The Center for Teaching and Learning will be offering FLCs during the 2014-15 Academic Year. Participating in an FLC requires a commitment to meet together 5-6 times (about every 2-3 weeks) over the course of a semester. In most cases, FLCs work over a two-semester period. In addition to the meetings, participants will read, collaborate, and make progress on individual projects between meetings. Each participant will actively contribute as responders, facilitators, peer reviewers and experts in selected areas of teaching and learning. Faculty should consider their other professional commitments before applying.
2014-2015: Registration for this faculty learning community is closed!
Facilitator: Dr. Jamie Warner, 2014-2015 Hedrick Teaching Fellow, COLA/Political Science
How do you encourage students who have been introduced to learning through nonstop, high stakes, standardized testing to be creative in their thinking? One of Marshall’s official student learning outcomes is a domain called “Creative Thinking,” in which students are supposed to learn to work with ambiguities and possibilities, embrace risk, and experiment with innovation. That sounds like a great learning outcome regardless of discipline: we all want innovative doctors and nurses looking for better treatments, politicians who think outside the box to solve problems, imaginative businesspeople creating products to make our lives better, and artists, musicians, and writers who push us to reexamine ourselves and our world. But, as the designers of courses in which we are supposed to teach students to think creatively as part of our university mission, how exactly do faculty do this work on the ground – at the level of writing the syllabus, designing assignments, and thinking about grades?
Can something like creativity be taught?
In the fall semester of 2014, members of this learning community will look at both philosophical and research based texts that suggest that thinking “creatively” is just as much about the structure of the incentives and assessments of the classroom as it is about the individual personalities of the students. In the spring, members will experiment and write up their own classroom attempts to “nudge” students into doing imaginative work, using pop culture, non-traditional assignments or innovative grading schemes. The goal of each member is to disseminate the results of their own experimentation, innovation, and risk-taking at the 2015 and/or 2016 iPED conferences at Marshall University, other professional venues, and/or in publication form.
CEIIR FLC Schedule: TBA | OM 109 – Teaching Commons