Faculty Report, 2005-06
Peter Ellertsen
Fall Semester: Communications 150 (intro to mass comm.), 15 students; COM 221 (intro to public relations) 20 students; English 111 (rhet./comp.), two sections totaling 30 students. New Horizons: COM 221-70 (intro to PR), 7 students.
Spring: COM 209 (basic newswriting), 12 students; COM 222 (intro to advertising), 18 students; ENG 111, one section with 10 students; Humanities 221 (Native American cultural expression), 28 students; COM 296 (capstone), 2 students; and COM 199 (independent study), 2 students. New Horizons: COM 150-70 (intro to mass com), 5 students. I taught HUM 221 and COM 199 for the first time this semester..
Committee assignments: Chair, assessment committee.
TEACHING STRATEGIES:
What changes did you make in your teaching this year? Please comment on any successes or failures you had in making changes to the syllabus, using a new textbook or material, or trying a new teaching strategy.
The biggest change, perhaps, was introducing Common Student Learning Objectives and Course Based Student Learning Objectives on my syllabi and beginning to use them more rigorously as I developed individual lesson plans. I’m finding it gives me more focus, as does the use of classroom assessment techniques over time.
I also taught a new course, in Native American cultural expressions, in a new field – the humanities. So I had to get up to speed on the field as well as course content; this involved a lot of experimentation with assignment formats, which is an ongoing process I expect to continue next school year. At the end of the spring semester, I opened a teaching weblog at http://teachinglogspot.blogspot.com/ in which I am exploring some of these issues more fully. This grows in part out of my experimentation with the use of blogs as a teaching tool during the spring semester, posting links to supplementary readings and prompts for writing assignments to the personal blogs linked to my faculty webpage at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/welcome.html. The experience was encouraging, and I plan to do it in a more methodical way in the coming academic year.
Teaching mass communications majors in the new baccalaureate program will also require som adaptation of my teaching methods, since students’ motivational level and competencies should be higher than I have found to be the case with Gen Ed students.
In what area of teaching do you think you made the most improvement this year?
Lecturing (which is something I thought I would never do but turns out to be worth pursuing after all). I usually tuned out on classroom lectures in my student days, but this year I was assigned a classroom (Dawson 220) that required more lecturing on my part than in the past because of an instructor-centered (as opposed to student-centered) classroom design. It isn’t a style of presentation that comes easily to me, but I’ve reflected on lecturers who held my attention in grad school (there were a few) and read up on the Socratic method and lecture techniques on the Internet as I try to develop a style that fits my personality and teaching goals. I’m still awkward at it, since it involves a major change in the way I conduct classes. But I think I’m coming along. Only one student evaluation said I was too long-winded in class (fewer than in the past, come to think of it), so I think I’ve made a good start.
What would you like to improve on next year?
Lecturing! At my suggestion, I’ll meet lecture sections of my humanities classes in Becker L15 twice a week and a lab section in a computer lab once a week. This has been Okd by the scheduling committee. Since the humanities courses involve music and other art forms in addition to printed literature, I plan to make more use of electronic media – videos, sound tapes, etc. – next year. This is another area I need to work on next year, since basically I am a technological klutz.
Were there any other factors that helped or hindered your performance this year?
As always, I was able to work in an environment that values classroom instruction even when I had to spend a lot of time on accreditation and other issues that took time away from teaching. That’s important, and I think I tend to overlook it when I do these end-of-year reports.
One factor that took some getting used to was teaching in a computer lab that was designed more for lecturing and PowerPoint presentations than for writing and classroom discussion. In D220, all the student desks face the front of the room and there isn’t enough space between rows for me to work individually with students at their computers as they are writing or researching issues on the Internet in class. In all other regards, I like the classroom and plan to keep adapting my introductory public relations and advertising courses to a lecture format in order to continue meeting there. I have asked members of the scheduling committee to assign my writing and editing courses in future to computer labs like D22 or L16 that have sufficient space for me to intervene in student writing processes; their enrollment has tended to be between 10 and 15 students, so I anticipate no problem in being able to teach them in the smaller labs. My solution to the problems posed by the classroom design in my humanities courses is detailed above.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
In addition to your teaching, what other professional activities did you participate in during this academic year?
Membership in professional organizations:
- National Council of Teachers of English
- Society of Professional Journalists
Conferences/Workshops:
Presented paper “Sacred Harp Singing in a Living History Environment” to the Fall Conference of the Midwest Open Air Museums Coordinating Council, Eagle Creek Conference Center, Findlay, Illinois, November 10, 2005. Participated in Appalachian Dulcimer Week, Western Carolina University, for “learning and promoting the dulcimer’s history and traditional playing styles,” June 2005.
Other:
- Volunteer interpreter at Lincoln’s New Salem State Historic Site. I interpret the log schoolhouse during the summer and sing with the New Salem Shape Note Singers.
- I coordinate meetings of the Prairieland Dulcimer Strings, a community group of amateur musicians that meets at my church (Atonement Lutheran).
INTERACTION WITH STUDENTS
Did you serve as an academic adviser this year? No.
Did you serve as an adviser to any student organizations? Yes. If yes, please list. The Sleepy Weasel, campus literary magazine. My duties are primarily editorial.
In what ways have you supported other college activities this year?
Editor of Nuts & Bolts, the assessment newsletter. In addition, I consciously assigned my freshman English and journalism students to observe and write about Free Food Days and other on-campus activities, partly for the writing experience and partly to expose them to the student activities. I make a practice of donating copies of The Chicago Tribune and several music magazines to the Resource Center when I’ve finished reading them. I very much like what Joanna Beth Tweedy has done so far to create a welcoming, productive atmosphere in the Resource Center. It reminds me of the commons rooms in a more traditional school, and I try to do as much as I can to help her in these efforts.
ASSESSMENT
Have you used any means of assessing how students are learning (other than grading course work)?
I use several Classroom Assessment Techniques, primarily reflective essays. Often I embed them in the final exam, and perform a rudimentary content analysis on student answers to rather broad questions in order to see how often they mention topics that are covered in the CSLOs and CBSLOs on the syllabus. For more information on the technique, see the student prompt at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/reflect.html linked to my faculty page.
I often use a variation of the “one-minute essay” CAT – asking students the clearest point, the most confusing point and the point(s) they want to know more about -- in a variety of ways. These range from a quick survey, either at the end of class or not infrequently during the class when I suspect we’ve gotten off track, to framing reflective essay questions that embed a clearest-point, most-confusing-point rubric into final exams or other assignments at the end of the semester. It has gotten to be pretty integral to the way we move through the material in a course.
What would most enable you to use consistently some assessment tools or techniques that would tell you about the College and student learning?
Since I edit the assessment newsletter, as in the past I’m more interested in the answers other instructors give to this question. I use reflective essays a lot in my own classes, as stated above, and am getting more focused in the questions I embed in the essay prompts as I gain experience with the technique.
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