May 2024 Workshops
The CTLA is excited to announce 4 workshops for the week following commencement! Each workshop will last 3 hours with an optional lunch before or after the session. Faculty participants may register for 1, 2, 3, or all 4 workshops. To participate, fill out the registration form.
Tuesday, May 21 Workshops
Designing Meaningful Assignments
9 am – 12 pm (optional lunch 12 – 1 pm)
Led by Courtney Broscious, Associate Professor of Political Science
Are your assignments engaging students in outcome-focused learning? Do you feel confident that through completing course assignments, your students have demonstrated that they have learned the skills and knowledge most important to your course? In this interactive session, you’ll dive into the art and science of designing assignments that both engage students and drive them towards achieving desired learning outcomes. Using the principles of backwards design, you’ll spend time reviewing your course goals and then editing an existing assignment or designing a new assignment to meet your stated learning objectives. You’ll have an opportunity to explore whether your assignment aligns with global rubrics used to assess student learning on specific outcomes, and to get feedback from peers.
Please bring a syllabus for a specific course and one or more assignments from that course. You may find it helpful to bring a laptop.
Designing LAC 101 Learning Experiences to Address ELAC Learning Outcomes
1 pm – 4 pm (optional lunch 12 – 1 pm)
Led by David Pellegrini, ELAC Seminar Coordinator and Professor of Theatre
This fall, 30 sections of LAC 101 will run for the first time. Upon completion of this seminar, students should have a foundational understanding of each of the five ELAC learning outcomes and be able to articulate the value of a liberal arts education and an understanding of the skills and practices involved in the liberal arts. But how will faculty design classroom activities and assignments that help students develop this understanding? In this workshop, you’ll hear from faculty who have given some thought to learning experiences that introduce, address, and measure each learning outcome. You will have the opportunity to work in a small group with other faculty to develop a lesson plan and assignment around a specific learning outcome. You’ll have time during the session to begin work on an assignment or in-class experience and get feedback from your peers. You will also be given access to what will become a repository of assignments designed by Eastern faculty to address all of the different learning outcomes. This workshop will also be helpful if you are considering developing seminars at the 100, 101 and 200 levels in the coming academic year. You may find it helpful to bring a laptop.
Faculty who share their work-in-progress at the end of the session and commit to sharing a final draft by June 21 for upload to the repository will be eligible for a $250 stipend. Faculty will be asked to participate in a one-hour virtual resource sharing event in late June to discuss the assignment/ experience they have designed.
Wednesday, May 22 Workshops
Infusing Sustainability Into Course Design Across the Disciplines
9 am – 12 pm (optional lunch 12 – 1 pm)
Led by Patricia Szczys, Executive Director, Institute for Sustainability
Students have embraced opportunities to engage with the ‘wicked problems’ of sustainability in their courses. The pursuit of sustainability goes beyond a direct response to climate change; it examines the historical and modern behaviors, policy, and practices that directly influence the interwoven environmental, social, and economic crises. The UN sustainability framework sets goals that aim to alleviate poverty, improve health, reduce educational and social disparities, spur equitable economic growth, and steward the environment. In this workshop, you’ll learn nine strategies to integrate sustainability into your courses (ELAC or majors courses) and you’ll hear how faculty from different disciplines have done so. You’ll experience hands-on learning activities that address the interdisciplinary nature of sustainability topics and highlight ways in which faculty and students can find meaning in coursework. You’ll have the opportunity to begin drafting an assignment or learning experience for your own course(s) that integrates sustainability and receive feedback from peers.
Please bring a syllabus for one of your courses that you are interested in connecting to sustainability—or a preliminary idea for a future course. You may also find it helpful to have a laptop.
Hope in a Time of Monsters: Supporting Faculty and Student Mental Health
1 pm – 4 pm (optional lunch 12 – 1 pm)
Presentation by Sarah Rose Cavanagh, Senior Associate Director for Teaching and Learning, Simmons University
Facilitation by Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, Professor, Psychological Science
Teaching is a vocation. When supported with resources and security, it is a constantly renewing source of excitement and richness. The last several years of disruption, uncertainty, and overburdened workloads have exhausted faculty and students alike. Monsters have reared their heads, and we have understandably shrunk from them. Faculty are burnt out—sacrificing their own mental health, phoning it in out of desperation, or leaving the profession entirely. Students are experiencing an epidemic of mental health problems, especially of anxiety. As instructors, we can support and encourage student mental health through pedagogies of care. A pedagogy of care involves high-touch practices like frequent communication, flexibility, inclusive teaching practices, learning new technologies and techniques, and being enthusiastic and passionate. All these practices involve both a heavy investment of time and a high degree of emotional labor. How can we support our students without burning ourselves out? How can we revive our sparks? In this interactive presentation, Sarah Rose Cavanagh will present some research and food for thought on how higher education should respond to both faculty depletion and the student mental health crisis. The presentation will reference content from her latest book, Mind Over Monsters: Supporting Youth Mental Health with Compassionate Challenge.
Following this talk, you will have opportunities to reflect on and discuss with peers your current practices and course policies, and how you might infuse “compassionate challenge” into your teaching. Please bring one or more of your syllabi to review. You may find it helpful to have a laptop.
