Undergraduate Faculty Development Workshop

Assignments are powerful teaching tools, and their design is one of the most consequential intellectual tasks that faculty undertake in their work as educators. Yet that work is often private and unavailable for collegial exchange and knowledge building. The charrette — a term borrowed from architecture education, denoting a collaborative design process — will be an opportunity to talk with other faculty interested in trading ideas about the design and use of the various tasks, projects, papers, and performances we set for our students.

The workshop, facilitated by Dr. Susan Albertine (Senior Scholar, AAC&U), will be an interactive assignment-design charrette based on a process developed by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA), using the Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP) and the ASPPH Recommended Critical Component Elements of an Undergraduate Major in Public Health, a product of the ASPPH Framing the Future Task Force established to better prepare graduates for success in a changing world and global marketplace, as frameworks.

The charrette aims to:

• stimulate ideas about how to strengthen the assignment you bring to the session,
• help participants think together about how assignments can be intentionally linked to important course, program, and institutional learning outcomes in ways that create more coherent pathways for students, and
• open up a productive “trading zone” for discussion about teaching, learning, and assessment.

Workshop registrants will be asked to submit an assignment they would like to share and work on. This might be a draft assignment, one that has worked well but may be in need of a “refresh,” or one that has not worked as hoped.

Following the workshop, participants will have the opportunity to share their revised assignment and continue the conversation on ASPPH’s Online Communities. Additionally, participants are encouraged to submit their final assignments to NILOA’s assignment library, which provides a searchable online library of collegiate-level course assignments in a wide variety of academic disciplines that link to one or more proficiencies in the Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP).

Draft agenda:
10:15 – 11:00 Registration
11:00 – 11:30 Overview
11:35 – 1:00 Working time
1:00 – 1:30 Working Lunch, to include reflections on the morning
1:30 – 3:45 Working time
3:45 – 4:45 Reflection and exchange
4:45 – 5:30 Takeaways

Accommodations:

We recommend booking your stay at one of the following hotels -- all within walking distance of ASPPH.

Beacon Hotel
Hotel Palomar
Hotel Madera
Topaz Hotel