From plan to product in a single day

In one study room a psychology professor helps a French professor record a vodcast, while in a nearby study room a physics prof shows two colleagues how to create a pencast. In other rooms faculty members who teach biology, speech, education, and creative writing learn to add narration to their powerpoint presentations or post podcasts to Moodle or videotape their own teaching.

This is the reason I love my job: there's nothing more exciting than bringing together colleagues from different disciplines and setting them loose to teach and learn from each other. "Arrive with a plan and leave with a product" was the motto for an all-day workshop designed to inspire faculty members to brush up their active teaching skills and equip them to use technology to engage students in learning outside class.

We started the day with a keynote address called "Active Teaching: Transitive Verbs and Transformational Pedagogy" in which a theater professor challenged us to examine the verbs we act out inside and outside the classroom. If students think "to read" means "letting the black ink on the white page smack me in the cognition and just not stick," then we need to unpack that verb for our students and engage them with sexier verbs, like "to discover" or "to explore" or "to wrestle."

"We need to increase our verbulary," he asserted. "If you're feeling uncomfortable in front of your students, fall back on the verbs that got you where you are: to experiment, to invent, to dissect."

And then attendees dispersed to small rooms to learn a skill from a colleague or to try out an iPad or a Smartboard or classroom clickers. Getting all the volunteers lined up, the rooms reserved, and the schedule worked out was a monumental task requiring a great deal of cooperation, but many people worked together to make it happen and to cope with the inevitable glitches that arose along the way.

At the end of the day we gathered as a group once again for our Showcase of Stars, where we looked at a few of the projects my colleagues created during the day. At the beginning I asked the group, "How many of you tried something today that you've never done before?" Nearly every hand went up. I wish I had gold statuettes for all of them.