CEAC Learning Circle Schedule and Work Ethos
As you know, we plan to rotate our weekly “meetings” between staff/project team meetings to deal with the “business” of CEAC and the CEAC Learning Circle (aka, Writing Retreat).
We will meet over a working lunch and early afternoon from 12:00p – 3:00p in room 4317 throughout the Spring Term for both series of meetings.
The Learning Circle will meet on the following dates (with the associated draft agenda items as listed):
January 14 – Opening the Circle
January 28 - Brainstorming the Work (Framing the Projects)
February 11 – Writing Retreat (Shared Work)
February 25 – Writing Retreat (Shared Work)
March 25 – Writing Retreat (Shared Work)
April 8 – Writing Retreat (Shared Work)
April 22 – Celebrating the Work, Debriefing and Next Steps (Sharing Completed Work)
We will discuss whether to continue the Learning Circle beyond April, depending on our productivity and needs!
Sharing Work in Between Writing Retreats
Work will be shared electronically via a shared folder in our CEAC project space. Each person will have their own folder where they will store their work (please keep it all there) --- and, we will commit to:
1. Sending the group an email at least once in between our Writing Retreats to indicate the availability of new or revised draft material for people to review/critique. In your email --- clearly and concisely identify how others might best help you. For example, I might suggest “I am having difficulty with the transition between the review of literature section and describing the actual activity we did. Can you help me bridge that section?” or “I struggle with using a direct, active voice in my writing. Can you especially scan for that?”. By being more specific, even if it is to say “can you read for general readability and flow?” helps to focus the reader and you will find that you get much better feedback from your reviewers. You might even want to draw on specific strengths of some individuals in our group and ask for different reviews from different people!
Be sure to tell people which specific file to access as the draft materials you want to have reviewed!
2. Reviewing each other’s draft materials prior to the next Writing Retreat and using either “track changes” in Word or scanning to pdf/emailing written comment/suggestions for each of our colleagues, as appropriate. We trust that we will read each other’s work --- there is no need to comment on or edit someone’s work simply to prove you read it. If you have something useful to suggest or a comment that might be useful, then make it, if not, simply let the person know you read their work via our conversation in the Writing Retreat.
Once we begin writing (creating some draft product), we can best serve each other’s learning in a number of ways ---
As a reviewer for presentation, style, fidelity to an audience
As a reviewer for content and argumentation
As a recommender of potential sources
As a supplier of potential sources
As a supplier of new perspectives and ideas
As a questioner for increased clarity of thinking
As a Learning Circle, we have responsibilities to ourselves (for our individual projects --- our written products as lead authors), to others (as co-authors and colleagues as mentioned above), and to the circle as a “community.”
Therefore, we need to ---
Produce as lead authors,
Critique as colleagues (for all others)
Learn collectively from the process as a community of CEAC.
In this way, we publish our knowledge and add to the collective experience of the field (both as individuals and as CEAC), we develop our academic and professional critiquing skills and strategies, and we all learn as evaluators and educators.