Faculty Development Workshops (2009- Fall 2022) | Past Faculty Development Workshops

What First Years Need to Know about Sustainability @ Dickinson!

Facilitator: Lindsey Lyons, Assistant Director of the Center for Sustainability Education

Whether your first-year seminar connects to sustainability or not (we bet it could), FYS faculty play an important role in advising and mentoring students in opportunities for learning and experiences that support Dickinson’s institutional commitments. Find out what sustainability means at Dickinson, the basics of identifying sustainability courses across the curriculum, understanding our key living laboratory programs like The Handlebar, The Hive and Free xChange and learn about our path to carbon neutrality for 2020 (this year). This interactive Q & A session will allow you to better understand our award-winning efforts to incorporate sustainability into Dickinson’s academic curriculum, operations, student life and co-curricular happenings. Find out what’s new, innovative and on the horizon. You’ll have the opportunity to think creatively about how you, your first-year students, or your courses may connect to sustainability. We are here to help.

Working with Multilingual Writers (Part I)

Facilitator: John Katunich, Associate Director of the Writing Program

How can we help international and multilingual students grow as writers? What is important to know about second language learning that would help us recognize the strengths and challenges that multilingual writers bring to their writing? This interactive workshop will orient faculty to what we know about how second language writing develops, and offer opportunity for dialogue about the multilingual and international writers whom we encounter in our classrooms.

Visual Literacy in the Classroom: Trout Support for Teaching with Images

Facilitator: Heather Flaherty, Curator of Education

Teaching students to be critical consumers of visual culture provides them with an essential skill set for navigating the increasingly image-saturated world in which they live. While most students have been taught to analyze texts from a young age, few have developed a similar skill set for working with images. In this workshop participants will learn about the resources and programs The Trout Gallery offers in this area, and try out some tried and true close-looking exercises developed in art museums. Information on discipline-specific art objects in The Trout Gallery permanent collection will also be available.

Working with Multilingual Writers (Part 2) – Video and Discussion

Facilitator: John Katunich, Associate Director of the Writing Program

From how students organize their writing, how they cite sources, or how they respond to instructor feedback, there may be a variety of ways in which culture and educational background shape how international students write. The documentary Writing Across Borders (produced by the Oregon State University Center for Writing and Learning) shares the experiences of international student writers learning to navigate the academic writing expectations in US higher education. Following the film, there will be an opportunity to discuss how what was learned from the film may help us understand and support the diverse multilingual and international students at Dickinson. Participants need not have attended Working with Multilingual Writers Part 1 to participate in Part 2.

Course Design Collaboratory

The Course Design Collaboratory offers professors a collaborative and productive environment to finalize your syllabus and assignments before the semester begins. We will meet in the Waidner-Spahr Library where you will have space to work on your course design. In addition, you will be able to sign up for consultations with various campus experts. They will be available to consult on such topics as the research process and information literacy; digital and multimedia projects; best practices for students with disabilities; designing and teaching writing; syllabi and learning goals; different pedagogies (i.e. collaborative, active learning, etc.); and diversity and inclusion in the classroom, among others. You can choose as many consultations as you wish to attend, work on your course materials between consultations, share ideas with fellow faculty, and enjoy lunch together.

Teaching the WID Course

The workshop will provide you with an opportunity to discuss with your colleagues ways in which to shape or refine an existing WID course and make the WID criteria support the content-based learning outcomes of your course. We will discuss:

What is WiD? How do I plan a WiD course?
How do I create effective assignment prompts?
How do I sequence and scaffold writing tasks?

In addition, Emily Marshall and Tony Underwood of the economics department will present their model of an econometrics WiD course.

You will receive lunch and a stipend for participating.

Joining a Faculty Planning, Writing, and Support Group and Maintaining Work-Life Balance

Facilitators: Noreen Lape, Associate Provost of Academic Affairs/ Director of the Writing Program; Steve Riccio, Lecturer in International Business and Management

This workshop is for faculty who are interested in joining a weekly Planning, Writing, and Support Group. PWS group provide support, accountability, and, in some cases, feedback for faculty as they make progress toward their scholarship goals, which may range from planning to drafting to revising projects. If you prefer to work with specialists in your field, you may choose to create your own group prior to this meeting. If you wish to join a group and the members need not be specialists, you can form a group at the meeting.

