“..you can’t just drop new innovations into a classroom and hope that the instructor will invent effective ways to use them. To fully utilize a new teaching technology, you often need to invent new teaching practices as well.”
– John Seely Brown, Visiting Scholar, University of Southern California
Purpose
The Innovative Teaching Program (ITP) aims to encourage faculty’s use of new teaching strategies and technologies in a modern, flexible, technology-rich learning environment. In partnership with a Teaching Mentor (from AAT) and an Instructional Designer (from EMC), the faculty will redesign classroom activities, implement the activities, and reflect on his/her teaching practices.
Selection into this program is a tremendous privilege. It demonstrates the commitment Leeward CC has to supporting faculty interested in excelling as innovative teachers.
Goals
- Assist faculty to identify and implement strategies which use appropriate and effective teaching practices and technologies.
- Though continual evaluation, improve on his/her teaching practices.
- Provide a safe, supportive environment that encourages faculty to try new classroom activities promoting active-learning, increasing student engagement and collaboration.
Description
One (or two) candidates will be selected each semester to participate in the Innovative Teaching Program. The selected participant(s) will be spend equivalent to three (3) Teaching Equivalencies (TE) to redesign, implement, evaluate, and reflect on at least four classroom activities (approximately one per month) in which pedagogy and technology are examined and integrated into selected classroom activities. The selected participant(s) will teach in ED 104, one of the campus’ modern, flexible, technology-rich learning environments.
Semester Prior (Fall)
The selected participant will spend approximately 12 hours of pre-planning preparation prior to the semester s/he implements. This will include meetings with the Teaching Mentor and Instructional Designer as well as working on her/his own in preparation for the following semester. During this semester, the participant will select at least four classroom activities to focus on.
Implementation Semester (Spring)
Throughout the semester, the selected participant will receive individualized support from the Teaching Mentor and Instructional Designer through weekly meetings, classroom observations, and video-recorded classroom session (approximately 15 hours of meeting time and 30 hours of working on, evaluation of, and reflection of classroom activities).
Eligibility
- Tenure-track or tenured faculty at Leeward CC
- Teach at least one face-to-face or hybrid course
- Available to meet regularly for a minimum of 1-hour per week with mentor(s) for the entire semester.
Deliverables
- Four redesigned classroom activities licensed as Creative Commons.
- Personal Teaching Blog detailing your learning and reflections of the process (publicly viewable).
- Data comparing classes for pre and post implementation.
- Video-recording of classroom activities to be included in a “library” of innovative teaching examples.
- Learning Outcome Assessments will be entered into Tk20.
Our dream is for this mentoring-model to continue to expand as program participants become mentors and the number of modern, flexible, technology-rich classrooms increase across our campus.