Teaching & Learning Highlights

IHCC Teaching and Learning Center represented the college at the 2022 Higher Learning Commission Annual Conference in Chicago during April. Jill Budde, Vice President, Craig Leager, Director of Teaching and Learning, and Libby Serkies, Instructional Coach, facilitated a session titled: Choose Your Own Adventure: Highly Differentiated New Faculty PD. Approximately 100 participants from around the country came to learn more about creative ways to support new faculty.

Description:

Very few community colleges across the country have a dedicated Teaching and Learning Center. However, Indian Hills Community College (IHCC) has found a way to make this a reality. Through strategic efforts and feedback loops, IHCC has crafted a bold vision regarding the professional development of its instructors, including instructors who are new to the institution. The IHCC Teaching and Learning Center has developed the New Faculty Academy (NFA) to be a critical factor in our ongoing efforts to inform, coach, and support all faculty to be highly qualified and student-centered professional educators. Faculty who are new to IHCC engage in 25 hours of professional development as part of their initial onboarding through the NFA.  

During the presentation, the following elements of the IHCC New Faculty Academy will be addressed in the listed order: 

1. Conception of IHCC Teaching and Learning Center
2. Funding of IHCC Teaching and Learning Center 
3. Development of New Faculty Academy 
4. Implementation of New Faculty Academy 
5. Data interpretation of New Faculty Academy impacts 
6. Lessons learned through data mining and reflection of New Faculty Academy 
7. Plan for the future of New Faculty Academy 
8. Questions and answers  

IHCC believes in the differentiated offerings and methods of engagement within New Faculty Academy that allow for instructor agency and autonomy related to their professional growth and development. We further believe this model is a replicable and sustainable endeavor for other institutions regardless of size and demographics. 

IHCC's Teaching and Learning Center presented at the 2022 Teaching & Learning Innovation Conference hosted by the University of Tennessee - Knoxville in March. Session Title: Projects, Quizzes, and Test, Oh My! - Strengthen the Alignment and Cognitive Level of Assessment Tasks

Description:

Assessment is an integral component of instruction. Assessing student learning allows teachers to determine whether the instructional strategies being used are accomplishing the desired goal. 

Assessments lead us to reflect on hard questions like... 

• How do you know what your assessments are measuring? 
• Are we teaching what we think we are teaching? 
• Are students building their skills or maintaining the status quo? 
• Are there other, or better, ways to teach content and skills to improve student learning? 
• Are students learning what we think we are teaching?  

The first thing educators must do to answer these questions is to determine if their learning objectives and assessments are clearly aligned. One of the most powerful tools to determine alignment between learning objectives and assessments is Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy. 

Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy is a framework, or organization, for classifying cognitive levels within instructional objectives, activities, and assessments. This framework helps educators to develop critical thinking and higher order cognitive abilities purposefully and strategically. 

If assessments are misaligned with learning objectives or instructional strategies, it can often undermine both student motivation and learning. As seasoned instructors, we know what often results when students disengage. 

To ensure alignment of assessments to learning objectives and instructional activities, educators can use Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy to compare the cognitive demands of the three components in the teaching cycle: 

• Learning objectives 
• Instructional strategies and activities 
• Assessments 

Participants analyze various assessment tasks to determine their alignment to connected learning objectives using Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy. Participants can practice this alignment process on several examples, and even on their own learning objectives and assessments.