Discovering, Integrating and Applying Knowledge: Effective Educational Practices for Today’s Students and Tomorrow’s Innovation
Pre-conference Workshops
Thursday, April 10, 2008 | 2:00 – 5:00 p.m.
(Pre-registration required: $100 for Members and $125 for Nonmembers)
Workshop 1: Fostering Seamless Learning Environments that Connect Learning to Society’s Big Challenges
New poll findings affirm that college graduates need more cross-disciplinary knowledge and more real-world applications to succeed in a demanding global environment. What uses of technology and what classroom designs advance or impede student development?This workshop will explore ways in which learning environments can be coherently and developmentally redesigned to help students acquire the knowledge and skills needed to effectively address society's complex challenges. Participants will discuss a range of contemporary challenges including communicating in multi-cultural environments, adjusting to rapidly changing technology, and making good use of data. They will examine learning environments from the perspectives of physical layout of a space and the atmosphere in which students interact with each other and with the instructor. Participants will gain new understanding of the kinds of interaction most likely to help unequally prepared, first generation, and disengaged students succeed in college as well as ways for innovatively designing classroom space to advance student engagement and learning.
Paul Woodruff, Dean of Undergraduate Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
Workshop 2: Engaged Teaching, Engaged Learning: Creating Transformations for Effective Educational Environments
To be a member of a faculty is to be committed to two principal activities: active engagement in research and scholarship; and teaching. The former is the ongoing learning, analyzing and reflecting upon the knowledge of one’s chosen “discipline” as the basis of creating new knowledge. The latter is the synthesis of one’s store of learning to draw the student into the excitement, the wonderment, of that knowledge. The aspiration of the teacher is to transform the learner into a discerning, knowledgeable, respectful, active citizen. This workshop will explore how best to achieve this transformation. What conditions foster effective teaching and learning environments? If those can be identified, how can they be multiplied? What can and should campus leaders do to encourage faculty to expend significant effort in devising modes of teaching that promise to engage the learners’ passionate attention? Is it inevitable that engaged teaching results in equally engaged learning? If incentives are needed to generate enthusiastic engagement of the enterprise of teaching, what are they? Answers to these and other questions will vary by institution, of course, but much can be learned from the differences and the similarities of distinctive situations.
Tamar March, Director, Arden Seminars and Senior Fellow, AAC&U
Workshop 3: Using Assessment Data to Enrich Effective Educational Practices
How do we know which pedagogies lead to desired learning outcomes? Created for the purpose of helping those in assessment lead their institutions toward future of ever-enhancing quality improvement, this interactive workshop will provide an overview of transformative assessment and describe specific action steps that can be taken to enrich educational practices. Transformative assessment can be a more meaningful use of data because it focuses on a shift to outcomes that are created by those who will use the data. Participants will discuss the case study of “Great State U”, an institution that has created an assessment planning culture based on the fact that “the accreditors are coming!” And, though the recent accreditation visit was successful, the institution is still “doing” assessment rather than actually using assessment to enrich and enact effective pedagogies. Participants will examine assessment as a transformative vehicle that can measure the outcomes of engaged and active learning.
Catherine M. Wehlburg, Executive Director, Office for Assessment and Quality Enhancement, Texas Christian University
Workshop 4: Connecting Liberal Education Outcomes with Effective Educational and Institutional Practices
There is growing consensus among educators, employers, and policy leaders about the most important values and learning outcomes of higher education for life and livelihood in a global 21st century (e.g., AAC&U’s College Learning for the New Global Century and "How Should Colleges Prepare Students To Succeed in Today's Global Economy?" available at www.aacu.org/advocacy/leap/). Many colleges and universities face challenges in making these liberal education goals and values broadly known, supported, and engaged within the institution, and by key individuals and organizations outside the institution. In this workshop, we will discuss successful steps that a comprehensive public university has taken to showcase and build support for liberal education. Participants will identify groups and individuals on and off our campuses who we need to engage, and will brainstorm about effective strategies for doing so, exploring ways to adopt AAC&U LEAP literature and materials to frame our messages.
Donald P. Christian, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
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