Teaching Faculty Retreat Day 2016
Tuesday, August 16, 2016, 8:30 AM – 4:00 PM
College Mennonite Church Fellowship Hall
This year’s Special Guest:
Dr. Bryan Dewsbury, Asst. Professor of Biology, University of Rhode Island
This year’s Theme:
Social Belonging, Community Engagement, and Passionate Learning:
Creating Learning Spaces Where All Students Feel They Belong
“The need for social belonging – for seeing oneself as socially connected – is a basic human motivation” Gregory Walton & Geoffrey Cohen¹
Last year’s focus on Bottlenecks meant that we had a reason to talk with one another about our teaching and the way it affects our students. As we head into this year – in which Passionate Learning is our focusing Core Value – we have an opportunity to center our thinking around how we foster the right environment for passionate learning and how we connect our students to people and activities in the community that support their academic and personal development. In order for our students to sustain their motivation to learn deeply and explore their passions, they need to develop a strong sense that they belong to a community of other learners, each searching out their own passions – all part of something larger than themselves. Belonging inspires them, empowers them and deepens their confidence that they are not alone and that they have a place where they can share what they care about with others. They also need to understand the relevance and importance of what they are learning to our community – its present and its future.
This year, as we make our final decisions about how to run our classrooms and how to create places for passionate learning, I invite us to reflect on the kind of “whole person education” we deliver and how it supports students to explore their academic and personal passions. During the Teaching Faculty Retreat we will explore how Social Belonging supports the motivations and academic achievement of our students, and how we can foster that sense of belonging with our teaching. We will also learn about a model for connecting students to people and contexts outside our classrooms to help them see themselves as scholars and professionals.
Our guest this year will be Assistant Professor of Biology, Dr. Bryan Dewsbury of the Unviersity of Rhode Island.² Dr. Dewsbury will speak in the morning session about Social Belonging and how it supports learning and achievement. In addition he will introduce us to his work in developing a teaching model that supports students in exploring their passions and helps retain them in the sciences.³ In the afternoon, he will lead us in activities designed to help us “connect the dots” between the concepts we discuss in the morning and our classroom practice. This promises to be a great way to start this year of Passionate Learning, to reconnect with one another, and to deepen our own senses of belonging as we begin this new year.
The agenda appears below. Please be there by 8:30 am.
PREPARATORY READING – These readings are research articles that help frame the context of Dr. Dewsbury’s presentation. Please take some time to review them. For those of us that are not used to reading statistics these pieces may be challenging, but the experiments and results in each of them provide strong evidence for the arguments and interpretations in the discussion sections.
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² http://web.uri.edu/bio/bryan-dewsbury/
³ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3867768/
AGENDA
8:30 Coffee, tea, rolls available
9:00 Dean’s Welcome
Ross Peterson-Veatch will offer a welcome and some framing comments to start the year
9:30-10:00 Opening Activities
10:00-11:30 Session I
Bryan Dewsbury will deliver a presentation on Social Belonging and its importance for motivation and intellectual achievement and then lead a discussion on his presentation.
11:30-12:00 Announcements and Updates
12:00 LUNCH in Westlawn Dining Hall
1:30-3:00 Session II
Bryan Dewsbury will lead a session on incorporating concepts from his morning seminar into classroom practice by leading us in a mock classroom exercise in which we act as his students. He will pause at a variety of points to discuss pedagogical practices he is using with us.
3:00 Break
3:15-3:45 Department Discussions on Implications for Your Work This Year
Colleagues will have time to discuss with one another what are the implications of Dr. Dewsbury’s presentation and examples for our teaching this year.
3:45 Closing
Closing remarks offered by Ryan Sensenig, Faculty Chair 2016-2017, and Ross Peterson-Veatch
4:00 Adjourn
Other important dates to start the year:
First Week Back
- Wednesday, August 17, 9:15am (depart from GC) – 5:45pm (depart from Merry Lea)- All-Employee Retreat at Merry Lea
- Thursday, August 18, 8:30am-12:00pm – Department Chairs and Program Directors Meeting, Newcomer Center 17
Second Week Back
- Monday, August 22, New Faculty/New Employee Orientation
New Student Days
- Saturday, August 27, 8:30am-5:00pm, New Student Days
- Presidential Picnic at 5:00pm on the College Green (employees and families invited)
- 7:00pm Soccer – GC vs. Madonna University
- Sunday, August 28, 10:00am-5:30pm, New Student Days continue, Continuing Students arrive on campus to move into dorms
First Week of Classes
- Monday, August 29, New Student Days Continue
- 8:00am-5:00pm, All Offices Open
- 8:00am-11:00pm, Good Library Open
- 9:00am, All First Year students meet with ICC Class, Umble Center
- 6:30pm, Chem 111 Lab (first meeting)
- Tuesday, August 30, 8:00am – All classes in session
- Wednesday, August 31, 10:00am – Welcome Convocation, College Mennonite Church