Community of Practice Spring 2022

Any instructor that wants to learn more about being a reflective teacher.  Pre-Promotion instructional staff who are interested in improving their instruction.  

Being a reflective teacher is a practice that allows instructors to examine the choices they make in designing their curriculum and takes student and peer feedback to make revisions to instruction to improve student learning and success. In our Reflective Teaching Community of Practice, participants will be asked to think critically about their teaching and, with help from their peers, modify their instructional approaches as they would like.

During your time in the community of practice, you will be matched with 2 – 3 other instructors. This collaborative peer group will be asked to observe each other a few times during the semester, using an agreed upon set of observation norms.

Peer observation can be either formative or summative. Formative observations are designed to provide guidance and advice to help an instructor improve. To be most effective, formative evaluations should be confidential and should remain the property of the instructor being observed. Formative peer observations give the instructor opportunities to reexamine their teaching with an observer who is a colleague. Summative evaluations are not confidential and usually performed for use in personnel decisions such as promotions and for comparison in relation to other colleagues in the department

This experience is designed to be a non-evaluative, supportive, and growth-based process. Participants are coached in setting a teaching goal based on personal self-reflections. They will then observe others to give feedback on their group members’ goals as well as reflecting on their own practice utilizing their group members’ feedback.

• Provides instructors with an opportunity to be more intentional, specific and clear about quality teaching and learning and the various ways they may go about achieving it.
• Provides instructors with independence and flexibility to enhance their teaching quality by helping them identify the areas they want to focus on.
• Helps instructors develop and improve their collegiality through the development of a team that has the potential to provide support in addition to an honest review of their teaching.
• Allows for instructors across units to explore teaching and learning from a different perspective/discipline.
• Preparation of a teaching portfolio that can focus you on what aspects of teaching improvement desired for PRT.

The Peer Review Collaborative is meant to focus instructors on enhancing or improving their teaching through the use of peer review.  While it is not explicitly meant as a way to review teaching for promotion, the development of a teaching portfolio throughout the process will most certainly help faculty develop that aspect of their promotion file.  

Anyone who is interested in being more purposeful and reflective of their teaching is welcome to participate.

To participate in the semester long experience would take about 10 to 20 hours of your time over the course of the semester. Please take a look at the tentative schedule below.  

1. Journal Reading: Let’s agree upon the principles of effective instruction.
2. Initial Training: Each semester, CATL will host an initial training workshop for those faculty interested in participating in the program. The training workshop will:
   • introduce the program to the participating instructors
   • Discuss Principles of Effective Teaching
   • Create space for instructors to do some initial self-reflection regarding their instruction
   • Provide guidance for instructors to develop an instructional goal for the semester
   • Provide an initial opportunity for instructors to get to know their peers
   • Introduce faculty to a variety of teaching observation protocols.
   • Formation of observation teams.
3. Peer Observation Meeting: Each semester, teams will conduct 2 cycles of observation. Part of the initial meeting is to discuss schedules and give teams an opportunity to discuss their semester teaching goals with their observational teams.
4. Observation Cycle #1: Each instructional team will conduct observations of the other instructors in their team.
5. CATL Debrief: After the first observational cycle, CATL will host a meeting/workshop to debrief the experience and facilitate the creation of new or modification of previous learning goals.
6. Repeat Steps 3 – 5
7. End of semester debrief/celebration.