share your experiences with similar types of approaches (either as a teacher or a student) by responding to this email or visiting our Joyful Teaching blog (by the way, because it has so many images and is rather long, this message may well be easier to read on the blog).
I have two resources to share with you: 1) a video of our first Zoom Conversation: Discussing Discussions and 2) an amazing email about discussions I received from our wonderful colleague Jill Malone. If you have time for nothing else in this email today, please watch the video Jill included in her email — I am reasonably confident it will make you happy.
Conversation #1: Discussing Discussions
We videotaped our first live Zoom Conversation about discussion strategies. You can view it here (and count your time for flex) or you can visit this resource in Canvas (on’t forget to enroll in our PDP canvas site on your way). Curry Mitchell and Lisa Lane have some very creative and effective insights into discussions to share with you; I hope you will visit with them when you have time.
Greetings Friends:
I come to you today in yet another pathetically transparent attempt to encourage us all to chat a bit about teaching and learning at our college.
I know, I know, it is week eight! What is wrong with me!
But week eight is just the right time for some rejuvenation — just the right time to bring that pulse of energy back into our onsite or online classes with a new discussion technique for your bag of tricks.
You may even find yourself injecting discussion leadership strategies into some of your meetings (they worked for me when I was on jury duty).
And every one of us — staff and faculty — has experienced discussions both enthralling and stultifying. We all have opinions, ideas, and tips to share.
Not surprisingly, we are not alone in our interest in this topic. And during this week-long celebration of discussion (wait…what?!), I will be sharing web sites, and books, and other tools we can use to sharpen, expand, reinvent, renew, restore, recalibrate and otherwise transform our discussion skill set.
Our new Canvas PDP site offers all sorts of wonderful opportunities for exploration, especially via our Project Joy link which highlights faculty led teaching and learning related initiatives at MiraCosta.
Today, I would like to focus on our Integrative Learning page, which pulls together resources gathered by faculty working in our learning communities and health start programs, all of which focus “fostering students’ abilities to integrate learning—across courses, over time, and between campus and community life” (“A Statement on Integrative Learning”).