The Center for Teaching & Learning

Message From the CTL Director

Faculty Focused:

• Preparing for the First Day of Class
• Using AI as a Tool: Teaching Considerations
• Academic Innovation Grant for High-Impact Practices

Student-Centered:

• How to Encourage Student Help-Seeking Behavior
  
• Messaging Matters: Academic Alerts

Equity Emphasized:

• Updated accommodation memo language to premier for Fall 2023!
• Anti-Racist Discussion Pedagogy

Tuned Up:

• Tips from the Digital Diva
• Macgyver of iTech
• Teaching for the First(ish) Time?

Online Oasis:

• 8 Lessons Learned from Online Teaching
• Fostering Metacognition in Discussion Boards

Scheduled:

• August 9th: New AC faculty orientation

• August 14: Fall Forum

• August 15: New adjunct faculty orientation

• August 17: Assesstivus 2023

• August 18: Teaching Assistant (TA) Orientation

Welcome to our newest faculty colleagues and welcome back to our newer and more experienced faculty!

I am excited to be in a new role as your CTL Director. Our ultra-organized and forward-thinking Dean of Faculty, Dr. Paige Eager, has passed the CTL baton so she can begin work on Hood's re-accreditation with the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and continue to move our new core curriculum forward.

I started at Hood as an assistant professor of social work in the Department of Sociology and Social Work in August 2017. I moved to Frederick from Minnesota after receiving my Doctorate in Social Work (DSW) from the University of St. Thomas (MN), a degree program focused specifically on higher education teaching and leadership. I worked for many years in a non-profit organization assisting adults with serious and persistent mental health issues, serving most recently as the clinical Learning and Development Manager. Many of our colleagues know that I get pretty jazzed talking about all aspects of teaching and learning! My primary research interest involves social workers' ethical and professional behavior.

The CTL's professional development opportunities for the coming academic year will prepare us for our new core curriculum, Heart, Mind, and Hands. At the Fall Forum on Monday, August 14th, please come prepared to participate in the afternoon session called "Getting to the Heart: Course Design/Redesign." During this session, we'll discuss scaffolded learning and inclusive syllabus design.

Mark your calendars:

August 14: Fall Forum, 8:45am-3:30pm, Rosenstock Auditorium then Whitaker

August 15: Adjunct Faculty Orientation, 5:30pm, Whitaker Campus Commons

August 17: Assesstivus 2023, 8:30am-1pm, Whitaker Campus Commons

August 18: Teaching Assistant (TA) Orientation, 10am-1pm, Whitaker 220

August 22: First day of classes for undergraduate and graduate students

Need Resources?: Please check out the CTL Blackboard site for helpful resources for new faculty colleagues, adjunct faculty, teaching assistants, and annual contract faculty. Specially selected books on pedagogy, assessment, and other higher education topics can be found in the Library Learning Commons near the faculty publications on the second floor.

If you're interested in getting involved with our Center for Teaching and Learning Advisory Board, would like more information about CTL's resources, or have ideas to share, email me at ctl@hood.edu or gricus@hood.edu.

Warmly,

Michelle Gricus

"The first day of class is important because it provides the preview for the course. It affords you an opportunity to introduce yourself and your course design, gain a better sense of your students are, their backgrounds and aspirations, communicate expectations, and establish the culture (tone and tenor) for the semester. Critically important, it also provides students with an opportunity to get a glimpse of your teaching style, course timelines and milestones, and your overall expectations for learning success." Continue reading here

Since November 2022, the availability of free large-language models (LLMs) like Chat GPT have wreaked havoc in educational settings, generating fear and mistrust. Marie Curie said, "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."

To help faculty understand more about large-language model (LLM) tools like ChatGPT, the CTL would like to share the following resources:

The University of Maryland suggests some helpful considerations for teaching in the age of AI:

1. Test your assignments and adjust. Put your assignment prompts into ChatGPT. If needed, structure assignments to require peer review, write more creative prompts, or convert written assignments into infographics, presentations, podcasts, etc.
2. Encourage students to use AI in their assignments. This might include allowing tools like ChatGPT for drafts, and then requiring students to edit and turn in both versions.
3. Decrease cheating opportunities. Make sure assignments don't feel like "busy work" to students, offer options for assignment formats, use alternative grading strategies for assignments where students are more likely to access AI for help.

