By Jack Prostko, Director, Faculty Development Center
In past columns I have described in some detail the kinds of individual services for assessing teaching available from UMBC's Faculty Development Center, including mid-semester focus-group evaluations, classroom observation, videotaping, and individual consultation on a range of issues. Over the past few weeks, for example, I've met individually with different faculty members to discuss syllabus construction, testing and grading, academic integrity, collaborative learning, and difficult classroom dynamics. But besides these services there are many other resources available for faculty interested in exploring teaching issues.
Each semester the FDC sponsors workshops and lectures by experienced professors interested in sharing ideas about teaching. This semester Presidential Teaching Professor Jay Freyman, of the Department of Ancient Studies, will talk to faculty, staff, and students on Wednesday April 23, from 1-2 p.m. in room 318 of The Commons, as part of our ongoing "Award-Winning Teachers on Teaching" brownbag series.
Presentations by past speakers in the series, including Professor Lynn Zimmerman ("Engaging Students in the Classroom"), Professor John Jeffries ("Reflections on Teaching"), and Professor Robert Deluty ("Graduate Student Teaching, Mentoring, and the Search for Balance"), are archived and can be viewed on our Teaching Resources page. You may also want to check the complete Teaching, Learning, and Technology Brownbag Workshop Archive developed and maintained by John Fritz and the New Media Learning and Development unit. For those not familiar with other resources available at the FDC, visit the "Teaching and Learning" section of our Web site.
In addition, departments interested in discussing specific teaching concerns can request that the FDC sponsor a workshop on the topic for all departmental faculty. This current semester we have already worked with individual departments on creating effective writing assignments in the discipline, academic integrity, Turnitin.com, and designing team projects.
A new resource now available free to UMBC faculty is The National Teaching and Learning Forum. The link is currently displayed on the FDC homepage and on our teaching resources page. Under the NTLF masthead is a link for site license subscribers that will give you access to five years of NTLF issues, as long as you are using a UMBC account for Web access. This newsletter offers both reflective articles and practical tips on effective instruction; the current issue, for example, contains articles on "Mindfulness in Teaching," as well as on identifying one significant dichotomy in learning styles. The "Supplemental Materials Archive" and the "Library" are also valuable resources, containing bibliographies and some full-text articles on a variety of teaching topics.
The FDC maintains a library of books and publications that you may wish to consult for suggestions and advice. A list of library holdings is available online in our "Teaching and Learning" section. In addition to these books we subscribe to The Teaching Professor, Online Classroom: Ideas for Effective Online Instruction, College Teaching, and The Journal on Excellence in College Teaching. You are welcome to browse through these periodicals at our office or, if you have need for information on a specific teaching issue, call and we'll locate, photocopy and deliver relevant information.
Finally, the FCD wants to encourage all faculty members at UMBC to explore teaching issues, especially within disciplines. Often, disciplinary organizations sponsor conferences or seminars on teaching, and the FDC can usually help subsidize conference fees or travel expenses. This past weekend, ten faculty and staff members attended the 7th annual Lilly Conference East, held at Towson University under the FDC's sponsorship. The conference, focused on "The Art and Craft of Teaching and Learning," had both general and discipline-specific workshops. UMBC attendees were enthusiastic in their comments about the conference and felt that they discovered new teaching strategies to experiment with in their classrooms. (The NTLF Library, under "Teaching Community," contains a calendar of general conferences on teaching.)
If you would like to find out more about teaching resources and what might be relevant to your classes or your discipline, please contact me at ext. 5-1829 or prostko@umbc.edu.
