Miami-Dade's Covenant

You've perhaps seen the articles today in The Chronicle of Higher Ed and Inside Higher Ed on Miami-Dade's covenant and assessment. Here are links to the first and second. Congratulations, colleagues!

It would be useful and worth some 'blogging' to discuss how Miami-Dade is implementing this assessment, to learn how we might find out more details of the process, and to explore the researchable questions that this type of system-wide assessment yields, i.e. the SoTL factor.

Very exciting to see Miami-Dade's comments from Colorado now making the national higher-ed news!

Thanks JJ

I've finally signed in and am looking forward to using this blog and communicating with all of you. Thanks JJ for setting this up!

Lisa

Western Carolina's New Publication

I wanted to give each of you a copy of our new SoTL publication at Western Carolina University. You can find it (pdf document, 151 KB) here.

Enjoy!

Anna McFadden

Hello and thank you for coming to visit us in Boulder for the Conference

Hi CASTL CLuster Friends,

We miss you in Boulder. The weather is still as beautiful as it was last week. I hope you were able to travel home safely. I know from your comments how much you enjoyed being here and we greatly enjoyed you and your company

Thanks to J.J. for establishing the BLOG for our communications and to Clayton for introducing us to the The Green Man.

As I reflect on the Conference and our time together, I believe the idea of a monograph is wonderful. The process of it will for me refine my thinking and assist me greatly with my "writing as a way of knowing" process. Robert is right that in our case CU has taken on a particular dimension of SoTL work, i.e, faculty development where as CUNY for example is taking on Institutional work i.e, gen ed. That distinction was for me very clarifying. Each of you contributed to my more sophisticated understanding of SoTL. By the way, some of you may be very interested in the Iowa State model for promotion and tenure mentioned by Vice Chancellor Peg Bacon. It embodies both scholarly teaching and the scholarship of teaching and learning in stages in faculty member's lives and by virtue of being a model for P&T rewards scholarship in teaching. Knowing this model, I think, and adapting it at CU is the least of the policy issue effects that I raised last week.

Well, I finally am blogging and learning. I don't know that FACEBOOK is on the horizon for me.

Cordially,
Mary Ann

Welcome to the CASTL Green Man Cluster

The Green Man Cluster blog serves the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) System-Wide Collaboration cluster. We set it up after our October 2007 meeting in Boulder, CO, to facilitate communication of ideas growing out of that meeting, and planning and discussion of outcomes to be achieved by our November 2009 goal.
It's named in honor of Clayton Lewis, who painted himself green and wandered the Boulder campus, frightening faculty in a heroic effort to raise SoTL awareness. "Man" of course means women, men, and whatever those blue guys are. The logo was designed by Helen Macfarlane, MA, medical illustrator at the U. of Colorado Medical School.

In response to a rhetorical question "If we were to write a monograph in 2009, what would the chapter titles be?" the group cleverly decided that they would write a real monograph. A possible organization would start with a set of questions that each collaborating system in the cluster would be asked to address from their perspective; if we can formulate these questions early, they could even inform some further research to be done in the next couple of years.

Chapter 1: What are the meanings of SoTL and how might SoTL specifically apply to university systemwide settings?
Chapters 2-6: Written by the Carolina, Colorado, Miami-Dade, New York, and Wisconsin groups.
Chapter 7: Discussion of what the cluster has learned that would be useful to other institutions.

It goes without saying that these titles and organization are not set in anything yet, least of all stone.