So while we wait for the thousands of responses to Joyful Tidings #23 to roll in, I thought I would take a moment to highlight two wonderful follow ups to previous conversations from Maria Figueroa and Sunny Cooke:
From Maria Figueroa in response to our conversation about empathy…
Last week I served on a jury in Temecula (I know…I know…scary huh?)
Reading on the Sly
While I spent most of my days frantically trying to keep up with my classes and PDP work during the hours I was not in court, I also used my downtime during the trial — waiting in hallways and jury rooms — to start reading Saundra Yancey McGuire’s Teach Students to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation.
Springboard to Our Conversation?
I will not burden you here with all of Yancey McGuire’s cool strategies (which she summarizes neatly in some very helpful jury-trial-lunch-break-friendly appendices).
While we could debate what aspects of and approaches to teaching and learning we wish to discuss as a community of teachers and learners, I hope we can all agree that the conversations themselves are essential.
Talking to each other about our teaching and learning opens us to ideas, relationships, and inspiration we can miss as we focus on our day to day work at the college. (It took me three hours to write that sentence without using the phrase “hunkered down in our silos,” which just shows how educational jargon has corrupted my very soul!).
I want to share an experience I have had with this kind of conversational synergy over the past few days.
Last week, I sent out a friendly email celebrating the arrival of our new students and calling on colleagues to share their ideas about first day strategies that work.
Six of them very kindly did so: dara, Rick Cassoni, Lisa Fast, Louisa Moon, Chad Tsuyuki, and Marti Klein. Thank you so much to each of you. I have included everything they shared below in this email, but in case you lose this inspiring email, you can always find it forever archived on our joyful teaching blog.
Greetings Colleagues:
In this post, I ask both faculty and staff colleagues to share ideas about the first day of class — how they experienced it as a student and how they think about it as an educator. I begin by sharing a “conversation starter” idea from a book devoted to how we begin classes.
In this message, I wish to share with you two teaching narratives I have encountered recently as a way of advancing our professional development program’s goal of re-centering at least some of our conversations around teaching and learning.
A Humanities Narrative
Our new VP for Instruction, Diane Diekmeyer, shared with me some digital stories about faculty from her previous college. This one features Sharon Crasnow, a Norco College philosophy professor.
One of the most exciting developments in our flex week program over the last few years has been the work of our Academic Senate Diversity, Equity and Cultural Competency (DEqCC) committee developing cultural competency conferences to facilitate professional development in this vital knowledge and skill set.
For a variety of reasons, I am re-reading John Bean’s Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom (2011).
Early in the text, he offers a definition of critical thinking I hope might provoke some conversation.
A Conversation Starter
In What the Best College Students Do — a book with a title that unfortunately raises more hackles than interest — Ken Bain offers an intriguing summary of the big questions he believes faculty should consider when they think about their teaching:
“…the best educators thought of teaching as anything they might do to help and encourage students to learn. Teaching is engaging students, engineering an environment in which they learn. Equally important, they thought of the creation of that successful teaching and learning environment as an important and serious intellectual (or artistic) act, perhaps even as a kind of scholarship, that required the attention of the best minds in academia. For our subjects, that scholarship centered around four fundamental inquires:
Greetings Colleagues:
I imagine that many of you, like me, are working through the transition to Canvas in some way this summer: whether it is moving a course or two, starting a new course, or refining sections you have already experimented with before. This image is of an old scratch sheet I used to think about how I wanted to “bend canvas to my will” by making sure that my pedagogical strategies drove my use of Canvas (rather than the the other way around!).