Faculty Development

Twice a year, the SCTLC hosts an all-day professional development event that routinely covers teaching excellence, inclusive teaching, student success, educational technology, and other topics. Each May, we also host a “Special Topic” event with an outsider speaker. We have welcomed Jeanne Hey (author of The Balancing Acts of Academic Leadership), Cyndi Kernahan (author of Teaching about Race and Racism: Lessons from a White Professor), and Meredith Goldsmith, Professor of English at Ursinus College, who led a discussion on “Leading Through Uncertainty.”

Fall Faculty Development Day 2024

Spring Faculty Development Day 2024

The Simpson College Teaching and Learning Center provides formative, confidential teacher observations and consultations for any instructor who is looking for feedback on particular aspects of their craft. Reach out to mark.pleiss@simpson.edu for more information.

The Director of the Teaching and Learning Center supports faculty in their first year with a day-long orientation day in August and meetings throughout their first year. The SCTLC also pairs new faculty with a mentor from outside their unit. If you are interested in participating, email Mark at mark.pleiss@simpson.edu. Stipends, food, coffee, and an invitation to an end-of-year party are offered to all mentors who meet with their mentee once a month from August through April.

The Director of the SCTLC oversees the application and budgeting process for faculty travel to academic conferences and collaborates with Campus Advisory Committee and the Committee for Academic Diversity and Inclusion on research, scholarship and creative output grants, course development grants, team grants related to diversity and inclusion, and exigency grants for projects that fall outside the scope of these opportunities. See the SCTLC internal page for deadlines and details.

2024-2025 Inclusive Excellence in College Teaching FLC. Inclusive teaching, research-based methods, and best practices for formative teacher observations are all at the core of this year’s 2024-2025 Faculty Learning Community. You will read and discuss research and theory on inclusive teaching and the wider science of teaching and learning and engage in guided self-reflection of your courses and lessons. Moreover, you will learn how to conduct a formative teacher observation and collect data with an Interactional Analysis and the Generalized Observation and Reflection Protocol (GORP).

2023-2024 Advising FLC. Associate Professor of Mathematics Ross Sweet welcomes 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-year faculty to our Faculty Learning Community on Advising. The programming aligns with the advising schedule and ranges from nuts-and-bolts trainings on registration strategies to holistic approaches to engaging students and making them feel welcome and included.

Spring 2023 Vocation FLC. Professor of Education Chad Timm leads a collection of selected readings on the topic of vocation in undergraduate learning.

Each year, the SCTLC offers a writing group that is designed to advance the research and creative projects of our faculty. We provide structure, guidance, and support for faculty at all levels of their careers, and we discuss topics that include: daily writing habits, identifying common barriers, overcoming rejection, and other topics.

Each year, the SCTLC offers a variety of workshops and lectures related to professional development. Our Monday GIFT (Great Ideas for Teaching Sessions) run on Mondays from 12:35-12:55 p.m. on Zoom, and we run two and three-part series once a semester on Tuesdays from 11:45-12:45. This semester, we are also hosting lectures from faculty who just completed their sabbaticals on Fridays from 3:30-4:30 p.m. See below for more details.

Fall 2024-2025 Workshops.pdf

The SCTLC oversees IDEA EVALUATE, the student course evaluation system of Simpson College. See the internal web page for a copy of the survey that students receive, information on how to setup your learning outcomes, and tips for interpreting your survey responses and increasing student response rates. The Director of the SCTLC and/or Instructional Designer are also available for confidential consultations about student feedback.

The SCTLC houses a full-time instructional designer, Melissa Daniels (melissa.daniels@simpson.edu), who can help you with all questions related to Moodle, Online Course Design, Educational Technology, Video Editing Software, Accessibility and Universal Design, and other questions regarding teaching and learning. Melissa also offers an annual summer course design program, SOFA, and 20-Minute GIFT (Great Ideas for Teaching) Sessions. See “Faculty Development Programming” for dates of those presentations. The SCTLC Internal Page also has videos, tutorials, and other trainings on several educational technology resources (Moodle, Slido, Nearpod, Videoscribe, Perusall, and more!). Resources for inclusive course design and instructional methods are also available on the SCTLC internal page.

ANNUAL SIMPSON ONLINE FACULTY ACADEMY (SOFA) 

Five-Week summer course design institute with a fully asynchronous format and weekly assignments

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:  

Upon completing the class, attendees will be able to:

• Use Moodle at a higher level

• Understand the best practices and common language for course design and online learning through the Online Course Quality Review Rubric (OSCQR)

• Apply the OSCQR rubric to their online presence (or course) and execute it in Moodle through lessons, assignments, and evaluations

• Create and operationalize widgets, video recordings, asynchronous lessons, the gradebook, and more

• Engage in further work related to best practices in online and in-person teaching and learning

• Upon completion of all the assignments in the 5-week course, faculty will receive a stipend.

If you are interested in completing the SOFA course during the summer session, please e-mail Melissa Daniels, melissa.daniels@simpson.edu.