This workshop focuses on the Fulbright Program for Faculty. Ms. Cunniffe will provide information about lecturing and research opportunities in more than 130 countries, provide advice on which country to apply to and how to make contacts abroad. She will also discuss how to prepare the Fulbright application. This program will be open to faculty at other Twin Cities area colleges and universities.

Learn about the process of grant-seeking, strategies for writing a successful proposal, and how to write an assessment plan for your grant proposal.

Learn about "Selected Works," an online site that does more than promote your research interests; it is also a place where you can post and publish your research. Best of all, "Selected Works" provides feedback on when your work is being used (something you don't get from journals or citation reports). This key feature provides a means of sharing with grant funding agencies an example of how your work is being used.

How can you design an assessment plan that both improves student learning and meets "external" expectations? Join us for a step-by-step look at creating an assessment plan that is unique to your department and builds on what you are already doing.

Learn about approaches for observing your peers in the classroom setting by watching a split video of students learning and a faculty member teaching at a small, selective, liberal arts college much like Macalester. We will discuss our observations and how you would assess the faculty member using the approaches provided.

First year students need a good foundation in information fluency to be successful in college. These two sessions will introduce you to information fluency concepts, and help you with designing assignments that will introduce students to the unfamiliar territory of scholarly resources.

A faculty panel will discuss successful first year seminar assignments. There will also be a peer review of your assignment ideas.

What are characteristics of writing assignments that serve students well in the First Year Seminar? What innovations in writing pedagogy are suggested by new research? Discuss examples of assignments that faculty might create for the FYS, especially when the faculty member comes from a discipline where writing long papers is not the norm.

Our colleagues look to the First Year Seminar to provide the foundation for students’ ability to write for a college-level, scholarly audience. Learn about steps can you take to prepare your FYS students to understand scholarly and disciplinary writing conventions.

New to advising? Never taught a First Year Seminar? Then this workshop is for you. First Year students often have a wider range of advising needs and require more time and attention than upper class students. This session will use a case study approach to explore the various aspects of the First Year student experience as well as the campus-wide resources that are available to support faculty advisors and students. While this program is especially designed for faculty teaching a First Year Seminar, it is open to all faculty advisors who want the opportunity to discuss advising strategies and best practices.

Casey Jarrin will show some of the ways she has used film clips in her courses. Fritz will show you easy ways to add more video into your courses, both for student assignments and your presentations.

Oral histories, music, lectures, pronunciation guides are all examples of audio elements that can be an integral part of a course curriculum in any department, Are you interested in making audio a bigger part of your class?

Imagine a simple classroom technique that would not only focus student learning and improve instructional effectiveness, but could also be used to support course and departmental assessment needs. Its possible, and it might look something like a knowledge survey! Workshop participants will learn about the design and implementation of knowledge surveys for use in their courses.

Faculty members often have high hopes that students will reflect deeply and intensely engage course ideas and readings by participating in voluntary (even required!) Moodle discussions. These high hopes too frequently come crashing down when student participation reveals indifference or disdain for these out-of-class ‘conversations.’ But must it be this way? This workshop will utilize a case study to examine the pedagogical promise and pitfalls of online class discussions through Moodle.

Believe it or not, this scenario is not a joke nor a stretch. Additionally, it requires little more tech savvy than the ability to bookmark a website and read email. Learn how to use the free Internet tool, Diigo, to refine the quality and streamline the process of information sharing and gathering with students, colleagues, and friends.

Want to dramatically lower the overhead involved in collaborative writing? Want to be able to peer into groups to see which students are doing the work and which aren't? If so, join us and we'll show you how!

Female faculty members report that their authority in the classroom is more than occasionally challenged by students, especially if the faculty member is relatively young or small in physical stature. In this roundtable discussion, Professors Moe and Dolan will lead a discussion about the phenomena and invite participants to share their experiences and strategies for handing such in-class challenges.

How often have you read a student paper, led a class discussion, graded an essay, or listened to a student presentation, and thought, "There's potential here, but what's the point and where's the evidence?" In this workshop, Dr. Beld will identify and share effective strategies for improving students' abilities to think critically, engage thoughtfully with texts, articulate arguments, marshal appropriate evidence, and write and speak convincingly.

