Month: March 2023

Teaching Resources (and more)

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Dear faculty, 

Starting in Summer 2020, the Office of Faculty Development has produced a number of tools and resources “on demand” – so to speak – to ensure that faculty could receive support and access information whenever they needed, to mitigate the fact that the office was not physically available during the early stages of the pandemic. 

Since then our resources have grown exponentially, so I have begun a process of curation to ensure that every faculty can access and navigate our tools easily. After all, it is useless to have a lot of resources if faculty don’t know where or how to find them. 

In this Tuesday Tip, I want to introduce a new set of resources included in the FDEV website. The Teaching Resources page offers a number of tools specific to teaching and learning, organized in six main areas: 

  1. Course Design 
  2. Course Delivery 
  3. Assessment 
  4. Inclusive Teaching 
  5. Digital Learning 
  6. Evaluation of Teaching 

Each area has a dedicated page that offers resources for fairly specific needs, and each page (with the exception of “Evaluation of Teaching) is organized in three columns: 

  1. I need help with… 
  2. Ideas for implementation 
  3. Resources 

My goal was to identify specific needs, provide a few clear tips for implementation, and pair those tips with digestible resources and tools, including fillable templates. 

In addition to these new Teaching Resources, I also want to remind everyone of two additional resources page: 

New Faculty Resources: this is a page designed specifically for new faculty, and it offers broad resources, including links to faculty orientation and information on how to access our systems. 

FDEV Resources: this page includes a compilation of all resources and tools in FDEV so you can get a glimpse of the full menu available to you. 

We hope that these pages will make navigating resources easier for you, but feel free to reach out if you have any questions! 

Chiara Ferrari, Ph.D. 
Faculty Development Director 

Student Success Funding Opportunity – CREATE Awards

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Dear faculty, 

Dean Kate McCarthy and I want to share information about a funding opportunity from the Chancellor’s Office, a call for proposals for the CREATE awards. 

Below is the broad description for the award and attached you find the full call. 

“The program invites individual faculty and faculty teams to propose plans that will transform the student experience. Winning proposal(s) will identify a common problem, articulate the ability to advance a solution locally and at scale, have a strong emphasis on equity and demonstrate the ability to institutionalize innovation across the CSU system. The award recipient(s) will be those who can creatively increase the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded, shorten time to degree and dramatically reduce equity gaps.” 

Proposals should be developed to align with one of three funding tiers: up to $50,000; from $50,001 to $100,000 and from $100,001 to $150,000. You can find more information on the CREATE Awards website, including information about past awardees, to get a sense of the type of proposals funded last year. 

Kate and I plan to host a Zoom session on Monday, March 27, from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. to hear ideas from interested faculty and to see if UED and FDEV can support and/or collaborate with faculty who plan to apply. If you plan to attend, please let us know and share your idea in advance, so we can collect any necessary resource or information. Please be aware that this is not a call for funding sent by UED and FDEV, so for specific questions about the application process, please contact Dr. Chenoa S. Woods, director of Research​ and Student Success Initiatives at the Chancellor’s Office. 

The Zoom information is below: 
https://csuchico.zoom.us/j/7507777561?pwd=OWRzeUFyZERMdFJ6aldzaW5Ecjkwdz09

Meeting ID: 750 777 7561 
Passcode: 270151 

We look forward to seeing you on Monday! 

Chiara Ferrari, Faculty Development Director 
Kate McCarthy, Dean of Undergraduate Education 

Grading for a More Equitable Society

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Sent on behalf of Dr. Grazyne Tresoldi, Assistant Professor in the College of Agriculture and READI Equity Fellow.

Dear colleagues,  

I assume we are all familiar with the equity biases in the student evaluations of teaching but are you aware of the implications of your own unconscious (implicit, hidden) biases?  

I hadn’t thought much about it until I found this study published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology. In their research, teachers graded (similar) students’ written essays but were not blind to their ethnical and socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds. Essays associated with students from lower SES received lower ratings than those associated with higher SES. However, the number of objective errors identified was the same, suggesting the teacher’s judgments were biased. After this, I stumbled over many articles addressing this topic, including in STEM – where we are trained to be highly objective and thus less subjective. Our unconscious biases can only help perpetuate the inequalities and a patriarchal society. 

As a person who truly enjoys knowing students at the personal level, I have implemented a few strategies to lessen the effects of this systemic problem.  

  1. Recognize my own unconscious biases. I learned about the Implicit Association Test during the CSU Avoiding Bias in Hiring training. This free test can help you to explore your attitudes, beliefs, and biases toward marginalized groups. Becoming aware is the first step toward change! 
  2. Use of anonymous grading. Both Canvas and Blackboard offer the option to hide student names during grading. If grading hard copies, I require a student ID number instead of names.  
  3. Grading with rubrics. In addition to helping students evaluate their own work, rubrics help us to be more objective during grading. The British study above, suggested that teachers are more likely to revert to biased judgments when there is no clear evaluation rubrics.  

What strategies have you implemented? I would love to hear what you do to promote more equitable grading! 

Need help getting yourself started? Reach out! The READI hub is here to help you to implement EDI & antiracism teaching practices.