MUFFIN MIX READS

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"change in teaching practice is an introspective and lengthy process which is mediated by questioning personal assumptions and learning from risks taken in instruction contexts. . . this process is facilitated by peer and institutional support and. . .there should be an appreciation that it takes considerable time before newly developed thoughts can be turned into action" (p. 97)

Saroyan, A. Amundsen, C. & Li, Cao. (1997). Incorporating theories of teacher growth and adult education in a faculty development program. To Improve the Academy, 16, 93-116.

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"Rather than closely controlling or bracketing the context in which we study individual learners, the detect-elect-connect model can help researchers foreground the environmental conditions and the individual learner’s place within social (and other) context(s). We can, thus, begin imagining different ways of intervening in students’ learning. These approaches would go beyond creating curricula and pedagogies that foster the transfer of skills and abilities toward those that also create environments that facilitate the dispositions that are determined to be most germane to transfer."

Ellen C. Carillo, in Portanova, Rifenburg, and Roen (eds.), Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing

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"Without this theoretical framework, WAC directors are left to mimic program elements of other programs and use a trial-and-error approach to program development"

Cox, Galin, and Melzer, Sustainable WAC, p. 14

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"An approach for building WAC programs that have the systemic impact and sustainability of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program at North Carolina State could help WAC directors act not solely on lore, but also on guiding principles, informed by theory, that can provide a methodology and a set of strategies that apply to a variety of contexts for building WAC."

Michelle Cox, Jeff Galin, & Dan Melzer, Sustainable WAC, p. 8

[sweartrek]

Prescriptions for success with Doctor Beverly Crusher

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PS: I desperately needed this today.

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"Teachers often depend on their personal authority and expertise to define themselves in relation to their students. . .To the extent that a teacher's self-concept depends on whether he or she is recognized as an authoritative source, that teacher may avoid the strategic and purposive aspect of writing in favor of its prescriptions"

Mary Kennedy, Learning to Teach Writing, p. 12

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(via GIPHY)

When everyone writes about their faculty/TA development programs as amazeballs when you know they’re not really.

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Me while reading Rose & Finder’s “Thinking Together: Developing a Reciprocal Reflective Model for Approaches to Preparing College Teachers of Writing” (in Pytlik & Liggett’s 2002 Preparing College Teachers of Writing). 

(via GIPHY)

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Theories of Change & Higher Ed

So, today I finished Adrianna Kezar’s (2016) How Colleges Change: Understanding, Leading, and Enacting Change, one of the non-writing books in my special topic reading list. Kezar’s book explains dominant theories of change and how they can play out in higher education.

My big takeaways from the big right now:

1. We need a multi-pronged approach to all major changes that taps into various theories and uses them as lenses, not steps, for approaching that change

2. Deep / second-order / double-loop learning is hardest but probably the kind I’m most interested

3. Resistance to change is not inherently negative.

As an aside, this is like the fifth time I’ve seen Miami’s Faculty Learning Communities appear in higher education research. I don’t know much about the FLCs but could be interesting to explore more at some point.

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I’VE BEEN PROMOTED!!!!