There will be three parts to this session.

Steve Riccio will discuss work-life balance and introduce participants to Cal Newport’s “Deep Work” scheduling model – a model meant to address the problem, as Newport describes it, of spending too much of time on “autopilot” and allowing distractions to undermine deep work. The goal of this discussion is for participants to create their own scheduling model that will yield greater efficiency and work/life balance.
Participants will form groups (or announce their formation) and discuss the rules of engagement.
Participants will also learn about the characteristics of effective peer groups – how working with a peer group differs from working with an editor’s peer feedback.

Facilitating Successful Peer Reviews – Workshop and Lunch

Facilitator: Noreen Lape, Associate Provost of Academic Affairs/ Director of the Writing Program

How do writers become revisers? We will discuss how to explain “global revision” to students, particularly how it differs from editing or proofreading. We will also learn how to set up peer review groups, monitor student performance in those groups, guide students to produce quality feedback, and assess their revisions. Take-aways will include a peer review rubric and revision guides.

Working with Multilingual Writers – Workshop and Lunch

Facilitator: John Katunich, Associate Director of the Writing Program

How can we help international and multilingual students grow as writers? How may culture shape the way they approach writing and the writing process? What is important to know about second language acquisition that would help us understand the strengths and challenges that multilingual writers bring to their writing? This interactive workshop will orient faculty to best practices for supporting multilingual and international writers, and facilitate dialogue about the multilingual and international writers whom we encounter in our classrooms.

Responding to Student Writing – Workshop and Lunch

Facilitator: Noreen Lape, Associate Provost of Academic Affairs/ Director of the Writing Program

With a focus on managing the paper load, we will consider how to respond to student writing in a way that helps students grow as writers and thinkers. Examining the art of composing margin notes and endnotes, we will discuss approaches to commenting, the pitfalls of over-commenting, our purpose and sense of audience when commenting, and the amount of emphasis to place on sentence-level (grammatical) errors. We will also talk about how you can adapt the new Writing Program Rubric to your courses and use it as a tool for grading and responding to student writing.

Faculty Writing, Research, and Publication

A Brown Bag Lunch Series

The Faculty Writing, Research, and Publication program seeks to support the scholarly endeavors of faculty. There are two components to the program, allowing faculty to choose their level of participation. First, there is an opportunity for interested faculty to form weekly Planning, Writing, and Support (PWS) groups. Second, there is a year-long, monthly workshop series. While some workshops are specifically for the PWS groups, most workshops are open to all faculty who are interested in developing strategies for increasing their productivity, creating a more efficient research process, winning grants, and getting published.

Each month, you will receive an email invitation to the upcoming workshop and a link to a Doodle poll where you can RSVP. All workshops will take place in Althouse 207 except the November 9th workshop, which will be in Stern 11.

Joining a Faculty Planning, Writing, and Support Group while Maintaining Work-Life Balance

Facilitators: Noreen Lape, Associate Provost of Academic Affairs/ Director of the Writing Program; and Steve Riccio, Lecturer in International Business and Management

This workshop is for faculty who are interested in joining a weekly Planning, Writing, and Support Group. The purpose of the PWS group is to create a safe space that supports faculty as they make progress toward their scholarship goals, which may range from planning to drafting to revising projects. If you prefer to work with specialists in your field, you may choose to create your own group prior to this meeting. If you wish to join a group and the members need not be specialists, you can form a group at the meeting.

There will be three parts to this session. 1.) Participants will form groups (or announce their formation) and discuss the rules of engagement. 2.) Steve Riccio will discuss work-life balance and introduce participants to Cal Newport's "Deep Work" scheduling model - a model meant to address the problem, as Newport describes it, of spending too much of time on "autopilot" and allowing distractions to undermine deep work. The goal of this discussion is for participants to create their own scheduling model that will yield greater efficiency and work/life balance. 3.) Participants will also learn about the characteristics of effective peer groups - how working with a peer group differs from working with an editor's peer feedback.

