LEAP Fellows: Work Plan Phase 2 Questions

Due: July 13 to group

Please articulate well-written responses to the following questions and prompts for each of the proficiency initiatives you have selected to work on. You might decide that it makes sense to combine your responses to address more than one, or you might separate them.

View this work plan, which will evolve over time, as a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning project (SoTL). That is, follow the established steps for conducting SoTL by: asking learner-centered questions; building on the work of others; investigating the teaching/learning question by determining the methods you will use to gather data; analyzing the evidence; public dissemination of results and reflection and application of results.. To learn more, check out the Randy Bass article below and go to the UW-Milwaukee SoTL site at: https://www4.uwm.edu/cipd/sotl/stepstosuccess/.

1. Clear definition of proficiency initiative (PI): what is it?

2. Why it matters, what big question(s) it addresses, what “problem” it solves, and for whom (i.e., for students, majors, degree programs, departments, colleges, campuses, institutions, the system, American higher education, as appropriate).

3. How is this PI being used or applied within in your local context (courses, major, college, institution)? How is it being used or applied within or across the UW System? How could it be used or applied?

4. How will it help embed or “mainstream” equity?

5. How will you frame and assess your work in relationship to the overall Faculty Collaboratives project?

6. Do you view this work as something new or as a continuation of work already underway at your institution, by you or others, and in what way? Is it scalable?

7. What kind of session would you design a for the September conference around your PI/work?

8. What “products” and “artifacts” would you want to curate for the Hub and share with other colleagues around the System, with the goals of disseminating, inviting people in, and scaling? This could include rubrics, assignments, curriculum maps, guides to the PIs, articles, etc.

9. Please draft a timeline for your work plan, July 2015-February 2016 (see Peggy’s timeline for her Hub work plan). Because this is a research project, we expect you to become as fluent as you can in LEAP, broadly, and your proficiency initiatives, in particular.

Required Readings (including all the print copies of materials given to you):

DQP/Degree Qualifications Profile: A learning-centered framework for what college graduates should know and be able to do to earn the associate, bachelor’s or master’s degree

Peter Ewell: The Lumina Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP): Implications for Assessment, NILOA Occasional Paper #16 http://www.learningoutcomesassessment.org/documents/EwellDQPop1.pdf

GEMS publication: General Education Maps and Markers: Designing Meaningful Pathways to Student Achievement

LEAP Challenge booklet: The LEAP Challenge: Education for a World of Unscripted Problems

VALUE Rubrics (all of them)  To download the rubrics, go to: https://www.aacu.org/value

AAC&U Equity guides:  Committing to Equity and Inclusive Excellence  Step Up and Lead for Equity: What Higher Education Can Do to Reverse Our Deepening Divides

Randy Bass, “The Scholarship of Teaching: What’s the Problem?” https://my.vanderbilt.edu/sotl/files/2013/08/Bass-Problem1.pdf

Randy Bass, “Disrupting Ourselves: The Problem of Learning in Higher Education” http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/disrupting-ourselves-problem-learning-higher-education

“Flipping Orthodoxies: Overcoming insidious obstacles to innovation” (will be emailed as pdf attachment to you)