[Factc] Do you have a gift you would love to share with your colleagues?

Wed Feb 5 09:24:43 PST 2020

The other day I received an email from one of the faculty leaders in our system asking for really good artifacts around creating meta majors and program maps that will engage faculty in ways that are meaningful to them… so that this essential practice becomes an opportunity for transformative change, rather than yet another bureaucratic exercise to check off the list.

I was able to direct the faculty member to a few resources I hoped would be helpful, as well as a faculty contact in our system who I know has led this work bravely and thoughtfully.

But here’s what I know: you can’t really have a community of practice with just artifacts flying around via e mail and a phone call or two between individuals.

For a community of practice, you need to bring people together who possess a shared identity ... and a sense that we are working on something really big together. Love it or hate it, our collective attention on GP offers us a chance to be a real community of practice, and not just a network.

The difference between a technical problem and adaptive challenge is that for a technical problem… You just bring in an expert with a best practice. Boom. Problem Solved.

Fully addressing adaptive challenges means you have to work together to create new learning.

Communities of Practice are the place to bring both these kinds of challenges, but they are especially useful for engaging with adaptive challenges.

My hope for this year’s assessment, teaching, and learning conference is that it is THE place where educators in our Washington state CTC system bring the adaptive challenges their guided pathways implementation raises in the institutional context: that we come together, as educators, to create new learning, new practices, together ... in community.

When you are struggling with an adaptive challenge, every contribution a colleague makes to your learning feels like a gift. Even a relatively small thing can revitalize you and radically change your trajectory.

If you have read to this part of the email, then I sense it’s because you have a gift to share with your faculty colleagues at the ATL conference.

Maybe it’s around meta majors and program maps… Maybe it’s around choosing an equity framework to guide your institution’s guided pathways redesign… maybe it’s around collapsing your dev Ed sequence ... maybe it’s around TILT-ing assignments or other artifacts to be more transparent. Maybe it’s around creating new labor models so adjunct faculty can be fully involved.

A gift could also be posing an adaptive challenge in a way that makes other people say, “Yes! I struggle with that too!” and asking conference attendees to come together and explore the challenge with you ... and work collaboratively to invent a new practice.

As much as I would love to have all the answers all the time… I don’t. As much as I would love to know exactly what’s happening on every campus around guided pathways... I don’t.

So I’m hoping that if you have a contribution to gift your colleagues with… please do submit a proposal to the 2020 ATL conference! If you know someone who has a gift to share, encourage them to submit.

Also, I’ve been thinking about something one of our faculty developers asked me a while ago… Where is there space to disagree was guided pathways beyond hallway conversations? So if you’d like to pose a presentation along the lines of playing the doubting game with guided pathways… Please do. All voices are welcome.

Peace,

Jen

PS— Want to bounce an idea of me? Please reach out. I have been receiving some great ideas through email and I love hoping people flesh out their ideas.

From: ATLC <atlc-bounces at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:atlc-bounces at lists.ctc.edu>> on behalf of Jennifer Whetham via ATLC <atlc at lists.ctc.edu<mailto:atlc at lists.ctc.edu>>
Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2020 4:21:24 PM
To:
Subject: ATL Community Call for Proposals! Rethinking Student Instruction: Exploring the Faculty Role in Guided Pathways

My dear friends and colleagues:

I’m so excited to announce that we are now accepting proposals for the2020 Assessment, Teaching, and Learning Conference<http://bit.ly/2020atlc> at theLynnwood Convention Center<http://mapq.st/2sRuCfA>!

This year’s theme isRethinking Student Instruction: Exploring the Faculty Role in Guided Pathways andincludes a major focus on key implementation issues related to guided pathways— in particular good practices focused on successful faculty leadership & engagement in the work.

We invite proposals for 90 minute concurrent sessions in four key areas:

•        Equity-Minded Praxis

•        Guided Pathways: Design, Models, Approaches

•        Faculty Leadership & Engagement

•        Research-Based Learning Frameworks

After you read the descriptions of the conference stands in theCall for Proposals<http://bit.ly/2urzEjk>, please consider filling out theproposal form<http://bit.ly/2sOjeky>. Proposals are due by 5:00 PM on February 19th, 2020.

Questions? Please contact Jennifer Whetham at jwhetham at sbctc.edu<mailto:jwhetham at sbctc.edu>

________________________________

[Title: SBCTC logo - Description: Compass]Jennifer Whetham (pronouns: she/her/hers)

Assessment, Teaching, and Learning

Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges

jwhetham at sbctc.edu<mailto:jwhetham at sbctc.edu>• o: 360-704-4354 • c: 206-310-1291

2019-20 ATL Initiative: Supporting Faculty Engagement in Guided Pathways<http://bit.ly/2BpQe3q>

Add Your Voice: Take the Survey<http://bit.ly/2odbDJM>

“The problems of racism in writing classrooms are not primarily pedagogical problems to solve alone. Racism is an assessment problem, which can only be fully solved by changing the system of assessment, by changing the classroom writing assessment ecology. Thus assessment must be reconceived as an antiracist ecology.”

 [FB671723]        Asao B. Inoue, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies<http://bit.ly/2xvacY4>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ctc.edu/pipermail/factc_lists.ctc.edu/attachments/20200205/1195dca0/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.png
Type: image/png
Size: 8117 bytes
Desc: image001.png
URL: <http://lists.ctc.edu/pipermail/factc_lists.ctc.edu/attachments/20200205/1195dca0/attachment-0002.png>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image002.png
Type: image/png
Size: 375 bytes
Desc: image002.png
URL: <http://lists.ctc.edu/pipermail/factc_lists.ctc.edu/attachments/20200205/1195dca0/attachment-0003.png>