For a reflection on the use of LLMs in the classroom, read MIT Technology Review's article "ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it or Packback's White Paper: "How Academia is Adapting to Generative AI."

Read Dr. Heather Mitchell-Buck's column below for more on AI!

The Academic Innovation Grant for High Impact Practices (AIG-HIP) provides financial support to individual faculty members to pursue a high-impact practice associated with a course, which is unlike the broader Academic Innovation Grant. Funds must be used to directly aid in the creation of one of the following experiential high-impact practices for a course: internships, undergraduate research, community-based learning, capstone courses, or global learning. To encourage broad participation across the college and exercise good stewardship of the grant resources, grant funding will be capped at $2,500 per award annually. Proposals will be considered annually by the CTL Advisory Committee and will be evaluated using a rubric. Applications are due in March. To learn more about this grant and how to apply, please visit the CTL Blackboard page and click the "Academic Innovation (HIPs)" link on the left sidebar.

The CTL has a dedicated bookshelf space in the Library Commons for CTL resources and materials! Feel free to check out these books and return them when you are finished. If you would like the CTL to order other materials to increase our repository, contact Kerri Eyler with your request.

Episode 159 of the Office Hours with EAB podcast sheds light on how faculty and staff can support help-seeking behavior. An excerpt:

"Our research has shown that there's four primary benefits that students experience from truly building and developing their help seeking skills. Not only does it help them get the resources they need, but it also helps them overcome challenges. If students have a high level of help-seeking behavior or initiative, it can increase achievement and confidence, which will overall boost their mental health. The other thing it can help the student do is increase their learning engagement...

And so by promoting a help-seeking behavior, by empowering students to get the support they need, we're actually increasing their engagement with us and with the community."

To listen or access the transcript, click here.

Hood uses CampusLabs Beacon as our early alert, update, and encouragement system for undergraduate and graduate students. Faculty are encouraged to send alerts to students early and with a growth mindset in mind.

Generally, students are more receptive to alerts written as invitations to re-engage. Give students specific information on how they can be successful, including resources whenever possible. Harshly worded or overly punitive-sounding messaging is often predictive of further student disengagement. Some additional tips:

• Send Beacon alerts soon after an issue becomes apparent, and when the student still has time to improve. This might mean adding an alert after consecutive absences, the first missing assignment, or a low test score. Use the sort feature in Blackboard's grading columns to help you identify students who are missing the mark.
• Hood's Student Success team reaches out to students who have 3+ alerts in the system. Often, students demonstrate similar patterns across courses, and your alert may help identify those patterns and get students back on track.
• When a student re-engages or shows improvement, update and lower the alert to reflect this growth. Faculty are responsible for closing the alerts, and the directions can also be found in the links below.

• It can also be very encouraging for students to receive an "Encouragement" alert.
  

Directions for using Beacon are on our student success website and can be found here, Beacon training guides, along with other faculty resources. For more information, contact the Student Success team.

Shaun Hoppel started as director of accessibility services on May 1st, 2023. Shaun has over ten years of experience supporting students with disabilities in higher education and is excited to work with faculty to support students with accommodations at Hood College. One of the first changes faculty may notice is that the design of student accommodation plans has changed. The accommodation plan memo that faculty receive will now categorize approved services into an “eligibility list.” The plan will differentiate between services used in the classroom, testing accommodations, and programmatic or facilities modifications.

Each accommodation will include a description of the service geared specifically to the essential information faculty need to know about that accommodation. Feedback on the new layout is greatly appreciated. Please reach out to accessibilityservices@hood.edu with any questions or feedback about the new memo layout. Stay tuned for further process improvements from accessibility services on the roadmap for the 2023-2024 academic year!

Regardless of the discipline, race and race-based power are interwoven in the materials we select, the content we teach, and the examples we use to illustrate concepts.

The Anti-Racist Discussion Guide, written by Dr. Selfa Chew, Dr. Alisa Cooper, and Dr. Akil Houston provides helpful tips, tools, and syllabus guidance for instructors in any discipline who are committed to anti-racist work:

Depending on your own race, gender, and identity, there will be different challenges to cultivating an actively anti-racist curriculum in your classroom. This kind of work is hard and uncomfortable by its very nature. Discussions on race have been made a cultural taboo in many contexts, and instructors who choose to enact an anti-racist and critical pedagogy may experience conflict and pushback from their class and their community. (Chew, Cooper, & Houston, p. 11)

Looking for more resources on anti-racist pedagogy?

