CTL Teaching and Learning Forum  

The aim of the CTL Teaching and Learning Forum is to highlight the successful teaching strategies that St. John’s faculty have developed and now use in their classes (all these are in boxes with gray headings). There are also links to other valuable information for faculty.  Click on the tabs above to access a host of good ideas.

Here are links to useful resources from the St. John's Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL).

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) is an idea that developed after the publication of Ernst Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (1990).  He described four types of research:  discovery, integration, application, and teaching.  SOTL came to be defined as the process in which faculty do research on their teaching, much as they do research in their discipline:  formulate a question, investigate it, and then publish their results.  The advantage of this approach is that it would mean that teaching could truly advance as a discipline.  It could get away from "reinventing the wheel" because faculty could build on the work their peers had reported.

Here's a good article that provides an introduction to SOTL:  The Scholarship of Teaching: New Elaborations, New Developments.

The entire Calendar of Events for Spring 2013 is now available.  It lists not only CTL events, but others that are of interest to faculty.

In addition, you can go to our Workshops page to get full information on these upcoming events:

Faculty Writing Retreat 5/20

Technology Emersion 5/21

More Database Magic 5/30

Creating and Editing Movies 6/6

CampusGuides 6/13

Mobile Apps for Education 6/20

Screencasting 6/27

Digication 7/11

If you are looking for something to enliven your teaching this semester, there are two old-standbys that might help.  Though they've been around for some time, each of these Websites is updated regularly, so there's always new food for thought:

Tomorrow's Professor -- they have over 1,000 posts with information on a host of teaching issues.

ProfHacker -- despite the name, not all the posts on this wiki deal with technology, they've even had one on what to wear to class.

St. John’s University Libraries subscribe to CampusGuides, a hosted web publishing service that allows users to easily create attractive and functional web sites. CampusGuides is now available for all faculty members who are interested in creating their own web sites for purposes such as:

      -   sharing information within an academic department 
      -   creating course pages 
      -   promoting new services and programs

CampusGuides supports rich text, embedded videos, RSS Feeds, Podcast Feeds, Embedded Videos, and Documents and Files, allowing for the easy creation of dynamic and engaging web content. CampusGuides is also well-suited to collaborative purposes, since individual guides can be edited by more than one person. To view guides that have been created by St. John’s University Libraries’, go to http://stjohns.campusguides.com/index.php. [In fact, you are reading this message on a CampusGuides page; the CTL endorses CampusGuides as an easy way to create and manage content!]

If you are a faculty member at St. John's and would like to create a CampusGuides site, just send an email to campusguides@stjohns.edu to set up an account.  If you have questions, email Ben Turner of the University Libraries at turnerb@stjohns.edu.

The University has recently published a new planning document,  It extends the 2008-2013 Strategic Plan to 2014 and focuses on articulating, enhancing, measuring and marketing the value of a St. John's education. It can be accessed on the Strategic Plan page by clicking on "Repositioning the Strategic Plan 2011-2014."

The Schedule for Final Exams is now available at http://www.stjohns.edu/services/registrar/finalexam.stj.

If you are updating your syllabus for the new semester, here are a couple of blog posts that provide some pointers:

Syllabus: Extreme Makeover

11 Fast Syllabus Hacks

Function of the Course Syllabus

In addition, there are more ideas on the CTL Forum's Planning the Course webpage.

The latest CTL Newsletter is now available.

The CTL has a number of resources available.  Faculty may borrow these for a month.  Here is a list of these resources.

In the Wall Street Journal of all places, there was a wonderful article on America's Top College Professors.  Naomi does a wonderful job of describing the elements of excellent teaching. 

The University's Title III Program, Transforming Teaching with Technology, has a website with information on its activities in infusing more critical thinking, information literacy, and technology into the undergraduate curriculum.  There is also a Critical Thinking website with a number of case studies on how to incorporate more critical thinking activities into your teaching.