Moore's Musings

Bill Moore, Policy Associate
WA State Board for Community & Technical Colleges

With " Creating Significant Learning Experiences," the 2007 Pacific Northwest Higher Education Teaching & Learning Conference just three week away, Bill thought this was a good time to encourage folks to register for this annual event (see article below) that brings together faculty and staff to experience and share in the great work happening around teaching, learning and assessment.

He will be back next month to again express his thoughts on issues/questions/topics of interest to educators.

"Creating Significant Learning Experiences"
Pacific Northwest Higher Education
Teaching & Learning Conference

WOW! "Creating Significant Learning Experiences", the 2007 Pacific Northwest Higher Education Teaching & Learning Conference will be upon us in three short weeks, May 2-4 at the Vancouver, WA Hilton. If you have not already registered, you might want to do that today.

This year's program has many exciting sessions and plenaries beginning with the opening plenary featuring Dr. L. Dee Fink, an Educational Consultant on College Teaching and Faculty Development. His presentation on "The Joy and Responsibility of Teaching Well" will be a great beginning to what promises to be a rich and full two-day conversation on teaching and learning with colleagues from across the Pacific Northwest. In addition to speaking at the opening plenary, Dr. Fink will lead a pre-conference workshop on Wednesday, May 2, from 1:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. titled “Want Your Students to Learn More? Some New Ideas for Designing Significant Learning into Your Courses.” Three other pre-conference workshops are: a) Courage to Teach: Sustaining Vocational Passion and Integrity, b) Effective Online Teaching Practices, and c) The Uncomfortable Classroom. To register for one of the workshops or the conference, please visit the conference website.

At the noon plenary on May 3, presentations will be made to recipients of the 1st Annual Teaching, Learning & Assessment Award and the new Distance Learning Leadership Award. Be sure to be on hand as we recognize individuals in Washington's higher education community for their outstanding contributions to teaching, learning and assessment and their commitment in supporting and providing educational opportunities for all students.

Friday's closing plenary at noon,

will be a fun, upbeat, and educational competition between students and faculty! You don't want to miss this one. In addition, students will participate as presenters in several sessions during our two-days as we share and learn from each other the rich work being done around the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, Institutional Assessment Informing Practice, eLearning and Instructional Technologies, Preparing the Underprepared and Students’ Experience of Learning.

Information on registration, lodging, fees, conference-at-a-glance and session descriptions can be found on the conference website. Looking forward to seeing you the first week of May in Vanouver, WA.

"You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives."
Clay P. Bedford

Links to Articles/Reports of Interest to Educators

Getting Serious About College Readiness (Inside Higher Ed, March 22, 2007) - As someone who works with many states to improve education, I’m deeply troubled by the lack of our national progress — and the missing urgency in postsecondary education — toward improving students’ readiness for college and their prospects for completing college degrees. Many in postsecondary education agree the readiness problem must be addressed, and a few states have taken strong early steps toward a solution. So, why haven’t we moved closer to solving the readiness problem?

Misaligned Priorities (Inside Higher Ed, April 10, 2007) - Colleges rely on high schools to produce students who can do college-level work. But, according to a study released today, college professors and high-school educators don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye on what the curriculum for college-prepared students should be.

40 Years of Change in the Student Body (Inside Higher Ed, April 9, 2007) - For four decades, the University of California at Los Angeles has administered the Cooperative Institutional Research Program Freshmen Survey, recording the values, attitudes and backgrounds of the high school graduates who will become the next batch of American college students. Their self-reported answers form the backbone of a large trove of data that has served to illuminate trends in higher education. UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute is releasing a broad overview of trends gleaned from the survey. The report, “The American Freshman: Forty-Year Trends 1966–2006,” highlights some striking changes in the makeup of college freshman classes, many of which confirm widely reported trends — but not without a few surprising findings.

Another Sector Heard From (Inside Higher Ed, April 6, 2006) - There have been no shortage of reports in recent months and years about the problems and challenges — crises, even — confronting higher education and possible solutions to them: Margaret Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, the National Academies, the Skills Commission, and the National Conference on State Legislatures, all have weighed in, to name a few. The Association for Career and Technical Education, which represents educators, researchers and others involved in preparing young people and adults for the work force, offered its own assessment this week of what the United States must do to bolster the number of people who get enough postsecondary education to succeed in the work force.

Trends in Training College Faculty, Staff and Students in Computer Literacy (Primary Research Group) - This report looks closely at how nine institutions of higher education are approaching the question of training faculty, staff and students in the use of educationally oriented information technologies. The report helps answer questions such as: what is the most productive way to help faculty to master new information technologies? How much should be spent on such training? What are the best practices? How should distance learning instructors be trained? How formal, and how ad-hoc, should training efforts be? What should be comptuter literacy standards among students? How can subject specific computer literacy be integrated into cirriculums? Should colleges develop their own training methods, buy packaged solutions, find them on the web? Organizations profiled include: Brooklyn Law School, Florida State University College of Medicine, Indiana University Southeast, Texas Christian University, Clemson University, the Teaching & Learning Technology Group, the Applalachian College Association, Tuskegee Institute and the University of West Georgia.

BCSSE Registration Open!

