Teaching Circles 2005-2006
Mary Baroni (Nursing), Beth Madison (Nursing), Elayne Puzan (Nursing), Jerelyn Resnick (Nursing), Suzanne Sikma (Nursing), and Linda Westbrook (Nursing)
The UWB Nursing Program was invited to participate in the Narrative Pedagogy Project designed to explore the experience of teachers and students in nursing education sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing. It included bi-monthly teacher teleconference conversations with partner schools of nursing to discuss the use of narrative pedagogy in nursing education. It also included a 60 minute telephone interview to share exemplar stories of each of our experiences in nursing education. As the coordinator of this project, I was responsible for soliciting 5 nursing students to consider volunteering to be interviewed by the project team about their experiences with teaching and learning in the UWB Nursing program. We were able to recruit 3 MN and 2 of our BSN students to participate in this research along with us.
Carol J. Leppa (Nursing), Andreas Brockhaus (Informational Systems), and Julie Planchon-Wolf (Library)
We met approximately 14 times beginning in June-05/Summer quarter and focused on the work of the Faculty Institute in Online Teaching and Learning. Our accomplishments for the Teaching Circle for 2005-06 include:
1. Developed, conducted and evaluated three 4-week mini Online Faculty Institutes for a total of nine faculty from four UWB programs:
Summer A-term: B. Kochis (IAS), K. Laverty (BUS), L. Westbrook (NUR)
Summer B-term: W. Freytag (BUS), M. Goldberg (IAS), A. Kovalesky (NUR)
Fall: M. Abrums (NUR), M. Fukuda (CSS), P. Nye (BUS)
2. Secured Bothell Dollars funding from the TLC and the VCAA to support the faculty involvement in the 4-week mini online faculty institutes at $300/faculty member at completion.
3. During Fall quarter, we worked with a library intern to update the bibliography on online teaching and learning. We also began expanding the bibliography to include educational use of Blogs and Wikis.
4. We wrote a proposal to create an online faculty learning community using Blogs and Wikis that we submitted for consideration for either a Worthington Academic Distinction OR a Worthington Technology Award.
David Goldstein (IAS), Laraine Hong (Office of Academic Affairs), and Michael Stiber (Computer & Software Systems)
The three of us met for an hour four times during the academic year. Our disciplinary areas of interest and teaching are very different, but our discussions of small-group strategies provided a common point for sharing ideas, suggestions, and experiences.
From David: In this teaching circle focusing on small-group work, we discussed broad issues of small-group assignments, dynamics, and assessments. The most valuable part of the discussions [for me, anyway!] was the collegial assistance in applying principles of small-group work to specific situations in our courses. I began to integrate our ideas into my courses, making students' small-group work more dynamic, as well as making me more confident in my assessments of group work. I will continue to improve these aspects of my courses.
From Michael: I used what I learned from the teaching circle to add elements of a "design studio" to my CSS 343 (Data Structures and Algorithms) class. This involved a single, quarter-long group activity that integrated the course material with ideas from a range of CSS courses.
From Laraine: Although I wasn't teaching during the year, our circle discussions helped me to reflect on my experiences with small groups in the university courses I've taught in the past. The ideas and insights that I gleaned from conversations with David and Michael will be put to good use when I work with a freshman portfolio-assessment group next spring.
Elizabeth Thomas (IAS), Cinnamon Hillyard (Quantitative Skills Center), and Nancy Place (Education)
This past academic year our teaching circle has primarily been engaged in writing a paper focused on a question common to the three of us, "When do visual images support our instruction and when do they actually hinder student learning?" Our paper, initially entitled "Students and Teachers Learning to See: Visual Images in the College Classroom" was submitted to the peer-reviewed journal College Teaching. In December we received a request from the editors to revise and resubmit our paper as two or three smaller papers. We did this and resubmitted two papers, "Students and teachers learning to see: Using visual images in the college classroom to promote student capacities and skills" and "Students and teachers learning to see: Using visual images in the college classroom to enhance the social context for learning." We should know by the end of June whether or not our papers have been accepted for publication.
We also spent time this past year sharing ideas for the development of Human Subjects applications and sharing strategies for facilitating good group discussions. We have decided that next year our group will focus on the advantages and disadvantages of teaching university classes in community venues.
We enjoy working in our teaching circle! We have found our work together to be professionally and personally satisfying.
Sundar Balakrishan (Business), Ron Tilden (Business), Sandeep Krishnamurthy(Business), Peter Nye (Business), & Gowri Shankar (Business.)
We met regularly as part of the larger undergraduate curriculum revision for the business program during the 2005-2006 academic year. This was a year long effort that entailed an analyses and discussion of all aspects of the core courses of the Business Program. The issues raised, discussed and analyzed every aspect of the undergraduate business core. These included an examination of the best practices at peer schools as well as the top ranked schools in the nation. The major topics discussed included the number of courses that should be in the core. Should the core be increased as opposed to a smaller more compact core providing flexibility to take two concentrations? What should be the specific courses in the core? And finally, what should constitute the knowledge base of the courses that make up the core. The meetings created a discipline that helped focus the faculty to efficiently complete this mammoth project. I would gladly participate in future teaching circles.
Jean Eisele (Education), Warren Gold (IAS), Martha Groom (IAS), Chuck Henry (IAS), and Carole Kubota (Education)
The focus of our Teaching Circle was to build on the efforts of SEED 2005. In addition to strengthening the connections between the IAS and Education Programs, our most significant accomplishments:
- We coauthored an article, Summer Environmental Education Days (SEED), which was published in the spring 2006 issue of the Washington Science Teachers Journal.
- We wrote a grant, Mathematics and Science without Walls: Improving Teachers' Abilities to Teach Math and Science Through a "Research, Design, and Build" Process, for the Boeing Company. We have not heard whether it has been funded or not.
- We wrote a Worthington Academic Distinction program proposal, Creating a "Virtual" Center for Environmental Education at UW Bothell, which was not funded but we believe contains excellent ideas for future grants, perhaps to the EPA or Dept of Ed.
- We are planning SEED 2006.
- We have begun collaborative efforts with other universities in Washington on an NSF proposal, Enhancing Environmental Knowledge of K-12 Students Through a Pre-Service Environmental Education Curricular Core Program. Dr. Lynda Paznokas from Washington State University has taken the lead on this proposal and we submitted a preliminary proposal to NSF in May.
On two occasions, we actually expanded the Teaching Circle to include all the teachers who had participated in SEED 2005. They provided invaluable insights that will help us as we develop SEED 2006 as well as other environmental education initiatives.
Bruce Burgett (IAS), Cinnamon Hillyard (Quantitative Skills Center), Ron Krabill (IAS), Sarah Leadley (Library), and Becky Rosenberg (Teaching and Learning Center, Writing Center)
Our teaching circle took as its focus the examination of interdisciplinarity and how it is addressed in the IAS program core, Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Our goal was to explore our construction of the interdisciplinary classroom in order to inform our work within IAS generally and with fellows in the Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy specifically.
We focused particularly on sections of the course designed and taught by Bruce and Ron. We did a substantial review of the literature on interdisciplinarity and are now completing an article on our experience with the course and its relationship to the literature. As we anticipated, our work in the teaching circle has enabled us to better articulate how our pedagogy relates to the competing meanings of interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. More surprisingly, we have also come to a richer understanding of how our work affects collaboration, challenges to our expertise, and the importance of these factors in modeling interdisciplinarity to our students.
We will be completing our article and expect to submit it for publication to Issues in Integrative Studies this summer.