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2005-2006 CTE Recognition Luncheon
The CTE Recognition Luncheon for 2005-2006 is scheduled for Wednesday, April 27th. At the luncheon, all faculty teaching and mentoring award winners for the academic year will be recognized. Presenters at the event will include Chancellor Kristensen; Senior Vice Chancellor Murray; Assistant Vice Chancellor Nikels; Honors Director, Gary Davis; Dean Flagstad, and Tom Tye II. The guest speaker will be former OTICA winner, Rick Miller. His presentation is Tales from the Trenches: The Joy of Teaching.
Award Winners to be recognized at the event include:
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Leland Holdt Award - Charles Peek
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Pratt-Heins Award - Daryl Kelley
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Creative Teaching Award - Joe Benz and Wayne Briner
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Honors Program Outstanding Teacher - TBD
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Inter-Fraternity Council Teaching Award - Charles Peek
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Student Body Teaching Award - Peter Longo
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Faculty Mentoring Award - Ada Leung CBT, Rich Schuessler FAH, Chris Exstrom NSS, Paul Twigg for Graduate College and UNK
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Integrating Online Resources in Face-to-Face Classrooms to Enhance Critical Thinking
B. Jean Mandernach
As discussed by McKeachie, "everyone agrees that students learn in college, but whether they learn to think is more controversial." This discrepancy is at the center of ongoing debate between content coverage and critical thinking. Instructors are trying to simultaneously cover more material, in more depth, with more critical  analysis while struggling with growing class sizes, limited funds, and restricted contact time. This instructional catch-22 creates an educational dilemma in which many instructors must make difficult decisions between focusing limited class time to the comprehensive coverage of course material or encouragement of critical thinking about a narrow range of course concepts. To address this dilemma, it is essential to integrate instructional strategies and techniques that can efficiently and effectively maximize both content knowledge and critical thinking.
Modern advances in instructional technology have produced a range of online tools and resources to assist instructors in simultaneously meeting these instructional goals. The use of online instructional technology provides two distinct benefits for instructors wishing to enhance students' critical thinking about course material: 1) it provides a means of moving lower-level learning tasks out side of class time so that limited student contact time can be devoted to higher-order critical thinking activities; and 2) it fosters the use of constructivist teaching philosophies by supplementing traditional face-to-face activities with opportunities for individualized, in-depth interactions with course material.
Online tools (i.e., preparation quizzes, lectures, supplements, notes, interactive modules) provide an efficient means by which instructors can shift the instruction of basic concepts outside of class so that students are prepared to fully engage in class activities. The expansion of students' time-on-task with course material prior to scheduled class meetings ensures that students are more prepared to benefit from interactive instructional strategies. This shift in focus allows instructors to dedicate their face-to-face interactions to instructional strategies that foster critical thinking about the content of a given course.
A unique feature of online education is the asynchronous learning environment that it creates. Online activities provide educators with the means to offer instructional assistance and learning activities that meet the demands, pace and interest of individual students. Central to the effectiveness of online interaction is the notion that an asynchronous environment allows for prepared, individualized, thoughtful interactions that are free from the constraints of time, self-consciousness, learning style and other student learning variables. There are a wide range of asynchronous teaching strategies available and advances in educational technology continue to contribute to the growing body and diversity of options; the most effective asynchronous tools for the promotion of critical thinking tend to be threaded discussions and alternative assignments based on emergent technologies (e.g., blogs, wikis, podcasting).
Limited only by an instructor's creativity and ingenuity, online technologies provide countless strategies for supplementing traditional classroom activities and promoting critical thinking. With the primary goal of promoting students' critical understanding and analysis of course information, the focus should not be on the technology itself, rather the emphasis should target the careful selection of appropriate online instructional strategies to meet course content and process goals. The effective integration of online technology is more than a delivery medium; it is a way of learning that challenges current views of teaching, thinking and instruction by blurring the line between teacher-student and by shifting the focus from knowledge acquisition to critical application of information.
Suggested Readings:
Astleitner, H. (2002). Teaching critical thinking online. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 29 (2), 53-77.
Bruning, K. (2005). The role of critical thinking in the online learning environment. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2 (5).
MacKnight, C. B. (2000). Teaching critical thinking through online discussions. Educause Quarterly, 4, 38-41.
Muirhead, B. (2002). Integrating critical thinking into online classes. United States Distance Learning Association Journal. Retrieved Jan. 25, 2006 from http://usdla.org.
Murchu, D. & Muirhead, B. (2005). Insights into promoting critical thinking in online classes. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2 (6).
Paul, R. & Elder, L. (2004). The Nature and Functions of Critical and Creative Thinking. The Foundation for Critical Thinking: Dillon Beach, CA.
Peirce, W. (2003). Strategies for teaching thinking and promoting intellectual development in online classes. Electronic Communities: Current Issues and Best Practices. U.S. Distance Learning Association: Information Age Publishing.
Walker, G. (2005). Critical thinking in asynchronous discussions. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2 (6).
