Professional development
Providing professional development is one of the three pillars of CSUMB's holistic alignment framework. Read about CSUMB's Assessment Philosophy & Practice.
Working with campus partners, the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment supports professional development in the following areas:
1. Culturally Responsive Teaching & Assessment
Inclusive teaching includes approaches such as culturally responsive and culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris, 2012) that seek to "perpetuate and foster -- to sustain -- linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling" (p. 93). CSUMB has convened a team of faculty and staff who, in spring 2019, will develop a culturally responsive teaching and assessment toolbox and support system to help faculty increase their expertise and effectiveness in implementing culturally responsive pedagogies. Primary texts informing CSUMB's approach include Jean Moule's Cultural Competence: A Primer for Educators, Zaretta Hammond's Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students, and Erick Montenegro and Natasha Jankowski's, Equity and Assessment: Moving Towards Culturally Responsive Assessment.
Paris, D. Culturally sustaining pedagogy: a needed change in terminology, stance, and practice. Educational Review, 41(3), 93 - 97.
2. Assignment Design
Assignment design workshops integrate use of CSUMB's institutional assignment guides and rubrics, the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) framework, and Elizabeth Barkley and Claire Major's Learning Assessment Techniques (LATs). These workshops help CSUMB educators create or improve assignments that help students better meet course learning outcomes through application and transfer of intellectual skills (critical thinking, information literacy, quantitative reasoning, and written and oral communication); personal, professional, and social responsibility; and/or integrative learning. Campus partners: Library and the Cooperative Learning Center.
3. Reading Apprenticeship & Threshold Concepts
CSUMB offers workshops, communities of practice, and individual consultations on Reading Apprenticeship. Reading Apprenticeship instructional routines and approaches are based on a framework that describes the classroom in terms of four interacting dimensions: Social, Personal, Cognitive, and Knowledge-Building. Those routines have been used extensively in community colleges and increasingly in four-year universities. The Reading Apprenticeship framework draws on the strengths students and faculty bring to build confidence and power to their work with texts, concepts, and each other. With a focus on apprenticing students to the problem-solving strategies of disciplines, Reading Apprenticeship helps students master core concepts and helps instructors explicitly support academic literacy in their discipline. Reading Apprenticeship is a promising approach to helping students master threshold concepts, another are of professional development at CSUMB. Campus partners: Communication Across the Disciplines and the Cooperative Learning Center.
4. Designing Group work: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom
This is a new initiative seeded by CSUMB’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Developed at Stanford University, Complex Instruction is a pedagogical approach that enables students to learn and teachers to teach at a high intellectual level in academically, linguistically, racially, ethnically, and socially heterogeneous classrooms. Campus partner: Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
5. Mindfulness
In collaboration with Health and Wellness Services, TLA staff and faculty are acquiring certifications at the Mindfulness Institute for Emerging Adults (MEIA, formerly Koru Mindfulness), an approach specifically designed for college students, but applicable to anybody interested reducing stress, sharpening focus, sleeping better, and living with greater mindfulness and self-compassion.
6. Annual Program Learning Outcomes Assessment
The Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment supports and provides professional development on conducting and annual program learning outcomes assessment projects using best practices in assessment (e.g. Suskie, L. 2018. Assessing student learning: A common sense guide. John Wiley & Sons). Campus partner: Academic Senate Assessment Committee.