• Race Forward
• Tufts Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching
• PBS Tools for Anti-Racist Teaching (intended mainly for K-12, but has wide applicability)

Have ideas/tools to share? Please add them to this shared document!

The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) condemns all forms of systemic racism, bias, and aggression against Black people, indigenous peoples, people of color, and those of marginalized genders, as well as discrimination based on socioeconomic status. We understand that excellence in teaching, by definition, must reflect our shared humanity and promote inclusive practices such as:

• being conscious of biases, racial abuse, micro-aggressions, and those who are minimized or left out;
• understanding and supporting those underrepresented in our Hood community; and
• promoting ways to actively foster equity, diversity and inclusion in our classrooms, research, and publications.

The CTL is determined to raise awareness of all those who have been systematically oppressed and call upon Hood faculty to join us in this commitment to create a more inclusive world. As members of the CTL Advisory Board, we stand united and affirm that Black Lives Matter.

Many of us (and our students too!) are concerned about the pervasiveness and seeming inevitability of AI tools in our classrooms. Some folx are trying to come up with “cheat proof” tests; others are drafting assignments that are meant to teach students the limits of ChatGPT and its ilk.

But I think the solution is, and should, be simpler. After all, it feels a bit … disingenuous to me to try to find a cheat or a workaround for something that is designed to be a cheat and a workaround. So if you’d like to help your students learn to trust their own voices and minimize the role of AI-generated content in your classes this semester – AND if you’d like to learn how my conversations about ChatGPT-related Honor Code violations have been positive and constructive instead of accusatory and dread-worthy – check out my thoughts here:

https://www.hsmitchellbuck.com/2023/08/09/in-the-age-of-ai-be-human/

If this is your first time teaching or teaching at Hood, or you still consider yourself a "new" instructor, check out these eBook recommendations and tips!

Teaching at Hood

• Each semester has a flow and information thrown at you in August may not be relevant until December, or even May! Set up regular meetings with your mentor and/or department chair to check-in about just-in-time topics. (And, no, you're not "bothering" them!)
• Start with balance, don’t think you are going to “achieve” balance “once things settle down.” This means, among other things, setting your own communication guidelines in place for responding to students/colleagues and creating a schedule that includes course preparation, grading, research, and service responsibilities.
  
• Hood’s students need you to be the best and most invested teacher you can be. This means making learning accessible, being available in person as often as you can, and getting to know students as people (with names!). Our students have complicated lives and some have challenges in and out of the classroom that impact their ability to learn.

Some e-Books (and selected quotes) available through our library:

• Cipriano, R.E. & Buller, J.L (2015). A toolkit for college professors. From page 55: Department chairs ranked 7 factors of faculty in this order: "Organizational skills, collegiality, vision, teaching, service, success in receiving grants, and research"
• Haviland, D., Ortiz, A.M., & Henriques, L. (2017). Shaping your career: A guide for early career faculty From page 82: "Rather than starting to plan a course with the teacher at the center, excellent teachers start by asking themselves what students need to know and learn."
  
• Liberg, C. (2023). Teaching your first college class: A practical guide for new faculty and graduate student instructors. From page 10: "Not surprisingly, students give high ratings to instructors for enthusiasm, knowledge, and caring about students. The opportunity to express these attributes begins with the first class."
• Nunn, L.M. (2018) 33 simple strategies for faculty: A week-by-week resource for teaching first-year and first generation students. From page 58: "First-year students are often confused and frustrated by our academic expectations, policies, and grading styles. We can mitigate some of the hard feelings and resentment that gets built by simply explaining why we do what we do."

Have a question, a tip, or a resource to share? Send it to Michelle at ctl@hood.edu

For many instructors who use discussion boards, it can be difficult to determine how to promote metacognition. In this article from Faculty Focus, Dr. Prud'homme-Genereux introduces a few tools for incorporating students' thought processes in meaningful ways.

For more online discussion ideas, check out the other parts of Prud'homme-Genereux's 5-part series.

