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Sharing LTAs l
LTA Home "The
journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." An
LTA is a single step but, to give that step meaning, it
ought to be part of a journey, a step in some direction.
Here are just a few examples of academic goals that can be
advanced, one small step at a time Each one would make sense
as a way to focus faculty attention on LTAs.
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Saving faculty time.
In an era when workloads are increasing for many
faculty, it makes sense to look for LTAs that a) can
reduce time spent in burdensome, unfulfilling ways or b)
reduce time needed to carry out fulfilling activities.
For example, email and, more recently, blogs and
tweeting have enabled faculty to communicate with more
of their students than would have been possible with an
equal amount of time spent sitting in one's office
waiting for students to visit. Time-saving is such an
important (and attention-grabbing) phrase that it makes
sense to incorporate it in any LTA campaign. In
our examples of using surveys
to collect LTAs, notice that all of them mention
time-saving as a goal for LTA use.
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Implementing Chickering and Gamson's 'seven
principles of good practice in undergraduate
education.' These principles represent a
summary of decades of educational research about the
kinds of improvements in teaching and learning
activities that usually improve outcomes. They seem
likely to improve retention as well.
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Improving learning outcomes
defined by your institution or department or
consensus outcomes such as those defined by the
Association of American Colleges and Universities
(AAC&U). (See, for example,
this survey for collecting LTAs that uses the AAC&U
goals as prompts.)
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Other themes can also be useful for
energizing the sharing of LTAs, so long as the goal is
likely to be valued by many faculty for many years. For
example, the TLT Group is part of the CAMEL project,
aimed at helping institutions adapt their curricula to
help undergraduates learn to understand and respond to
climate issues. We'll be experimenting with LTAs as a
way of incrementally altering teaching and learning in
this direction.
Once a theme has been chosen, faculty need
to be periodically reminded about the theme and its
importance. That's a secondary role for institutionalized
support for finding and sharing LTAs, and for evaluating the
program: each time a faculty member is asked to supply an
LTA or is offered an LTA, it's a reminder that the program
is supporting this strategy for improving teaching and
learning.
For example, if the goal of advancing the
seven principles has
been chosen, faculty members would periodically receive surveys asking for relevant
LTAs. Interested faculty might get an email a week with one
LTA for advancing one principle. Faculty would also receive regular evaluation reports on whether these
dimensions of teaching are indeed improving.
(Evaluations of adoption of the seven principles can be done
by using NSSE, CCSSE, or instruments derived from the
Flashlight Current Student Inventory and Flashlight Faculty
Inventory.)
Sharing LTAs via:
Surveys of local faculty
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Searching online l Emails to
faculty l Faculty Learning Communities
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Nanovation |
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PO Box
5643,
Takoma Park, Maryland 20913
Phone:
301.270.8312/Fax: 301.270.8110
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To talk about our work
or our organization
contact: Sally Gilbert |
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