My last Tuesday Tip on December 15th included a teaser about some news brewing in Faculty Development. I am excited to share them with you today as you prepare to come back tomorrow to start the Spring semester.
New FDEV website design
First of all, we made a few changes to the main FDEV page and we restructured the way you can access our offerings by identifying four major areas: Programs, Workshops, Tools, and Resources. Under each main title you find the list of the specific resources included in each page. You can access those pages by clicking on the corresponding photographs. We also added some icons that will take you directly to a some interesting new resources (and I will speak more about these below).
New FDEV Faculty Fellows
Dr. Jamie Linn Gunderson was selected as the FDEV Faculty Fellow for Spring 2021. Jamie will work with three other faculty fellows, Paul Bailey, Dustin Bakkie, and Dr. Chris Crews, to produce content for the FDEV website. I am excited to be working with this group of faculty and to increase what FDEV can offer.
New FDEV Resources
FDEV is excited to launch an FDEV Podcast and FDEV Zine (these pages are currently under construction, but save these links for the future). The FDEV Podcast will be hosted by Dr. Jamie Linn Gunderson and will be released twice a month, on the first and third Thursdays, starting February 4th. The FDEV Zine will be released on the first Monday of each month, starting on February 1st. The Zine was designed with the hope to attract some artistic work from faculty, students and staff. I will reach out to specific departments to see if we can establish some collaborations, or you can reach out to me directly (cfferrari@csuchico.edu). These new resources allow us to have an official FDEV Week now, since every day we are excited to be offering faculty some resource or opportunity for development:
The FDEV Week:
Monday: FDEV Zine (first Monday of each month)
Tuesday: Tuesday Tip (every Tuesday)
Wednesday: GO Virtual Community (every Wednesday 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. in Zoom)
Thursday: FDEV Podcast (every first and third Thursday of the month)
Friday: Friday Forums (twice a month)
New FDEV Tools
FDEV is also excited to launch two new tools that we hope will provide valuable help to faculty. We created a Model Course Design database that allows searching concrete examples of course design. If you click on the blue icons you will be able to access individual course portfolios created by Chico State faculty. Similarly, we created a page to search for Teaching Guides that offer tips in a variety of areas of instruction. Modeling Universal Design for Learning (UDL), we made the teaching guides brief, clear, easily accessible and applicable, and we organized the resources in four areas (explore, listen, watch, and read), offering additional information in various formats (websites, podcasts, videos, and articles). More instructions on how to access these tools are available on the respective pages.
New Teaching Climate Change & Resilience Series
In collaboration with the Campus Sustainability Curriculum Subcommittee, FDEV is happy to offer a new Teaching Climate Change & Resilience Series. The campus community will also have access to a number of books on climate change and resilience that are available on the series’ page. I want to take this opportunity to also promote our Teaching Racial & Social Justice Series. The next workshop, “Data displays and interpretation: linking the practices of our fields to social justice issue” (led by Dr. M.E. Matthews), will be held on Tuesday, February 2nd, from 3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. The schedule for the other spring workshops will be finalized next week.
Upcoming Events
Lastly, I want to promote a couple of events happening this and next week. Tomorrow we will have a chance to come together as a community for the third Tipping Point Summit. The focus this year is on Virtual Realities, and I hope that everyone will join us to learn about our virtual experiences and share your own. Next week (Friday, January 29th from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.) FDEV will organize a Friday Forum on How to Showcase Evidence of Teaching Excellence. Faculty will discuss their experience in class evaluations (both synchronous and asynchronous) and will share how to showcase evidence of teaching excellence in the RTP dossier.
We hope that you will find these resources useful and we encourage you to reach out to FDEV for any questions you might have.
We wish you a wonderful start of the Spring semester!