Tuesday, September 27, 2011

This week in faculty development...

A lot is going on this week, including  workshops that you can still register to attend:

  • Career Advising 101--develop a best-practice tool box to help students with their career preparation. This workshop is offered twice. The first offering is TODAY, Tuesday 9/27, from 12:30 to 1:45 in SO-111 and then again on Friday 9/30 from 10-11:15am in NC-1316.
  • Mid-semester check-up--work with Jeff Loats (Physics) and Mark Potter (Center for Faculty Development) to develop your tailored approach to asking students for mid-semester course feedback. Wednesday 9/28, 9:30-10:45 in Science 1086.
  • Accessing and Integrating iTunes Media into your Curriculum--iTunes is more than music. Learn how to find and access everything from in-depth interviews with Chinua Achebe to films of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders and San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake-most for free and all available to share with your students. Friday 9/30 from 9:30 to 10:45am in the Auraria Library Jackson Enhanced Learning Center.
Register for any of the above workshops at http://www.mscd.edu/cfd/calendar/.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Help Students Develop Paraphrasing Skills to Help Deter Plagiarism

Today's Faculty Development Updates post comes from Claudia Stinny, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment at University of West Florida. It is made available by the 2011-12 Teaching Issues Writing Consortium.


Although many discussions of academic integrity and plagiarism focus on failures in ethical reasoning, student problems with good authorship practices are often motivated by weaknesses in reading comprehension or skill in writing paraphrases (e.g. Roig, 2007). Students frequently have problems paraphrasing ideas from primary sources because their understanding of the original work is weak. Sometimes these problems manifest as an over-reliance on quotations. The student who has difficulty paraphrasing might string together quoted material to create a paper and contribute few, if any, thoughts stated in the student's own language. Some students may attempt to disguise their reliance on quoted material by omitting the quotation marks (and, even worse, omitting a citation) and then discover they are now charged with plagiarism.

Use an in-class reading and paraphrasing activity to promote comprehension of source material and good authorship practices
·         Assign a brief source passage for students to read and then write a one paragraph summary in which they describe or paraphrase an idea or argument presented by the author of the reading. If you think this part of the activity will take too much time, assign this in advance and require students to bring their written paragraphs to class.
·         Use a pair-share activity in which students share their one-paragraph paraphrases with one another and evaluate how accurately they describe the original idea or argument and how well they use original language when writing their description.
·         After discussing their paragraphs in small groups, ask the students to draft an accurate paraphrase of the original passage as a group. Describe the methods used in your discipline for providing a citation for the original passage and include an appropriate citation in the draft created by the class.

This exercise will give students practice in writing appropriate paraphrases. It will also serve as an immediate source of feedback about how well they understood the original passage and the concepts discussed. When the class develops a paraphrase that is both accurate and original, misunderstandings of the original ideas will be clarified and corrected. The class will also get direct practice with good authorship practices.

Based in part on an audio workshop, Avoiding the Plagues & Pains of Plagiarism¸ presented by Caroline L. Eisner, Academic Coaching & Writing (www.AcademicCoachingandWriting.org), February 1, 2011.

Roig, M. (2007). Some reflections on plagiarism: The problem of paraphrasing in the sciences. European Science Editing, 33, 38-41.

Submitted by:
Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D., Director
Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment
University of West Florida
www.uwf.edu/cutla/

Monday, September 12, 2011

Peer Instructional Coaching--Last call for participants

This week on Wednesday 9/14, a cohort of faculty will be meeting at 2pm at the Center for Faculty Development to form a peer instructional coaching cohort. More information about this opportunity is at Center for Faculty Development Web site.


Experience from past semesters has shown that for a cohort approach to peer observation and peer coaching to be effective, we will need to take the time to get to know one another, particularly around the topic of teaching, and build trust. This is why the cohort will be meeting twice before pairs break off and observe one another’s classes. But don’t worry, we won’t be falling backward into each other’s arms!

It's not too late to become part of this cohort. Cohort members have some light shared reading to do before this first meeting. To receive those readings and to be added to the list for Wednesday, email Mark Potter.

Friday, September 2, 2011

Announcing the fall-semester cohort of Peer Instructional Coaching

Formerly "Peer Observation of Instruction for Continuous Improvement," Peer Instructional Coaching is an initiative designed to take the threat and risk out of peer classroom observations and make them useful and relevant for Metro State faculty.

Participants benefit both from observing and from being observed. Past participants have remarked that the experience:

  • enabled one another to see how different students in different disciplines interact with their teachers.
  • provided the opportunity to see how teachers in different departments approached their teaching.
  • opened their perspectives to very different teaching styles.
  • provided actual ideas and constructive feedback.
Additional information, including expectations and instructions for joining this semester's cohort, is at the Peer Instructional Coaching page of the CFD Web site.