Faculty and Staff Book Groups

Author: Alyssa Hadley Dunn

Description: What should teachers do on the days after major events, tragedies, and traumas, especially when injustice is involved? This beautifully written book features teacher narratives and youth-authored student spotlights that reveal what classrooms do and can look like in the wake of these critical moments. Dunn incisively argues for the importance of equitable commitments, humanizing dialogue, sociopolitical awareness, and a rejection of so-called pedagogical neutrality across all grade levels and content areas. By highlighting the voices of teachers who are pushing beyond their concerns and fears about teaching for equity and justice, readers see how these educators address negative reactions from parents and administrators, welcome all student viewpoints, and negotiate their own feelings. These inspiring stories come from diverse areas such as urban New York, rural Georgia, and suburban Michigan, from both public and private schools, and from classrooms with both novice and veteran teachers. The facilitators will lead intentional conversations around the principles of Days After Pedagogies across educational contexts including K12 and higher education settings.

Facilitators: Kim Evert & Janna McClain

Meeting Format: Zoom

Meeting Schedule: Tuesdays (Sept. 19, Oct. 3, Oct. 24, Nov. 7) @ 3:00pm

Click to register for the Teaching on Days After group!

Editors: Stephen John Quaye & Sumun L. Pendakur

Description: In the updated edition of this important volume, the editors and chapter contributors explore how diverse populations of students experience college differently and encounter group-specific barriers to success. Informed by relevant theories, each chapter focuses on engaging a different student population, including low-income students, Students of Color, international students, students with disabilities, religious minority students, student-athletes, part-time students, adult learners, military-connected students, graduate students, and others. New in this third edition is the inclusion of chapters on Indigenous students, student activists, transracial Asian American adoptee students, justice-involved students, student-parents, first-generation students, and undocumented students.

The forward-thinking, practical, anti-deficit-oriented strategies offered throughout the book are based on research and the collected professional wisdom of experienced educators and scholars at a range of postsecondary institutions. Current and future faculty members, higher education administrators, and student affairs educators will undoubtedly find this book complete with fresh ideas to reverse troubling engagement trends among various college student populations.

Facilitator: Stacy Fields

Meeting Format: Zoom

Meeting Schedule: Wednesdays (Sept. 13, Oct. 11, Nov. 15) @ 9:00am

Click to register for the Student Engagement in Higher Education group!

Authors: David Clark & Robert Talbert

Description: Are you satisfied with your current and traditional grading system? Does it accurately reflect your students’ learning and progress? Can it be gamed? Does it lead to grade-grubbing and friction with your students? The authors of this book – two professors of mathematics with input from colleagues across disciplines and institutions – offer readers a fundamentally more effective and authentic approach to grading that they have implemented for over a decade. Recognizing that traditional grading penalizes students in the learning process by depriving them of the formative feedback that is fundamental to improvement, the authors offer alternative strategies that encourage revision and growth. Alternative grading is concerned with students’ eventual level of understanding. This leads to big changes: Students take time to review past failures and learn from them. Conversations shift from “why did I lose a point for this” to productive discussions of content and process. Alternative grading can be used successfully at any level, in any situation, and any discipline, in classes that range from seminars to large multi-section lectures. This book offers a comprehensive introduction to alternative grading, beginning with a framework and rationale for implementation and evidence of its effectiveness. The heart of the book includes detailed examples – including variations on Standards-Based Grading, Specifications Grading, and ungrading -- of how alternative grading practices are used in all kinds of classroom environments, disciplines and institutions with a focus on first-hand accounts by faculty who share their practices and experience. The book includes a workbook chapter that takes readers through a step-by-step process for building a prototype of their own alternatively graded class and ends with concrete, practical, time-tested advice for new practitioners. The underlying principles of alternative grading involve:

• • Evaluating student work using clearly defined and context-appropriate content standards.
  • Giving students helpful, actionable feedback.
  • Summarizing the feedback with marks that indicate progress rather than arbitrary numbers.
  • Allowing students to revise without penalty, using the feedback they receive, until the standards are met or exceeded.

