This community of practice will engage instructors and staff in facilitated discussions about how we can best support our first-year students as they transition to college. All participants will receive a copy of Saundra Yancy McGuire’s Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation. We will organize the community around themes in the book, and colleagues from each of UW-Green Bay‘s four campuses will share resources, insights, and advice from their years of experience. The community will meet face-to-face four times across the academic year, with each campus cohort supported by a facilitator and connected via web conferencing. The projected dates for these meetings are Fridays from 12-1:30pm on 11/2, 11/30, 2/22, and 4/5. Before and after each meeting, community members will engage in brief reflections and asynchronous discussions via Canvas. Additionally, participants will meet face-to-face in Green Bay at the Instructional Development Institute on January 24, 2019.
Eligibility
Instructors and staff who regularly engage first-year students. This may include instructors of first-year seminars, lower-level gateway courses, and/or general education courses. While the community will largely discuss instruction and classroom-level interventions, staff who also support first-year students are very welcome to apply. Participants who are unable to engage in each face-to-face meeting are able to join if they share these conflicts in advance with the co-facilitators.
Support
People who complete the experience and provide artifacts that reflect revisions to their teaching and/or practices will receive a certificate and will have an opportunity to share their knowledge with the broader campus community. Thanks to one-time UW System funds to support “faculty collaborations” across campuses, we are also able to provide $200 of S & E funds to participants to support a project related to the first-year experience.[1]
Interested?
Sign-up now to enroll and to receive a free copy of McGuire’s Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation.
Questions?
Contact Caroline Boswell, Director of the Center of Teaching and Learning @ boswellc@uwgb.edu or Jennifer Flatt, co-director of the First-Year Experience Community of Practice @ jennifer.flatt@uwc.edu.
Call for instructor and staff participants
[1] “This activity was supported by the UW System. The views expressed are those of the organizers/authors and are not necessarily those of the UW System.”
