THE WIT, THE WILL ... AND THE WALLET
Supporting Educational Innovation, Shaping our Global Futures

Pre-Meeting Workshops
Wednesday, January 20, 2:00-5:00 pm

Beginning with the End in Mind:
Backward Design in General Education Assessment
In Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe advocate a “backward design” model of educational decision-making, which begins with identifying desired learning outcomes and then "working backward" to select resources and develop activities that will advance those outcomes. This is not just good advice for designing a general education curriculum; it’s also good advice for designing a general education assessment program, where the principal “learners” are faculty and administrators, and the principal “learning outcomes” for those learners are all too often unspecified. In this workshop, participants will "begin with the end in mind" by first identifying what faculty and administrators should be able to understand and to do as a result of their encounters with general education assessment evidence. Participants will then review and evaluate a variety of strategies for gathering and sharing that evidence in light of the learning goals they have identified.
Beld - Backward Design in GE Assessment PowerPoint (PDF)
Beld - Backward Design in GE Assessment - Handout (PDF)

Jo Beld, Director of Evaluation and Assessment and Professor of Political Science, St. Olaf College

Strategies for First Generation Students:
Integrative and Applied Learning –Students Doing What They Know in Liberal Arts Colleges
The integration and application of learning are necessary outcomes of an undergraduate liberal arts education in the 21st Century. Many institutions help entering students develop the ability to integrate learning through first-year interdisciplinary curricula. Many also require a capstone experience in which students demonstrate mastery of subject matter and the ability to apply learning in authentic settings. For first generation college students, however, it is important to develop connections between their career values and the college’s liberal arts values—a prior step in connecting integrative with applied learning. 

This workshop is designed for faculty members and administrators to explore individualized and experiential learning strategies that lead to integration as well as application of learning for first generation college students. Participants will develop definitions of integrative and applied learning appropriate for their campus, and critique well-researched definitions, including AAC&U’s VALUE rubric. Participants will share their experiences with first generation college students, consider portraits of the first generation student (including the millennial student), and begin to develop curricular strategies – as well as assessment methods – that can more effectively prepare the first generation student become self-directed, take multiple perspectives, use self-assessment as learning, reflect, and link new knowledge with practical experiences in real world settings.

Marcia Mentkowski, Professor of Psychology, Director, Educational Research and Evaluation, and Chair, Research and Evaluation Council, Alverno College; Darren Cambridge, Assistant Professor, New Century College, George Mason University; Janette Kenner Muir, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary and Integrated Studies, New Century College, George Mason University; Nancy Murray, Academic Dean, The Evergreen State College; Margaret Antilla, Executive Director, CIEL
This workshop is sponsored by the Consortium for Innovative Environments in Learning

Academic Fundraising:
What Every Provost, Dean, Department Chair (and Faculty Member) Needs to Know – and Do
Back in “the good old days,” fund raising was the provenance of development offices and the campus president. Not any more. In today’s academy, responsibility for generating external support for campus programs is more widespread and the trend is only growing stronger in the current economy, where endowments are collapsing and trustees fear a lack of assured income for continuing operations. Public institutions are coming to rely more and more on private donors, while private institutions are finding increased competition for less readily available foundation support. Consequently, core institutional functions, including liberal education programs, which have always been less appealing to donors than special projects and naming opportunities, are threatened. In this workshop, national leaders in higher education fundraising will discuss the growing role of provosts, deans, chairs, and faculty members in garnering external support for essential academic functions. The focus of the workshop will be on using the downturn in the market to advantage by developing new ways to integrate academic fundraising with institutional strategic priorities.

Bruce Bigelow, Founding Partner, Charitable Development Consulting; Carol Kolmerten, Founding Partner, Charitable Development Consulting and Professor of English, Hood College

Undergraduate Public Health Studies:
Integrative Strategies, Curricular Frameworks and Ongoing Networks
Integrative public health study for undergraduates is an emerging field through which both students and faculty develop multiple disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Its timeliness and popularity can be attributed to student and faculty interest in addressing real-world problems that require the integration of science-based decision making with social and civic responsibility, and theory with practice. In this workshop, participants will explore and develop curricular, cocurricular, and programmatic elements of a public health approach which can be used to build bridges to other integrative learning efforts on their own campus. Small groups will focus on one of the following tracks: Civic Engagement and Service Learning in Health; Evidence-Based Thinking in Health; Health and Justice; and Sustainability and Health.  

Participants will work with national leaders, advocates, and practitioners of undergraduate public health (all working with AAC&U’s Educated Citizen and Public Health initiative) to create and refine shared language and sketch integrative curricular frameworks that will shape undergraduate public health education efforts on their campuses and across higher education. The workshop will be geared toward individuals and institutions engaged in any stage of work—beginning to advanced. Participants will also gain access to the initiative’s online resources, publications, and ongoing efforts. Strategies and plans for building faculty and institutional networks in each of these four tracks and linking such work to other AAC&U initiatives will be discussed.