What Editors Want: Top Tips from Journal Editors

Facilitators: David Jackson, Associate Professor of Physics; Eleanor Mitchell, Director of Library Services; Nicoletta Marini-Maio, Associate Professor of Italian & Film Studies;Dave Richeson, Professor of Mathematics

Dickinson faculty who are also journal editors will offer tips on working with journals to get published. For the past five years, David Jackson has edited The American Journal of Physics, a highly-selective international journal that focuses on the needs and intellectual interests of college and university physics educators. He will address the entire editorial process, from submission to publication (including rejections and appeals), with special emphasis on topics likely to be of interest to science faculty, such as the preparation of figures and graphs. Nicoletta Marini-Maio has been the principal editor of gender/sexuality/italy (g/s/i), an international journal that publishes articles in English and Italian. Before that, she coedited an Italian printed journal, Quaderni del '900 from 2011-2012. She will give advice on topics such as the preliminary selection or rejection of received contributions, criteria to assign selected articles to external readers, the editor's role as a mediator between readers and authors, and the editor's expectations about quality of revisions, including linguistic, stylistic, and editorial norms in an international environment. Eleanor Mitchell has served for eight years as editor of RSR, an international journal published in Great Britain for library and information studies professionals. She will discuss submitting to the appropriate journal by considering editorial statement of aims and scope, editorial board members, readership, previous authors, publishing schedule, types of articles included, journal impact factor, open access policy, and timeline for reviews, revisions, publication. For almost three years, Dave Richeson has been editor of Math Horizons. A non-traditional venue, Math Horizons is a magazine published by the Mathematical Association of America that is aimed at an undergraduate readership. Most articles are written by mathematics faculty, but some are authored or co-authored by students. Dave will discuss the homework an author should do before should do before submitting an article to a journal. He will give advice for faculty who have students who have done publishable-quality work. He will also discuss the benefits and costs of being an editor on his own career.

What Granting Agencies Want: Tips for Writing Effective Research Grants

Facilitators: Alyssa DeBlasio, Associate Professor of Russian; John Henson, Senior Associate Provost and Professor of Biology; Glen Peterman, Director of Sponsored Research

Alyssa DeBlasio has been awarded an NEH summer stipend and an ACLS yearlong fellowship, as well as assorted other grants from Humanities Centers and the Department of State. She will discuss cultivating habits that not only make grant writing less tedious but also contribute to a scholar's productivity. John Henson has generated over $2.5 million dollars in external funds from grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Research Corporation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as well as from fellowships from the Luckey P. Markey Foundation, the Marine Biological Laboratory and the US Department of State. He has also served on numerous grant proposal review panels for the NSF and the NIH and will be discussing the criteria that these panels use in ranking proposals." Glen Peterman of the Sponsored Projects Office assists faculty members with all facets of the grant seeking process for support of scholarly research, sabbaticals and fellowships. He will present some tips for preparing successful proposals.

The Habits of Highly Successful Researchers

Facilitator: Chris Bombaro, Associate Director for Information Literacy and Research Services

Research resources are constantly changing and becoming ever more complicated. In this interactive session, Christine Bombaro, author of Research Methods and Resources for Students and Scholars (Scarecrow, 2012), will consider how to make the best use of the vast array of databases and other services available through the library. Topics include advanced search techniques using discovery services such as JumpStart, selecting resources in a multi-disciplinary environment, citation searching, setting automatic search updates, and keeping track of your research. She will also respond to questions about research and library products and services from participants.

From Idea/Dissertation to Book

Facilitator: Amy Farrell, Professor of American Studies; Sarah McGaughey, Associate Professor of German; Wendy Moffat, Professor of English

This workshop is for writers who are seeking tips on how to develop an idea or dissertations into a book-length manuscript, and craft a proposal to an academic press. Amy Farrell will discuss the process by which she turned her dissertation into Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and a general idea about fat and dieting into her book Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (NYU Press, 2011). Sarah McGaughey, author of Ornament as Crisis: Architecture, Design, and Modernity in Hermann Broch's "The Sleepwalkers" (Northwestern UP, 2016) will discuss transforming a dissertation into a full-length book, staying on task, and choosing a publisher. Wendy Moffat is author of A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2010), which was named a Top Ten Book of 2010 by Janet Maslin of the New York Times. She will talk about the mid-process of discerning if an idea is really a book, and if so, what kind of book: deciding on audience, finding an agent, and preparing the pitch.

