Teaching, Learning, and Innovation Summer Institute
General Education and High-Impact Practices
How do foundational courses develop students’ abilities in research and inquiry, critical thinking and critical literacy, writing and communication, understanding perspectives different from their own, and integrative learning?
What do we know about effective strategies and high-impact learning experiences? How might we strengthen courses in the first two years to increase engagement in learning? How might we challenge and support students to deepen that intellectual engagement in more advanced courses?
This year’s Teaching, Learning and Innovation Summer Institute (May 21-24) will explore these key themes, with a particular focus on introductory and large enrollment courses as well as foundational courses of all sizes.
Faculty participants will choose among three programs that share these larger questions and goals, each with a somewhat different emphasis:
- The Doyle Engaging Difference Program: Faculty fellows will explore ways of integrating topics relating to diversity into their academic course content. These explorations will include attention to content and to teaching practice.
- The Bottlenecks and Thresholds Initiative (BTI): Faculty teams (pairs, trios, or more) will work together to redesign key courses in the general education curriculum, especially by focusing on strategies for writing and research that address core disciplinary concepts and significant stumbling blocks that regularly prove challenging for students.
- Teaching, Learning, and Technology Initiative (TLT): Faculty participants will explore how a range of emerging digital tools can realize course goals by reshaping how time is spent inside and outside of class and how students engage with course materials.
The application deadline is rolling. Applications will be reviewed as they are received; faculty members are encouraged to apply as soon as possible.
What will happen at the Institute?
Each of the three programs — Doyle, TLT, and Bottlenecks & Thresholds — asks faculty to engage deeply with a particular set of questions about teaching and learning and to share ideas with a community of colleagues representing a range of disciplines.
TLISI 2012 will include workshops exploring common themes shared by all three programs as well as sessions examining teaching questions through the particular lens of each group.
What will happen over the course of the year?
Doyle fellows will meet monthly as a cohort over the course of the academic year. Some of the Fellows will teach their Doyle course in Fall 2012, while others will teach it in the Spring.
Teams who participate in the Bottlenecks and Thresholds track of TLISI will pilot their course (re)design projects throughout the year, perhaps working with other colleagues who join the team during the implementation phase.
After attending the TLT track of TLISI, participants will be eligible to apply for year-long TLT fellowships where they will continue the work of the summer institute, implementing a particular technology project into a course taught in Fall 2012 or Spring 2013. Both summer attendees and year-long fellows will join a community of practice to share ideas with one another throughout the year.