PORTRAIT OF ENGAGEMENT
2010-11 Faculty Development Program Activity
Campus Participation: The Faculty Development Program organizes and conducts offerings aimed at engaging faculty in focused conversations about designing teaching/learning experiences to contribute to a "teaching commons" at NAU. The office also provides consultations to departments and colleges, committees, and to individual faculty. The figures below relate to the open resource sessions (workshops, roundtable discussions, book discussions, guest speakers, workshops).
| Number of sessions |
Total session
attendance |
Unduplicated number
of attendees |
Number of
departments/programs
represented |
| 49 |
731 |
366 |
118 |
Selected 2010-11 Highlights:
82 different faculty from 55 different departments/programs led sessions. Eight students were also invited to present their perspectives at sessions.
Faculty Development Program sessions were coordinated with 14 different co-sponsoring groups (excluding departmental and committee work sessions).
A daylong workshop on teaching was offered to faculty in the fall and a new series of 3 programs called Productive Beginnings was offered before the start of spring semester.
Three Communities of Practice were also initiated, involving over 24 faculty members in sustained conversations (5 sessions for each group) around these topics: Classroom Discussion (fall, 2010), Inclusive Design/Inclusive Practice (spring, 2011), Faculty Writing on Teaching and Learning (spring, 2011).
The Century Club met 7 times through the year as a roundtable conversation for faculty who teach class sections of over 80 students.
Two day-long sessions on designing teaching and learning experiences were offered to graduate teaching assistants, as were 2 sessions on portfolio development.
Representative Topics:
Transparency in the Classroom
Conducting Conference Workshops
Distressed Students in the Classroom
Designing Student Journal Writing
Understanding and Supporting Student Veterans
Partnering with Academic Programs Librarians
Integrating Film and TV in Curricular Design
Opportunities for International Teaching and Research
Dealing with Difficult Students
Chinese Student Success in the US
Designing Learning Experiences for Large Classes.
Impact: There are six Likert-scale questions and three open-ended questions on the electronic survey sent out immediately following sessions. The first two items address the goals of each session:
96% of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the session and materials met the stated goals
97% agreed or strongly agreed that topics were clearly addressed, useful, and provided valuable interactions between resource presenters and participants.
In a year-end survey of perceived impact, responses were received from 89 attendees (a 27% response rate). Participants were asked to consider the overall impact of the session/s they participated in and to check any or all of 5 items that were applicable. Responses were as follows:
78% responded that the session/s caused them to critically reflect on their work.
73% talked with colleagues about something that came up at the session/s.
67% directly applied something from one or more sessions to their teaching.
49% saw a positive impact on students related to something they adopted/adapted following the session/s.
32% directly applied something from one or more sessions to their scholarly work.
For a printable, pdf version of the complete Portrait of Engagement,
click here