Publishing in Scholarly Journals: From Selecting a Venue to Retaining Rights to Your Work

Facilitator: Jessica Howard, Electronic Resources and Web Services Librarian

You've written an article and are excited to get it published. But how do you identify which journal(s) to submit to? What do you do if a publisher wants you to pay to publish the work? What publishing options or access models might the journal present, and how do you choose between them? How can you maintain key rights to your published work, including sharing it with your colleagues or posting it on your website? Electronic resource specialist Jessica Howard will help you anticipate and understand the decisions you will make as you publish your work.

Transferring Lessons Learned in the PWS Group to the Writing Classroom

Facilitator: Noreen Lape, Associate Provost of Academic Affairs/Director of the Writing Program

The goal of the workshop is to come up with a list of specific writing-related classroom practices that derive from insights gleaned from work with the writing groups. Given the connection between reflection on faculty writing group experiences and effectiveness as a writing teacher, this workshop will ask writing group participants to discuss how they will transfer newly acquired insights about the writing process to the writing classroom.

What new writing strategies did you try that you could use with your students?
What did you learn from your group about the variety of writing processes? How could you share these insights with your students?
What did you learn about helpful feedback that you would like to emulate with your students and teach them to do in peer review?

Sustaining the PWS Group Momentum over the Summer

Facilitator: Noreen Lape, Associate Provost of Academic Affairs/Director of the Writing Program

We will celebrate the accomplishments of the PWS Groups with a luncheon. Groups will set goals and create a summer research agenda and timeline. Participants will also assess the effectiveness of the Planning, Writing, and Support Groups.

Sharing the Tools: How to Think With Student Writers

Presenters: David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen, Muhlenberg College

Our primary goal in this workshop is to offer you the opportunity to experiment with various writing and observation strategies in Writing Analytically. After a brief presentation on our major premises, we will be asking you to try some of its recommended activities together. The goal of these activities is to make the classroom the site of what Dewey termed “systematic reflection”—a place where faculty members think with students, sharing with them the means of idea production, which in turn fosters the kind of collegial relationships that turn classes into collaborative learning communities. This is what we mean by the phrase in our title—“sharing the tools.” The tools are activities we practice with students in virtually every class.

Here is a short list of what these activities offer:

ways of using writing to help students better understand and become more articulate about reading
ways of using writing to help students become more aware of their own acts of mind as thinkers
ways of using writing to help students recover at least some of the joy they may once have had in writing
ways of using writing to help students become more observant and more flexible thinkers—capable of dwelling comfortably in uncertainty and seeking out rather than avoiding

Copyright Basics for Users and Producers of Intellectual Property

Presenters: Theresa Arndt & Jess Howard

What constitutes "fair use" of copyrighted materials in educational settings? How can you maintain key rights to your own published work, including sharing it with your colleagues or making it available online? We'll practice using an online tool for analyzing fair use questions, and also discuss your rights as an author and strategies for retaining those rights that matter most.

Working with ELL Writers

How can we help ELL students grow as writers? How does culture shape the way they approach writing tasks? Is it useful, or even helpful, to line-edit their work? When it comes to grammatical correctness, do we hold ESL writers to the same standards as native speakers? For this interactive workshop, Lisa Wolff, Associate Director of the Writing Program and Coordinator of ELL, will offer practical tips from her years of experience teaching ELL writing courses.

Making Team Writing Work

Team writing is a type of collaborative experience in which groups of students work together to create a group project. In many of our disciplines – particularly business, the sciences, and the social sciences, professionals often engage in team writing. Yet many of us are faced with challenges when we assign team writing to students. In this workshop, Helen Takacs, Associate Professor of International Business and Management, will discuss how she works with organized and manages team writing assignments in her classes. She will offer her insights and tips for orchestrating and assessing successful team writing projects. And she will consider how to turn group conflict into teachable moments. Participants will come away with a copy of Team Writing: A Guide to Working in Groups by Joanna Wolfe.

