In spring 2001, CNDLS was awarded two grants through the AT&T Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. These grants allowed CNDLS to deepen the level of support and commitment to faculty development at Georgetown University by expanding upon the Faculty Colloquium on New Learning Environments, and the Teaching, Learning, and Innovation Summer Institute (TLISI). The AT&T and Hewlett grants supported a new faculty development program called the Teaching, Learning, and Technology (TLT) Fellows, which aimed to develop partnerships with librarians, technology specialists, and evaluation professionals in order to provide deep and sustained support to select faculty who were pushing the envelope of teaching and learning. The grants were also critical in building relationships among these programs, and in enabling CNDLS to build a significant community of faculty engaged in reflective pedagogical change. Over the course of the two years, 56 faculty members participated in the Colloquium and the TLT Fellows Program, with more than 200 faculty members participating in the Summer Institute.
The reflective process which the Teaching, Learning & Technology Fellowship strove to foster was a four-part circular movement from design to teaching to assessment to revision and back to design. While developing their teaching practice within this framework, the Fellows also sought to achieve three goals:
- Form a community of faculty reflective about their teaching and learning goals in a research university environment
- Improve student learning in a variety of general education and introductory science courses
- Build a catalog of best practice for faculty.
While the year-long Faculty Colloquium continued to attract new faculty members, the TLT Fellows Program was built around introductory and core courses focusing on inquiry-driven pedagogies. The TLT Fellowships were awarded to Georgetown faculty to develop innovative methods of teaching and learning, to implement these methods by redesigning a course or part of a course, and then to reflect upon and document the impact this redesign has upon student learning.
The Pilot Fellows were five pioneering professors whose interests ranged from hyperlinked textual writing to getting biology students outside the classroom to teach what they were learning to middle school students. For 2003-2004, CNDLS awarded the TLT Fellowship to eight outstanding professors who sought to reexamine and reinvigorate the teaching and learning process by transforming and deforming the texts on and contexts through which teaching and learning take place. The 2004-2005 TLT Fellows projects focus on student-contributed web-texts as supplements to traditional textbooks, creating online interactive case study exercises for students, and strategies for making large classes interactive.
The ongoing success of the TLT Fellows initiative is evidenced in the vision and innovation of the projects that the Fellows develop. Two Fellows also won external grants for their work. 2003 Hewlett Fellow Jen Swift was awarded a National Science Foundation Innovation grant to develop and assess a collaborative module for Organic Chemistry and 2002 Hewlett Fellow Heidi Elmendorf became a 2003 Carnegie Scholar in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
Teaching Applications: Assessment, Course/Curriculum Design
