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Goals

 

What I really have loved about creating this teaching portfolio is the opportunity to reflect on my teaching experience thus far and to see what I do well and where I need to improve.  Based on what I have learned about myself, I have set the following goals for the next five years:

Goal 1: Measure student success through concept inventories and program long benchmarks


There are a lot of ways we measure student success.  In my classes, I tend to rely on a mix of projects, papers, presentations, and written exams to determine the level of comprehension my students have attained.  What I have not done well, however, is to measure their starting aptitudes to their abilities at the end of my courses, to measure the effect of the course experience on these abiltiites.  In the future, I would like to create concept inventories for my courses to use as a pre-course and post-course assessment of the efficacy of the teaching and learning that transpires.

Further, I would like to work more on our departmental learning outcomes assessment process to create more robust and useful measures of student learning across the ANSC curriculum.  In the 2018-2019 academic year, I led the launch of new departmental learning outcomes for Animal and Avian Sciences.  My goal in the next five years is to do an excellent job measuring student attainment of these outcomes and garnering faculty support for the process.

Goal 2: Understand how to work with the Millenial generation more effectively


Like many of my colleagues, I am challenged by the changing social and academic norms of the Millenial generation.  I do find myself starting sentences with the phrase "When I was in college..." or "It would never occur to me to ...." But rather than resorting to stereotypes and frustrations, I would like to spend time at conferences and reading the current literature to better understand what motivates this group of students, and how I can better relate to them.  Fundamentally, I think that if you can effectively communicate to a student why a topic is important, fascinating, and relevant,  motivation and learning will easily follow.

Goal 3:  Refine the ways I use flipped classroom teaching techniques and student engagement methods

 

I have always been interested in student engagement and using class time as effectively as possible.  I think I have a lot yet to learn in this area, and I would like to spend more time reflecting on my student evaluations and the experiences and research of my colleagues in higher education to improve this area of my teaching.

To add to this goal, as part of my fellowship year with the Woodrow Wilson foundation, I will be learning best practices in on-line education and how to use some of the relevant technology to support it, from better use of our online learning management system, Canvas, to video editing.  This year will be a great way to support my efforts in creating a new online course as well as improving the delivery of my flipped courses.

 

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