How Learning Works: A Faculty Panel

Last summer, nine faculty members gathered to discuss the book How Learning Works: Seven-Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. The authors make a convincing case that there can be real and measurable increases in student learning by bringing to bear at least some of the principles and practices they discuss. For this panel, two faculty members will describe the learning projects they created as a result of the summer study group. Chauncey Maher will discuss how he devised a learning project focused on teaching philosophy students to formulate objections to arguments. Mark Aldrich will explain how he devised a learning project that accesses students' prior knowledge as a way to help them move beyond plot summary and develop their critical thinking skills. In sharing how they assessed their learning projects, these presenters will illustrate an approach to assessment rooted in learning theories and best practices.

Turning the Tables: Translating Second Language Learning and Writing Experiences to the Classroom and Writing Center

GUEST SPEAKER: Carol Severino, Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Center and Writing Fellows Director, the University of Iowa

Most of us have experienced learning and writing in a second language: for example, feeling overwhelmed and disoriented by a barrage of new data, but exhilarated when we finally acquire control of a language feature or rhetorical form; criticizing the pace, sequencing, or non-communicativeness of lessons, but admiring our teacher's balanced responses to our own and our classmates' speaking and writing.

What are the most productive ways we can engage in and reflect on our own second language learning and writing experiences? How can we connect our experiences to theory and research to employ them in teaching and tutoring? For example, how can empathy from "having been there, done that--on the other side of the desk" translate to pedagogy? Using the diary and learning journal studies of Kathleen Bailey and Andrew Cohen; George Braine's work on non-native speakers of a language who teach it; and the experiences of Dickinson College's language and writing teachers and tutors, this presentation-workshop will generate effective methods to translate our second language learning and writing experiences to the classroom and writing center.

How Learning Works

For those of you who want to complement your content-area teaching with mindfulness about how students learn, How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (Jossey-Bass, 2010) couples research on learning processes with practical classroom techniques. Ambrose et al. discuss topics like motivating students, providing the most effective feedback, facilitating the transfer of knowledge from one class or subject area to another, helping students become self-directed learners, among others. The authors of How Learning Works ultimately make a convincing case that there can be real, and measurable, increases in student learning by bringing to bear at least some of the principles they discuss.

We will meet for three days in May to discuss the book's content and plan modest projects (May 29-31). For the projects, you will identify a teaching/learning issue -- perhaps the need to redesign a syllabus, develop a new kind of assignment, redesign an assignment, or scaffold an assignment sequence, etc. We will meet again for two meetings in August at which you will present your projects (August 11 & August 15). Using the principles in the book, the group will offer feedback on the projects and think of ways to collect data to assess the projects.

Creating Effective Writing Assignments for Foreign Language Courses

Often writing assignments for foreign language beginners have learning goals related to grammar but not necessarily to writing. For this workshop, you are invited to share your assignments for your 100-level students with each other as we discuss enhancing those assignments with some basic writing-related learning outcomes. We will also discuss the kind of professor feedback on assignments that would prompt meaningful conversations between learners and MWC tutors.

First-Year Writers and Writing Pedagogy A Workshop for New Faculty

In this workshop specifically designed for new faculty orientation, Noreen Lape, Director of the Writing Program/Norman M. Eberly Multilingual Writing Center, will give an overview of the support services that the Writing Program offers new faculty. She will then explain the writing challenges first-year writers face, discuss the learning outcomes of the First-Year Seminar Program, and introduce the new Writing Program Rubric. This is the first of a series of three Writing Program workshops for new faculty.

Helping Students to Write Analytically

Do your students difficulty moving from summary to thoughtful analysis? While this workshop will be of special interest to First-Year Seminar faculty who have adopted Writing Analytically for their classes, anyone looking for techniques to deepen your students' analytical thinking is welcome to attend. We will examine some of the best techniques from the Writing Analytically textbook, and we will discuss ways to implement those techniques into the writing process. This workshop will be co-facilitated by Noreen Lape and Sarah Kersh. who served as Research Assistant for the fourth edition of Writing Analytically.

Adapting the New Writing Program Rubric to Your Classes

This workshop will introduce you to the new Writing Program Rubric and show you how to adapt it to your WR and Senior Capstone writing courses. In June with the help of an outside writing assessment consultant, a team of seven faculty and three administrators created a draft of the new Writing Program Rubric and assessed the first group of FYS, WR, and Senior Capstone essays. Noreen Lape, Director of the Writing Program, will present the rubric and the preliminary findings from the data. Ed Webb (Wednesday) and Mara Donaldson (Friday), two members of the assessment team, will discuss how they adapted the rubric and used it in their courses this semester.