Susan Albertine, Senior Director, LEAP States Initiative, AAC&U; Richard Riegelman, Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Founding Dean, School of Public Health and Health Services, George Washington University; Ruth Gaare Bernheim, Director, Master of Public Health Program, University of Virginia; and Shirley S. Tang, Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies and American Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston
This workshop is sponsored by AAC&U's Educated Citizen and Public Health initiative

Beyond Faculty Evaluation:
Maximizing the Value of Student Ratings to Improve Teaching, Learning, and Program Effectiveness
Colleges and universities are continually striving to document effectiveness and to demonstrate continuous reflection and improvement – for individuals, academic programs, and the institution as a whole. In the face of ongoing economic challenges, it is increasingly important to make data driven decisions and to consider maximizing the value of ongoing processes. Nearly all colleges and universities collect student course ratings and use the results as part of the faculty evaluation process. But too often, student ratings are underutilized. When used well, student course ratings can be a powerful tool to guide individual faculty reflection, programmatic assessment, and institutional effectiveness.  Workshop participants will be introduced to a student rating instrument and process that allows a campus to maximize the utility of their student rating process.  Reports and resources from the IDEA Student Ratings of Instruction system will be used for hands-on work related to using student course ratings for individual faculty development and as an indicator of program, departmental, or institutional effectiveness by utilizing aggregated results or national benchmarking results.

Bill Pallett, President, and Amy Gross, Vice President for Integrative Client Services – both of The IDEA Center
This workshop is sponsored by The IDEA Center

Transforming Undergraduate STEM Education: Exploring the Dimensions of Leadership
What makes a community aspire to a more desired future? Leadership.
What does it take for a community to achieve that future? Leadership.

Workshop participants will explore the why and the how of leadership in STEM reform in 2010 and beyond. Workshop facilitators will share stories culled from Project Kaleidoscope’s twenty year history, stories that illustrate varied approaches to developing and nurturing leadership teams to shape sustainable and robust undergraduate STEM learning environments. Through presentations, facilitated discussions, collective conversations, and reporting-out, participants will identify and explore some of the key challenges they face in current efforts to transform undergraduate STEM education. Special attention will be given to the role of culture and context in efforts to mobilize a community. Facilitators will capture ideas for leadership development related to three dimensions—at the campus level, at the personal level, and at the level of the AAC&U-PKAL partnership .Creative ideas will be prepared for later dissemination through the AAC&U-PKAL web site and will help shape the emerging AAC&U-PKAL partnership. An additional product of the workshop will be a set of resources on leadership development.

Jeanne Narum, Founding Director, Project Kaleidoscope; Susan Elrod, Professor of Biological Sciences and Director of the Center for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Education, California Polytechnic State University, and incoming Director of Project Kaleidoscope; Neal Abraham, Executive Director, Five Colleges, Incorporated; and Judith A. Dilts, Associate Dean of College of Science and Mathematics, James Madison University

Exploring Faculty Roles, Work, and Skills as a Way to Enhance Professional and Organizational Development
Teaching excellence and professional competence in scholarship, service, and administrative responsibilities require not only content expertise but also sophisticated skills in tasks like designing and delivering effective instruction, assessing the learning outcomes of instruction, working with people, and managing resources. In this sense, the profession of college teacher is a ‘meta-profession’ – a profession that requires integrated layers of different professional skills in order to achieve excellence. Although faculty come to the academy with high levels of content expertise, they may not have opportunity to acquire the additional skills required for professional success. The purpose of this workshop is to provide faculty members and academic administrators with: 1) a practical model for mapping the set of skills necessary for success as a college teacher; 2) a process for applying the model on campuses and in departments; and 3) the opportunity to investigate a key skill required for teaching excellence.

Michael Theall, Associate Professor of Education, Youngstown State University and President, Professional and Organization Development (POD) Network in Higher Education; Raoul A. Arreola, Professor of Pharmacy Emeritus, University of Tennessee Health Science Center

This workshop is sponsored by the POD Network
Workshop Materials Available Here

ACAD Workshop:
Academic Freedom as Risk Management
Death and taxes.  And if you are in academic leadership, the latest academic freedom ‘crisis.’  They are impossible to avoid.  And unlike the first two, the campus crisis often comes without warning, triggered by students, administrators, faculty, trustees, or even persons off-campus.  They throw you off your priorities and consume valuable time and resources.  Handled badly, they can strain relationships and leave lasting scars on leadership and the institution.  Combining case study, role play and guided discussion, the workshop will explore how grounding leadership in core university values can minimize theses risks, benefiting the bottom line and turning the next ‘crisis’ into an opportunity to enhance the institution’s most valuable asset—its reputation.

Rob Quinn, Executive Director, and Sinead O’Gorman, Deputy Director – both of the Scholars at Risk Network; Irving Epstein, Associate Dean of the Faculty, Illinois Wesleyan University

Saturday, 1:30-4:30 p.m.

ACAD Workshop:
Using Multi-Institutional Student Assessment for Faculty Development
Six Midwestern liberal arts institutions collaborated to learn about students' intellectual growth measured in terms of three high impact learning practices central to a liberal arts education: writing, critical thinking, and civic engagement. This interactive workshop will begin with a brief description of our findings while focusing on valuable faculty development that occurred. We will share information that led us to conclude that collaborative efforts can lead to meaningful and sustained commitment on the part of faculty to the measurement of student learning.  We will also describe the unique relationship among the six deans that enabled the success of the collaborative efforts.  The audience will participate in a short simulation of the reading and analysis of a student paper using one of the rubrics developed during the study. We will then look at typical data generated by such analysis to explore the ways it can be used to impact teaching and learning on individual campuses.

Kenneth W. Bladh, Provost, Wittenberg University; Beth A. Cunningham, Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Illinois Wesleyan University; David Fienen, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Gustavus Adolphus College; Michael Selmon, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Alma College