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Return to: Sharing LTAs l
LTA Home One way
to discover LTAs and set the stage for sharing them to
periodically survey all faculty, asking them each to
identify several personal favorite practices or materials
that a few of their colleagues might appreciate hearing
about. Then find ways to share those ideas with other
faculty so that, step by easy step, faculty can
incrementally improve their courses.
For example,
this collection of ideas
for improving faculty-student contact, active learning, and
the rest of Chickering and Gamson's 'seven
principles of good practice' was assembled by such
faculty surveys. Here's an
example of a survey that can be used for this purpose
(TLT Group subscribing institutions only, please).
This survey could be used as as is, asking about ideas for
all seven principles. Or faculty might be asked one such
question each month. For a longer discussion of using
this approach to help improving learning by implementing the
seven principles, click here.
And here's an example
of a
survey for collecting LTAs that is organized around the
defining goals of a liberal education.
Use this survey 'as is', or else alter the questions in
order to reflect local programmatic learning goals
(outcomes).
And this third
example of a LTA-harvesting survey focuses on
using technology in ways that save faculty members
time. "Saving time" is shorthand for "reducing
faculty time that would otherwise be spent on the more
burdensome, less pleasant tasks involved in teaching a
course, or else enabling faculty to reach more ambitious and
fulfilling goals with a manageable amount of time."
We suggest an
evolving process for spotlighting, harvesting, and sharing
LTAs when using surveys such as those above:
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Identify the
priorities for a multi-year campaign to identify and
share LTAs (e.g., advancing the seven principles across
the institution? improving selected outcomes of
undergraduate education? helping faculty cope with
expanded work loads by identifying ways that using
technology can save (burdensome time) while maintaining
or improving the quality of learning?)
-
Run a start-up
event or campaign to spread awareness of the LTA-sharing
program.
-
Begin the series
of surveys of faculty (once or twice a year? more
often?). This might be done within a single institution
or across a system, consortium, or association of
institutions.
-
Encourage and
support faculty to search for such LTAs already in use
at other institutions around the world: what are the
easiest, most rewarding, lowest risks ways to make
incremental improvements toward the goal (whether that
goal is one of the seven principles, a liberal learning
goal, greening of the curriculum, or simply saving
faculty time). Reference librarians might play a role in
helping faculty, as could support specialists who work
with specific departments.
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Edit the LTA
descriptions collected from surveys and other sources,
and begin distributing them. Faculty could receive a new
idea each week (either begin by emailing all faculty and
allowing them to opt out, or alerting all faculty and
enabling them to sign up). Key to success: very
clear subject lines for the email so that faculty can
delete unwanted ideas without evening opening the mail,
and open desired ideas and skim them in seconds.
Each email could have a link to a longer description or
to related ideas online.
-
Evaluate the
program by interviews or focus groups so that you can
tweak the program to make it more effective as a mode of
sharing, or terminate it before annoying too many
faculty. Longer term evaluation could be designed
to assess whether the program is contributing to
cumulative improvements in practice in the goal area.
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Phone:
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contact: Sally Gilbert |
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