The Art of Creating Effective Assignments

What makes an assignment clear, engaging, and intellectually challenging? We will look at the various components of writing assignments: key terms, task, format, requirements, audience, purpose, and process. We will spend most of the time critiquing and offering feedback to each other on assignments. Please bring copies of one of your FYS assignments to the workshop.

Assessing Essays in the First-Year Seminar: An Interactive Workshop

What is the best that we can expect from an FYS student when it comes to writing? For that matter, what makes an essay mediocre? We will practice assessing and responding to FYS essays using an FYS rubric and writing samples from former FYS students. Besides developing a better understanding of FYS grading criteria, we will also discuss how we might respond to the writers in margin and endnotes in order to provoke revision.

Building an Effective Assignment Sequence

What is the best way to sequence assignments throughout a course? We will look at several writing assignments for one course and discuss the logic of the assignment sequence. We will focus on how to scale and build assignments in order to guide students toward more complex thinking and writing. We will also consider the benefits of assigning ungraded and/or in-class writing within a sequence. Please bring your syllabus or descriptions of assignments to the workshop.

First-Year Seminar Teaching Circle

FYS faculty who are interested in discussing their challenges and successes as they teach FYS are invited to attend this Teaching Circle. Come to listen, to share ideas, and/or to pose questions and concerns to the group. All topics are determined by the faculty members of the Teaching Circle.

How to Create a Rubric

"Scientific Paper"
"The Humanities/Social Science Paper"

Rubrics are a way for you to define the learning goals you want your students to achieve and to communicate your expectations to your students. How do you choose what to include in your rubric? How much is too much detail? During the Friday session, we will create a rubric for a scientific paper. Then on Monday we will develop a rubric for a humanities/social sciences research paper. In the end, you will come away with a rubric that you can adopt or modify to your needs.

Making Collaborative Writing Assignments Work

Have you ever wanted to assign a collaborative writing project but refrained from doing so because it can be cumbersome to organize and manage? Have you ever given a collaborative writing assignment only to find group dynamics undermining the learning goals? In this workshop, we will discuss tips for orchestrating and assessing successful collaborative writing projects. We will also consider how to turn group conflict into teachable moments. You will come away with an excellent textbook that will guide students through the collaborative writing process.

Making Peer Review Work: A Conversation with Writing Associates

How do we facilitate a successful peer review? How do we teach writers to become revisers? Many of us recognize the importance of students receiving feedback from peers as they write; yet we also struggle to make peer review productive, often wondering if it is a waste of time. This workshop is for those of you want to make peer review work in your classroom. Writing Associates, who have facilitated FYS peer review groups all semester, will offer their insights on how students learn to offer quality feedback, what causes peer review groups to stagnate or falter, and what kind of professor support contributes to a successful peer review environment.

New Faculty Workshop: First-Year Writers and Writing Pedagogy

New Faculty Workshop: Prompting Writer Re-vision

How do writers become revisers? We will discuss how to explain revision to students, particularly how it differs from editing or proofreading. We will learn how to orchestrate productive peer review groups, seek support from the writing center, and hold effective conferences with writers. Finally, we will discover techniques that will enable us to hold students accountable for multiple drafts (without having to read every draft ourselves).

New Faculty Workshop: Responding to Student Writing

We will consider how to respond to student writing in a way that helps students grow as writers and thinkers. Examining the art of margin notes and end notes, we will discuss approaches to commenting, the pitfalls of over-commenting, our purpose and sense of audience when commenting, and the amount of emphasis to place on sentence-level (grammatical) errors.

Podcast Assignments: A Faculty Panel

Why assign podcasts as opposed to traditional essays and research papers? How is writing incorporated into podcast assignments? How do students benefit from doing podcast assignments? What podcasts assignments are particularly successful and what makes them successful? Three colleagues - Chris Francese (Classics), Sheri Lullo (Art History), and Kristi Humphreys (Chemistry) will share their podcasts assignments and the examples of the final product created by students. If you assign or are thinking about assigning a podcast project, this workshop is for you.