To learn more about these topics, review the Powerpoint Presentation. teaching critical thinking.ppt
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Mentoring New Faculty
Rick Miller and Theresa Wadkins
A mentor is usually someone older and more experienced who provides advice and support to, and watches over and encourages the progress of a younger, less experienced person. Mentoring has been shown to provide several benefits to new faculty including greater productivity (Queralt, 1982), increased likelihood of goal  achievement (Bogart & Redner, 1985), better understanding of the organization (Kram, 1986), and a sense of inclusion (Boyle & Boice, 1998). In addition to the benefits to new faculty, there are benefits to senior faculty who act as mentors including the development of managerial skills, intellectual stimulation (Reich, 1986), and the opportunity for reflection and review of one's own career (Nicholls, 2002). A variety of mentoring programs for university faculty have been implemented in the last decade, and research has been conducted on several relevant topics. Appleby (1999) addressed the characteristics of a good mentor, which include interpersonal skills, personal attributes and professional competencies. Stalhut and Hawkes (1990) identified four styles of mentoring: supporting, coaching, delegating and directing. Kram (1983) identified predictable stages in the mentor-protege relationship beginning with initiation and extending though cultivation, separation and redefinition.
What has received relatively little research attention is the kinds of support and information new faculty actually need from a mentor. This study utilized focus groups to determine the items for a questionnaire to measure what newly hired faculty believed to be helpful and important from a mentor and to compare that ranking with a similar ranking provided by department chairs. From the items identified by the focus groups, we asked newly hired faculty to respond to items as to whether or not they were provided each type of help identified by the focus groups and whether or not it was in fact helpful. We examined the specific activities and actions that new faculty indicated were the most helpful and least unhelpful. New faculty identified the following as what they most needed from a mentor: realistic expectations about the job, how to handle university hoops and how to  understand the way the university worked, help in finding resources, and opportunities for collaboration. We then made a comparison between the newly hired faculty and the department chairs to identify where there was agreement and where there was disagreement. Department chairs recognized the new faculty member's need for realistic expectations and how to find resources but were unaware for the need for collaboration and information on how the university works. Chairs were more likely to believe that new faculty needed information on the promotion and tenure process and on how to be an advisor than did the new faculty. New faculty indicated that some of the least important topics a mentor could address were time management, how the job differs from graduate school, and how to make realistic comparisons regarding job performance.
To learn more about these topics, review the Powerpoint Presentation. HLC Mentoring Roundtable.ppt
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The Impact of the Internet on College Students
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Rosemary Dawson, Ed.D.
The University of Oklahoma
The first part of this presentation addressed college students' use of the Internet for non-academic purposes and included the promises and pitfalls of the web. The second part of this presentation examined use of the Internet for academic purposes with its many strengths and benefits as well as its weaknesses and limitations.
Students use the Internet for a variety of academic uses, and most think that the Internet has had a positive impact on their academic experience. Others, including their professors, believe that the internet has had an adverse impact on academic skills. It is clear that to use the internet effectively, college students must become "information literate." Unfortunately while 3/4 agree completely that they are successful at finding the information they need and nearly 2/3 strongly agree they know best what information to accept from the Web, most students are not as information literate as they should be. Among the issues of concern for faculty is plagiarism and what they perceive to be widespread internet "cutting and pasting." Faculty input is essential to a student's ability to learn the research process, and there are tools that instructors can use to check for plagiarism.
Faculty use of the internet is increasing with more using email and discussion boards for face-to-face courses as well as teaching online courses. Online teaching requires an understanding of learner-instructor interaction in an online environment that includes the ramifications of the interactive potential of online education, as well as the advantages and possible negative impacts of online education. Quality learner-instructor interaction includes directing learning, providing performance feedback, promoting content understanding, creating structure, and supporting learning.
To learn more about these topics, review the Powerpoint Presentation. UNK Dawson.ppt
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Center for Teaching Excellence Podcasting Service is Here!
The Center for Teaching Excellence has been working with ITS and Distance Education to develop the capability to podcast all CTE events. We have one of the Spring 2006 events, Richard Sweeney's Creating Wow! Services for the Millennial Generation available in audio or video format at http://www.lopers.net/weblog/cte/. Click on this link and then click on CTE's Weblog. Scroll down to:
Video Podcast from Nebraskan Cedar Room Category: /Richard Sweeney
Audio Podcast from Nebraskan Cedar Room Category: /Richard Sweeney
Click on Richard Sweeney to access either the audio or video presentation (the audio should take less time to load).
This is a temporary site until UNK completes the process to become part of iTunes U, which is an iTunes site providing universities with the capability of podcasting. You can access the Stanford on iTunes site at http://itunes.stanford.edu/ to see the capability that UNK will have in the next month.
With podcasting of events, faculty and staff who can't attend a live CTE event can access the recording at a later date and can download it to an MP3 player or to a computer.
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Your comments and contributions are welcome!
Please send any comments or suggestions for the newsletter to teachingcenter@unk.edu. If you have information that you would like presented in the newsletter or would like to write something for one of the editions, please contact Jeanne Butler at 865-8495 or by email at the Center.
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