New Annual Contract (AC) Faculty Orientation took place on Wednesday, August 9th. Please extend a warm welcome to our newest faculty members: Dr. Aaron Angello, Assistant Professor of English and Communication Arts; Dr. Tim Coffin, Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science; Dr. Ashley Coen, Assistant Professor of Education; Dr. Jacqueline Douge, Assistant Professor of Public Health; Dr. Yangting Guo, Assistant Professor of Biology and Sustainability; Dr. Stephanie Masters, Assistant Professor of Psychology; Dr. Kimberly Morse Jones, Associate Professor of Art History; Mr. Jacob Muldowney, Assistant Professor of Art; Dr. Evelyn Nieves, Assistant Professor of Nursing; Dr. Nicole Pulichene, Libman Professor of Art; Dr. Aldemar Ramirez, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish; Mr. Cheng Qiao, Assistant Professor of Computer Science; Dr. Naeem Shaikh, Visiting Assistant Professor of Social Work.

Special thanks to our faculty mentors who are paired with our newest colleagues for the upcoming academic year: Drs. Paige Eager, Susan Ensel, Karen Hoffman, Anita Jose, Shannon Kundey, Lisa Marcus, James Parson, and Tricia Strickland.

New Adjunct Faculty Orientation takes place on Tuesday, August 15th at 5:30pm in Whitaker Campus Commons.

There are important resources for both AC and Adjunct Faculty on the Faculty Orientation Blackboard site. If you don’t have access to this Blackboard site, please contact Jeff Welsh.

TA Orientation takes place on Friday, August 18th at 10am. This second annual training will prepare our TAs in Global Languages, Biology, and Computer Science/IT to support students and faculty.

Join us on Monday, August 14th for the annual Fall Forum afternoon session! Following the college-wide fall forum in the morning, faculty are strongly encouraged to attend one of the following sessions:

AC undergraduate faculty: To begin the new Heart, Mind, and Hands core curriculum transition, please join us for the afternoon portion of the Fall Forum titled Getting to the Heart: Course Design/Redesign. During the session, we'll reflect on your teaching strengths and goals then transition into identifying scaffolded learning opportunities. Please come to Whitaker Campus Commons for a 1pm start time. We'll wrap up by 3:30pm.

AC graduate faculty/program directors: Come to Whitaker 220 from 1-2pm for "Hood College Values and Graduate Core Outcomes."

Assesstivus, our annual academic assessment workshop, will be held on Thursday, August 17, 2023 from 8:30 am – 1:00 pm in the Whitaker Campus Commons. Lunch and a continental breakfast will be served.

Dr. Kate Oswald Wilkins, Dean of General Education at Messiah University, will present two workshops:

• Why Assessment is a Bad Word: Language Barriers between Assessment and Your Academic Discipline (and How to Overcome Them).
• “I Guess they Weren’t Paying Attention: Examining the Assumptions we Make About Student Performance and asking Questions that Lead to Improvement.”
  

Please RSVP to Haley Greene (hgreene@hood.edu). We hope to see you there!

"Our conference, formerly known as the Research on Teaching and Learning Summit, has a rich tradition of celebrating research on teaching and learning. The SoTL Summit has adopted an intentionally developmental focus to help participants at all levels of SoTL experience grow as teacher-scholars.

In addition to peer-reviewed sessions, the fully virtual program will include a keynote address and other invited plenary sessions. We hope you’ll make plans to join this growing community of scholars! Click here to learn more about the 2023 Virtual SoTL Summit, happening September 21-22, 2023!

• Michelle Gricus, Associate Professor of Social Work, Director of the CTL
• April Boulton, Associate Professor of Biology & Dean of Graduate School
  
• Catherine Breneman, Assistant Professor of Social Work
• Paige Eager, Professor of Political Science, Dean of Faculty
• Shaun Hoppel, Director of Accessibility Services
• Elizabeth Mackessy-Lloyd, Assistant Professor of Nursing
  
• Jessica McManus, Assistant Professor of Psychology
• Heather Mitchell-Buck, Assistant Professor of English; Coordinator of Digital Learning
• Katherine Orloff, Associate Professor of Journalism
• Kathryn Ryberg, Reference & Education Services Librarian
• Atiya Smith, Assistant Professor of Psychology & Counseling
• Jill Tysse, Assistant Professor of Mathematics
  
• Jeff Welsh, Director of Instructional Technology in the IT division
• Adam Weintraub, Graduate Assistant for the CTL

Email: CTL@hood.edu
Website: www.hood.edu/CTL
Location: Hood College, Rosemont Avenue, Frederick, MD, USA
Phone: (301) 663-3131