On Janurary 30th and 31st, STARS FIPSE held its first Faculty retreat in Ventura, California. What follows are some reflections on the event, which was attended by 30 faculty, staff, and administrators.
The retreat kicked off on a Friday night as STARS participants were treated to a welcome dinner where LAVC president, Tyree Wieder, and project director, Deborah Harrington, defined key objectives and explained the opportunities and possibilities that the STARS grant will bring to students, faculty, and staff.
Saturday morning began with a buzz; participants displayed enthusiasm and eagerness for the day's activities, anticipating the workshops on strategies for Student -Centered learning. Mary J. Allen, CSU Director of Institute for Teaching and Learning, presented first, engaging the participants with a plethora of information. In a two and half hour presentation, she led the participants through a series of exercises and slides, detailing practical and effective means to improve the classroom experience for both the teacher and the student.
The main area of inquiry explored the distinction between teaching-centered learning and student-centered learning. Dr. Allen and the participants characterized teaching-centered learning as passive, rigid, dependent on lecture/memorization, and associated with the "gatekeeper" mentality. On the other hand, student-centered learning embraced active learning, engagement, discovery, flexibility, collaboration, and ingenuity. Next, the workshop segued into a discussion of "What Do We Want Our Students to Learn?" This provided an opportunity to explore the importance of defining Institution-Wide Goals and Discipline-Specific Goals as a means of creating a "cohesive curriculum." This discussion was followed by an engaging activity in which participants defined some of their own course objectives, some activities on how the students will learn to meet these objectives, and some assessment techniques to determine what exactly the students learned.
Dr. Allen's presentation touched on a number of other topics, such as strategies for active learning, identifying teaching and learning styles, identifying personality types, working with Bloom's Taxonomy, aligning course components and learning objectives, and using rubrics for assessment. At the conclusion of her presentation, Dr. Allen had left the participants with a wealth of information to bring into their classrooms. Each participant received a comprehensive hard copy collection of her presentation slides and over fifty different examples of assessment rubrics.
Next on the agenda was LAVC's own Jim Marteney, Professor of Speech Communication and Staff Developer extraordinaire. Professor Marteney brought his dynamic personality and enthusiasm for teaching, which proved contagious amongst the participants. Focusing on practical strategies for developing class goals while concentrating on teaching "Big Ideas," Professor Marteney encouraged faculty to think about ways for students to "take ideas from our courses with them for their utilitarian function and as enrichment for the students' lives." To accomplish this goal, faculty might consider less emphasis on a "Banking Concept of Education" and more emphasis on finding ways to help students synthesize course content into information that is relevant to their own lives and that can be applied to learning experiences in the future.
The second half of Professor Marteney's presentation, Teaching the Hollywood Way, engaged STARS participants with poignant movie clips of classrooms, students, and teachers, which were used to initiate discussion on strategies for the first day of class, icebreakers, course objectives, student/teacher relationships, setting expectations, and creating learning environments. Professor Marteney concluded his presentation with "Jim's Top Ten Teaching Tips" which detailed some practical suggestions for enhancing the classroom experience.
As the workshop came to a close the participants left beautiful Ventura with a plenty of ideas, strategies, suggestions, and information to bring into their classrooms. The first STARS workshop of 2004 accomplished a number of grant objectives, most notably, creating a forum for faculty and staff to engage with each other to share ideas about learning objectives, classroom assessment techniques, and ways to create a student-centered learning environment. The participants were encouraged to look forward to the next retreat, which will reach out to the other crucial factor in the grant, the students.
* Hard copies of both Mary J. Allen's Student Success in a Learner-Centered Environment and Jim Marteney's Teaching the Hollywood Way are available in The Writing Center. Please contact Deborah Harrington to receive your copy! If you'd like to view these documents online, please see the links below.