What are the 4 criteria necessary for a course to meet Macalester’s U.S. Multiculturalism requirement? Must every course meet all four criteria? Learn about concrete steps you can take to transform your course so that it qualifies for the U.S. Multiculturalism designation and meets student needs for this important general education requirement.

Macalester’s Statement of Purpose and Belief says that students should be able to “express themselves well in both oral and written forms.” This workshop will focus on helping you design (or redesign) oral communication assignments that allow students to demonstrate mastery of course material while “expressing themselves well in oral forms.” Participants will learn how to create innovative speaking contexts, help students develop their speaking proficiency, and teach students to adapt to new rhetorical situations.

Increasingly, faculty are interested in taking groups of students abroad during winter break. In this roundtable discussion, learn how other faculty survived the experience, the successful strategies they used, and the things they wish they knew before they embarked on the journey.

Interested in exploring ways to utilize the rich and changing urban environment to support learning in your courses? This workshop is designed to help faculty take first steps in addressing the challenges of "thinking local" in developing syllabi, assignments, and course-related internships. Participants will also discover how engaged teaching creates active links between multiculturalism, internationalism and civic engagement on campus.

What does exciting new research about how the brain works tell us about how humans learn? How might this information be reflected in how we teach or the assignments we create for students at Macalester?

Professor Larry Michaelsen has been practicing team-based learning techniques in his courses since the late 1970s. By 2004, along with his co-authors Arletta Baumen Knight and L. Dee Fink, he published the definitive guide that describes how he and others have perfected this approach in many college courses across all disciplines (Michaelson, Knight, & Fink, 2004). As the title of this book suggests, the approach they have used has had an observable transformation in learning and improved classroom experience for both students and teachers. They make a specific point to distinguish the team-based approach from small group active learning techniques. In this workshop will will study that distinction and delve into the details of carrying out a fully team-based learning course. References:Michaelsen, L., Knight, A. B., & Fink, L. D. (2004). Team-based learning : a transformative use of small groups in college teaching (1st ed.). Sterling VA: Stylus Pub.

Students studying in every discipline, not just in Environmental Studies, are developing strong interests in the challenges of environmental sustainability. This program provides an opportunity to engage these students more directly with your field by incorporating sustainability-related topics and problems into your courses. Sustainability offers a valuable new way to challenge your students with "real-world" data, problems and projects. Disciplinary barriers, if any, are modest and easily set aside. Whatever you teach, from creative writing to computer science, this workshop that will help you to incorporate sustainability into your classes, and to connect students to projects on and off campus.

Why did you enter the teaching profession? What is good teaching? What are your core goals for student learning? A well-formulated teaching philosophy comprises an essential foundation upon which one's teaching can be built. This hands-on workshop will focus on helping you articulate your teaching philosophy by providing time for reflecting together on your goals, principles, and strategies, and on ways of making these manifest in your teaching.

Research demonstrates that one of the most effective ways for improving student learning is by aligning the instructional goals, learning assessments, and instructional activities. Reverse design is a process that begins with considering what students should know and be able to do at the end of a course, and then proceeds to acceptable evidence of learning, and finally instructional practices. Workshop participants will learn about reverse design and begin using the process for one of their courses.

Classroom discussions are utilized as an important active learning technique in many courses. What are the pedagogical advantages and disadvantages of this approach? Why do discussions work so well for some topics, some instructors, or some groups of students? Are there some discussion techniques that are particularly effective in promoting good discussions? In this hands-on workshop, you will learn about (and use) several innovative discussion techniques to prompt new kinds of classroom discussion with your students.

Many faculty at Macalester use assignments that require students to make a formal oral presentation, but neither grade the students’ speaking skills nor give them feedback to help students improve on this important competency. At this workshop, participants will watch video clips of several student presentations and evaluate the speeches using evaluation rubrics that highlight different communication criteria. In addition, you will learn how to use a simple computerized audio program to record and then email your verbal feedback to students.

Case Studies -- Not just for law, medicine or business. Use them in economics, anthropology, biology, and just about anyplace else. This method places students in the role of decision maker. They analyze the case and eventually develop a solution. Students do most of the talking but they will need the wise guidance of you the professor or moderator. In this workshop, we will discuss how to choreograph a case study discussion.

Description forthcoming