Preparing to Teach Writing in the First-Year Seminar

What should FYS students be taught about writing? This workshop explains writing instruction in the First-Year Seminar. We will discuss the APSC-legislated goals of FYS, sequencing assignments, integrating information and digital literacy goals, incorporating mini-lessons on writing, and designing the syllabus. By the end of the workshop, you will have ideas about course design as you head into the summer. The two sessions are repeats, so you should choose to attend one or the other.

The Research Paper: Pet Peeves and Peccadilloes

Do you find that sometimes your students cite the source but copy the words without using quote marks? Does it seem that they all use sources ornamentally? Maybe you have even seen their complete rough drafts with parenthetical reminders to themselves to "insert quote here." We will discuss the frustrating issues that come up again and again regarding student research writing with the goal of formulating solutions and interventions.

Responding to Student Writers

Special Guest Facilitator: Dr. Nancy Sommers,
Sosland Chair in Expository Writing, Harvard University

In this workshop, we will reflect on what it means to be a thoughtful reader of student work. Research on responding has shown that teacher commentary, more than any other form of instruction, shapes the way students learn to write. To our students, it isn't just that without a reader "the whole process is diminished"; rather, it is with a thoughtful reader that the whole process is enriched and deepened. Yet most teachers acknowledge that they don't know how students use their comments or why students find some comments useful and others not. As we examine the ways we comment, we will discuss a wide range of teaching topics-creating and sequencing assignments, motivating students to become responsible writers, and teaching academic writing-and we'll take time to talk about how to use A Writer's Reference as a teaching tool.

Sequencing Writing Assignments: A Workshop for New Faculty

Teaching the WID Course

The workshop will provide you with an opportunity to discuss with your colleagues ways in which to shape or refine an existing WR course and make the WR criteria support the content-based learning outcomes of your course. We will also talk about how you can adapt the new Writing Program Rubric to your courses and use it as a tool for grading and responding to student writing.

Here are some topics we may discuss:

writing clear assignments in which you ask for what you want to get;
sequencing assignments effectively in your course;
using informal, low-stakes writing to support learning;
teaching the writing process - invention and revision;
facilitating productive peer reviews;
using the Writing Program Rubric to build your own rubrics
responding effectively to student writing so as to provoke revision;

You will come away from the workshop with feedback from your colleagues to use as you plan your course and with a new set of tools for teaching writing.

Using Low-Risk, (Ungraded), Exploratory Writing to Enhance Student Learning

Exploratory writing brings depth to the writing process and clarity to the learning experience. Exploratory writing can help blocked writers discover ideas and sediment knowledge; it can help anxious writers free up the working memory needed to concentrate on a task. In this workshop, we will examine several types of exploratory writing and share tips on how to integrate such assignments into a course. We will also hear from faculty panelists, Amy Wlodarski (Music) and Sarah Bryant (Mathematics), who will speak to the benefits of exploratory writing assignments.

When Writing Prompts Lead to Paralysis: A Conversation with Writing Center Tutors

How is it that our students misconstrue the simplest of our instructions? What is it about some of our assignments that, at times, lead students astray? How can we make our writing prompts any clearer? If the cardinal rule of assignment construction is "you get what you ask for," this workshop is for those of you who thought you asked for one thing but got something totally unexpected. Experienced Writing Center tutors, who have worked with students across the disciplines on all kinds of assignments, will offer their insights into the minds of writers as they process writing prompts.

Working with International Student Writers

This interactive workshop for faculty and administrators at Dickinson, Bucknell, and Lafayette Colleges will offer participants strategies and tools to help English Language Learners improve their writing skills.

Guest facilitator Dr. Susan Miller-Cochran is Associate Professor of English at North Carolina State University and Director of the First-Year Writing Program. She is the co-author of five books and numerous articles and chapters. Her most recent book, An Insider's Guide to Academic Writing, co-written with Roy Stamper and Stacey Cochran, is currently under contract with Bedford/St. Martin's. Dr. Miller-Cochran recently served as chair of the CCCC Committee on Second Language Writing from 2005-2010. She has also served on the Executive Committee of the Council of Writing Program Administrators.