This book is intended for faculty interested in exploring alternative forms of learning assessment as well as those currently using alternative grading systems who are looking for ideas and options to refine practice.

Facilitator: Alicia Fuss

Meeting Format: In-person, LIB 348 (LT&ITC)

Meeting Schedule: Wednesdays (Sept. 13, Oct. 11, Nov. 8) @ 1:00pm

Click to register for the Grading for Growth group!

Author: James Lang

Description: A freshly updated edition featuring research-based teaching techniques that faculty in any discipline can easily implement.

Research into how we learn can help facilitate better student learning―if we know how to apply it. Small Teaching fills the gap in higher education literature between the primary research in cognitive theory and the classroom environment. In this book, James Lang presents a strategy for improving student learning with a series of small but powerful changes that make a big difference―many of which can be put into practice in a single class period. These are simple interventions that can be integrated into pre-existing techniques, along with clear descriptions of how to do so. Inside, you’ll find brief classroom or online learning activities, one-time interventions, and small modifications in course design or student communication. These small tweaks will bring your classroom into alignment with the latest evidence in cognitive research.

Each chapter introduces a basic concept in cognitive research that has implications for classroom teaching, explains the rationale for offering it within a specific time period in a typical class, and then provides concrete examples of how this intervention has been used or could be used by faculty in a variety of disciplines. The second edition features revised and updated content including a newly authored preface, new examples and techniques, updated research, and updated resources.

• • How can you make small tweaks to your teaching to bring the latest cognitive science into the classroom?
  • How can you help students become good at retrieving knowledge from memory?
  • How does making predictions now help us learn in the future?
  • How can you build community in the classroom?

Higher education faculty and administrators, as well as K-12 teachers and teacher trainers, will love the easy-to-implement, evidence-based techniques in Small Teaching.

Facilitator: Lando Carter

Meeting Format: Zoom

Meeting Schedule: Thursdays (Sept. 21, Oct. 12, Nov. 2) @ 1:00pm

Click to register for the Small Teaching group!

Authors: Peter Felton & Leo Lambert

Description: A mentor, advisor, or even a friend? Making connections in college makes all the difference.

What single factor makes for an excellent college education? As it turns out, it's pretty simple: human relationships. Decades of research demonstrate the transformative potential and the lasting legacies of a relationship-rich college experience. Critics suggest that to build connections with peers, faculty, staff, and other mentors is expensive and only an option at elite institutions where instructors have the luxury of time with students. But in this revelatory book brimming with the voices of students, faculty, and staff from across the country, Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert argue that relationship-rich environments can and should exist for all students at all types of institutions.

In Relationship-Rich Education, Felten and Lambert demonstrate that for relationships to be central in undergraduate education, colleges and universities do not require immense resources, privileged students, or specially qualified faculty and staff. All students learn best in an environment characterized by high expectation and high support, and all faculty and staff can learn to teach and work in ways that enable relationship-based education. Emphasizing the centrality of the classroom experience to fostering quality relationships, Felten and Lambert focus on students' influence in shaping the learning environment for their peers, as well as the key difference a single, well-timed conversation can make in a student's life. They also stress that relationship-rich education is particularly important for first-generation college students, who bring significant capacities to college but often face long-standing inequities and barriers to attaining their educational aspirations.

Drawing on nearly 400 interviews with students, faculty, and staff at 29 higher education institutions across the country, Relationship-Rich Education provides readers with practical advice on how they can develop and sustain powerful relationship-based learning in their own contexts. Ultimately, the book is an invitation―and a challenge―for faculty, administrators, and student life staff to move relationships from the periphery to the center of undergraduate education.

Facilitators: Jenn Caputo & Keri Carter

Meeting Format: In-person, JUB 306

Meeting Schedule: Wednesdays (Sept. 20, Oct. 4, Oct. 18) @ 10:30am

Click to register for the Relationship-Rich Education group!