We frequently organize the day with break-out sessions for smaller groups of faculty to focus on something that interests them and that can help them in the classroom. But while planning for this spring, we decided to shake up that way of approaching faculty development and let faculty members define their own goals and identify what projects they felt would be most important to work on. All we needed to do was give them the freedom and time to work.
The idea came to use through Laura Middaugh, one of the terrific members of our Faculty Development Team. She showed us this video and had us pay special attention to the discussion about Atlassian Software that begins around minute 5:30:
We loved it, checked in with department chairs across campus, and they loved it, too.
We explained the idea to our entire faculty membership in October and gave them a few weeks to brainstorm and then let us know what types of projects they'd be working on. Faculty members could work on whatever they wanted, with whomever they wanted, however they wanted. Their only guidelines were that at the end of the day they needed to submit a report-out form and then get together for a dinner with colleagues to chat about their projects and celebrate the day's innovation.
In November we got some excellent teasers for projects like mental health awareness, applied technologies adjunct orientation, occupational therapy assistant (OTA) simulation exercises, and political economy across disciplines. And now we've got the entire list of projects, from ACEN Accreditation to Windows 8 and Server 2012.
 |
| The full program for our Spring 2015 Faculty Development Day |
Now that I know how terrific everyone's projects will be, I might call on them to present at a later workshop or write a guests post here, so keep your eyes peeled!
