Our season finale is here in our time together about learning to learn. The "dense, dark star" we began with has proven to be a constellation of many centers of light and gravity. In this episode, we spend time considering all we've uncovered this season, across the college as well as within the seven skills or states of being we explored.
We'll have a quick check-in with Christine Witkowski, professor of Sociology and chair of the Strategic Planning Committee for Excellent Instruction. She was part of the impetus for this season and with her, we begin to think about visible interdependence at an institute of higher learning.
Our main conversation is with Melissa Ellington, professor of English. We explore her background in Developmental Reading and how she's brought those fundamental skills into the teaching of College Writing. We engage with some huge questions and concepts including one from quantum physics: entanglement. What if we applied that concept to our lives of work at the college?
Join us to wrap up the season but also to launch yourself into fresh consideration of your own teaching and work in your instructional ecosystem. Below are resources to help you along the way as we ask ourselves: what is possible if we begin to teach in connection with each other?
Thanks for joining us for another great season of moving towards interconnection.
Listen here or on the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.
The podcast has many goals but one of them is to give professors concrete and conceptual practice you can use right away. Here is a simple tool you can use to begin to enhance and make visible the skills of learning to learn that we explored in this season. It's a small thing to begin this kind of enhancement in your courses. If you'd like to have a consultation - a conversation, even! - about your teaching and talk about how you'd like to enhance these skills in a fit for your discipline and subject, contact the CTE to schedule with us.
Christine joined us in Season One to talk about her teaching of Sociology here at the college. In that episode, she goes into further detail about how she wishes for connection at the college. Reach out to her if you're curious about the work of her Strategic Planning Committee for Excellent Instruction.
Curious about what the School of English and Humanities offers the community of students they teach? Here's the Wakelet that Melissa mentions that's constantly updated with their activities and offerings.
Melissa and I talk with great affection about a brilliant and irreverent book, Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott that we've both used in college writing courses and for our own enjoyment and edification. We both highly recommend it regardless of your relationship with writing.