The Beginning College Survey of Student Engagement (BCSSE, pronounced "bessie") measures entering first-year students' pre-college academic and co-curricular experiences, as well as their interest in and expectations for participating in educationally purposeful activities during college. BCSSE administration begins summer 2007 and is designed to be paired with a 2008 NSSE administration. BCSSE may also be used as a stand-alone instrument. Register now to survey your 2007 entering class. To learn more about BCSSE and/or to register, please visit the National Survery of Student Engagement website.

Publications/Resource Materials

Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (TC Record) - The essential purpose of an undergraduate education has been the subject of much debate, discussion, and conflict among scholars, students, and our public. Throughout the history of higher education, educators have constantly struggled to define what it means to be an educated person. Other words, what are the intellectual and human experiences we want our students to take away with them when they leave the academy? More specifically, and as Lewis notes, how can we “help [our students] to grow up, to learn who they are, to search for a larger purpose for their lives, and to leave college as better human beings”? Excellence Without a Soul is an impassioned and thought-provoking examination of the many issues (e.g., curriculum, advising, grade inflation, athletics, meritocracy, citizenship, morality, money) that are confronting higher education and our educational souls.

Directed Self-Placement: Principles and Practices (Hampton Press) - This book challenges two key assumptions: that college writing ability can be effectively measured outside the rich context of classroom assessment pratices, and that writing ability alone best predicts success in the college writing classroom. The contributors to this volume describe how and why directed self-placement works--how it honors the high school experiences of entering college students, how it motivates students to do well, how it encourages faculty to maintain high expectations, how it challenges both faculty and administrators to define and articulate their curricula, and how it helps ensure that students who really want extra help get the help they needed. Representing a full range of institutions--from community colleges to research universities--these contributors explore the principles and practices of this exciting new approach to writing placement.

Conferences, Workshops, & Professional Development Opportunities
______________________

"Creating Significant Learning Experiences"
Pacific Northwest Higher Education
Teaching & Learning Conference

May 2-4, 2007
(Register TODAY!)

NADE - Developmental Education: Piecing It Together; March 21-24, 2007, Gaylore Opryland Hotel and Convention Center, Nashville, TN

Tracking Your Future Teachers: How the Right Database Can Help Your Program Succeed; May 17-18, 2007, Green River Community College Auburn Campus

2007 Summer Institute on First-Year Assessment; June 10-12, 2007, Hyatt Regency Savannah, Savannah, Georgia

ACPA Student Affairs Assessment Conference, "Developing the Skills to Assess Student Outcomes; June 20-23, 2007, Columbus, Ohio.

ISSOTL 2007 "Locating Learning: Integrative Dimensions in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning; July 2-5, 2007, Sydney, Australia

Transition Mathematics Project "Summer Math Institute 2007"; Leavenworth, WA, August 20-24, 2007.

CRLA 2007: A Focus on Learning;
October 21 - November 3, 2007
DoubleTree Hotel and Executive Meeitng Center, Lloyd's Center, Portland, OR

2007 Assessment Institute;
November 5-6, 2007, Westin Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Indiana

12th Annual National Learning Communities Conference; November 7-9, 2007, University College at Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI); Call for Proposals being accepted through March 31, 2007.

National College Learning Center Association (NCLCA), "Learning Centers by Design"; September 26-29, 2007, Atlanta, Georgia.

Strengthening Student Success II - Making a Difference Conference; October 3-5, 2007, San Jose, CA.

13th Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning
The Power of Online Learning: Making a Difference; November 7-9, 2007, Caribe Royal, Orlando, Florida

From Louis Schmier's "Random Thoughts," we link to "Chaos Theory of Education " (October 6, 2006). Inspiring and thought provoking, Louis Schmier calls attention to the too often lacking but needed human dimension of education, showing that the heart of teaching is to care about each student as a unique, sacred human being.

From Blue Web'n an online library of Internet sites categorized by subject, grade level and format.

Women in World History - Curriculua for high school and college, includes primary sources and teaching strategies, more than 200 primary sources, scholarly reviews of online primary source archives, multimedia case studies, and online teaching discussion forums. The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create Women in World History. The goal is to help high-school and college world history teachers and their students locate, analyze, and learn from primary sources dealing with women and gender in world history.

Education Report Card (US Chamber of Commerce) - Description: In 2006, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce began to dig deeper into the nation's educational effectiveness by grading all 50 states and Washington, DC, on their K-12 school systems in order to identify both leaders and laggards in the tough business of school
performance. The Chamber assembled a diverse group of experts and partners to look at education performance and reform from a business perspective including an emphasis on coupling academic outcomes with attention to key business metrics: innovation, flexibility,
management, and fiscal prudence. Interactive parts require Flash.

Pew Internet & American Life Project Reports - All Pew reports and memos are based on research,
surveys and analysis and in some cases on the work with research partners. Reports fit loosely into eleven topic areas: Online Activities & Pursuits; Demographics; Internet Evolution; Technology & Media Use; Health; Family, Friends & Community; Major News Events; Public Policy; E-Gov & E-Policy; Education; and Work. Also includes presentations that you can use or repurpose, links to sites they used as resources or down and dirty facts from their research.

"How you teach is more important than what you teach."