Penn State Intercom......April 4 , 2002
Consortium opens door
to collaboration among
faculty to improve learning
By Annemarie Mountz
Public
Information
When Colloquy VIII
convenes on May 8, it will bring together a group of faculty members intent
upon improving the way their students learn. This formalized program is
one of several instituted by the Teaching and Learning Consortium (TLC)
in the nearly three years of its formal existence, and arguably is one
of its most popular. 
William C. Lasher, associate professor and chair of Mechanical Engineering at Penn State Erie, put together a team of six faculty members to attend last year's Colloquy.
"I was a relative newcomer to active learning at that point, and I thought it was a nice overview," he said. "We can learn specific things that we can implement in our classes, but more importantly it is an opportunity to take a break from our daily routine to focus entirely on teaching, to talk with other faculty and to clarify our thoughts about teaching."
Barbara Cantalupo, associate professor of English at Penn State Lehigh Valley, plans to attend this year's Colloquy.
"I hope to learn strategies for implementing a service learning module in an English composition class, but I also look forward to the opportunity to share other ideas about teaching and learning methods with my peers from other colleges and across disciplines," she said.
Cora Dzubak, director of The Learning Center at Penn State York, also is looking forward to this year's Colloquy.
"I can't help but think that exposure to shared problems and solutions will strengthen my teaching skills and techniques that I use with my classes," she said. "Sometimes it's hard to independently identify ways to improve what we're doing, so I'm typically enthusiastic about learning more about how others respond to similar situations. I honestly cannot recall ever having attended a teaching colloquy where I didn't come away with renewed enthusiasm due to hearing some fresh ideas."
Collaboration fostered
It is that opportunity to share experiences and ideas that makes the Teaching and Learning Consortium so valuable to faculty University-wide.
"No one unit can do it by itself," said John Cahir, vice provost and dean of Undergraduate Education. "While there had been lots of good activities going on in the past, they were somewhat disparate. Along came the Teaching and Learning Consortium led by John Brighton, to create numerous opportunities for people to get together. It enables them to work together to focus on various problems and discover who is making progress, how others can join in and learn what others were doing. It's sort of a follow-up on something John had been sponsoring while he was provost. Then when he took on the leadership of the TLC, he took the efforts to a much more organized level."
It is with passion that Brighton, executive vice president and provost emeritus, talks about the Teaching and Learning Consortium and its many programs to aid faculty in engaging students.
"We're constantly changing things, but that's the whole idea behind teaching and learning. One of the hard things about this is walking a fine line of change," said Brighton. "To instill the concept of 'All of us ought to be working on getting better at what we do,' and advocate active learning sometimes can be interpreted as 'You're telling me I'm doing something wrong.' What we're really saying is that you can do it better. We're trying to get faculty to understand that a lecture is fine, but we want to encourage people to engage the students more actively in addition to lecturing."
Brighton acknowledges that successfully facilitating classroom discussion and guiding learning in the classroom is significantly more work for faculty.
"You have to really be on your toes and alert. It's the same with students, maybe more so. Students will have to be more prepared for class. They will be more visible in class in terms of their ability to communicate and discuss topics. It takes some getting used to, but I think it's important that learning, like life, be an active, participatory activity."
That's where Colloquy helps. Several who attended last year did so for the opportunity to collaborate with other faculty and seek input on programs they were developing.
"Since we were in the beginning stages of a project, sharing it really helped us to think about the direction we were going. Faculty in the audience gave us great ideas that we had never thought of," said Kay Chick, assistant professor at Penn State Altoona.
Dr. Clark Venable and and Dr. Bob Marine hope to take some new ideas back to the College of Medicine at Hershey Medical Center after attending this year's Colloquy.
"We're really interested in what others in the Penn State community are doing in the areas of teaching and learning that might be new to us and have applicability to our programs," said Venable. "Also, we hope to find others doing work in the same area that we might collaborate with going forward. Whenever you get faculty with similar interests together in the same physical space it creates an environment of synergism from which new ideas and collaborations spring. It's good for faculty, good for students and good for the institution."
Other programs
Colloquy is one of several opportunities for faculty to gather and compare notes. Another popular TLC program is the Summer Teaching Academy.
"We had a Summer Teaching Academy last spring, after classes were over, for faculty who felt that they needed a little more breathing room to engage in workshops," Brighton said. "We had 10 different workshops on active and collaborative learning, teaching in large classes, working in teams, leadership, many different topics that focused on what I call student-centered learning."
Looking to the future
Other initiatives planned for this year are:
* consideration of an expansion of the Provost's Program for Departmentwide Initiatives for Improved Learning grants to include at least six additional academic units;
* a variety of workshops featuring national leaders to speak to the TLC membership and other faculty and students.;
* conducting of a survey of students to establish experiences and attitudes about using technology and active learning elements;
* discussing and developing strategies for supporting new or relatively new faculty in developing effective teaching methods centered on student engagement; and
* developing methods for communicating with faculty about the various programs for improving learning.
Cahir credits Brighton for the success of the TLC in promoting change in the classroom.
"Here is a very powerful, highly respected, senior officer of the University that everybody knew. Everybody knew that he stood behind quality, and now he has devoted his full efforts to teaching and learning. To me, that was the greatest windfall that could possibly happen. It made our work to improve teaching and learning much more effective and gave it wider impact. A lot of faculty were doing excellent projects. The issue that we had always faced was how to scale it up. How do we get it so that it permeates the whole University so that everybody benefits by it?"
That issue will continue to be addressed by the TLC. And as the consortium continues to move forward, it has several goals in sight for its fifth anniversary. According to the TLC annual report prepared last year, the TLC hopes to see "many more faculty, department heads and students engaged in what consortium members have found to be best practices for learning; many more students engaged more actively -- as individuals and as teams -- in learning; and many more students and faculty working together in teams to develop learning objectives and activities." Its leadership envisions "University-wide collaborations that generate and celebrate excellence in teaching and learning in a truly vibrant learning community."
If track record is any indication, Brighton and the TLC will meet those goals.
"We've worked hard at getting the information out, encouraging people to participate," Brighton said.
Annemarie Mountz can be reached at AMountz@psu.edu.