Writing in the Disciplines: The Making of a WR Course

How does your discipline shape the way you teach writing? How do you teach your students the language and conventions of your specific academic discipline? What constitutes revision in your discipline? Do you have to offer feedback on every rough draft written by every student in the class? Or are there other ways to help students re-see their ideas? We will look at these questions and more over three separate workshops facilitated by faculty from each of the three divisions.

Friday, February 26: Sarah St. Angelo, Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Monday, March 1: Elizabeth Lee, Assistant Professor of Art History
Friday, March 26: Jerry Philogene, Assistant Professor of American Studies

Regardless of your division, you are welcome to attend any and all of these sessions.

Teaching with Compassion in Post-Pandemic Times
Facilitators: Noreen Lape, Associate Provost and Director of the Writing Program; and Donna Bickford, Director of the Women’s and Gender Resource CenterAt the beginning of the pandemic, there were multiple articles in the

Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed centered on the accountability vs. compassion debate. In other words, as the pandemic worsened, should faculty focus their pedagogy on holding all students to the same rigorous academic standards, or should faculty display empathy and compassion for students who are suffering from stress, trauma, and various other inequities?

While the pandemic exacerbated trauma and inequity, trauma and inequities have always existed for our students. As the pandemic becomes more manageable and we move back to campus life, should we readjust our notions of student accountability and instructor compassion? In what ways can we practice what some have called “compassionate accountability”?

In preparation for a discussion about balancing compassion and accountability, participants will be asked to listen to the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast: “The Role of Faculty in Student Mental Health.”

Faculty Self-Awareness and Self-Care
Facilitator: Lauren Strunk, Executive Director of the Dickinson College Wellness Center

This workshop will provide an opportunity to get away from our busy lives and take time to reflect and learn from our experiences. This workshop will be used to question the long-term viability and sustainability of the ways that we work, highlighting ways of working that may produce stress, conflict, physical and mental health concerns and exhaustion. We will develop skills, practices and ideas to help us make changes in our day to day lives that will support our wellbeing and explore ways of working which keep ourselves healthy.

Equitable Grading PRactices: Contract Grading, Specifications Grading, Ungrading
Facilitators: Sarah McGaughey, Associate Professor of German; Melissa Wehler, Instructional Design Specialist; Noreen Lape, Associate Provost and Director of the Writing Program

In “The Case Against Grades,” Alfie Kohn reports three conclusions from the research on grading.

1. Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning.
2. Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task.
3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking.

This workshop is for those who have changed their grading systems or are curious about alternative forms of grading. You will learn about three alternatives to the traditional grading system: contract grading, specifications grading, and ungrading. We will discuss such issues as inclusivity, disciplinary differences in implementation, and appropriateness for varying levels of learning. Discussions will allow participants to consider both small and large changes to grading in their courses.

How to Utilize a Quantitative Reasoning Associate (QRA): Tips and Tricks for Implementing a QRA in Your Course
Facilitator: Jackie Campbell, Associate Director of the Quantitative Reasoning Center

Quantitative Reasoning Associates (QRAs) are trained students who work in a pedagogical partnership with a faculty member in any course with quantitative content. QRAs can help students with their learning process, collaborate with faculty who are looking to transform their teaching, and increase student motivation in a course. In this session, we will discuss various approaches to using a QRA to improve student learning in your course.

Introduction to ESRI Story Maps: A Spatially Integrated Mapping Application

Facilitator: Gordon Cromley, Director of the Spatial Literacy Center
Story Mapping platforms have become very popular for their versatility. While various companies and institutions produce story map software, this workshop focuses on ESRI Story Maps, a GIS application available through Dickinson’s ArcGIS Online web portal. By attending this workshop, you will learn how to add widgets to a story map template, add an ESRI quick map to your story map, modify the template of your ESRI story map, and receive an introduction to online resources that teach you additional story map capabilities.

Rubrics and Answer Keys: How to Support Student Learning while Problem-solving in Quantitative Courses

Facilitator: Jackie Campbell, Associate Director of the Quantitative Reasoning Center
Problem-solving in quantitative courses can be quite challenging for students. Students often ask for additional practice problems, but faculty often find themselves constrained by time limitations. In this session, we will discuss ways in which rubrics and answer keys can be utilized to support student learning, give students feedback, and provide additional practice without costing too much time in-class time.