TLC Prepares & Shares

Book Reads

We love to highlight books that we have personally found meaningful; we also elevate books faculty share with us to expand their influence more broadly by recommending them to others!

Titles we have read and coordinated book reads with for faculty include:

The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker

Priya Parker is a nationally recognized expert on effective gatherings and presents this step-by-step guide to intentional and meaningful gatherings where participants feel invited, included, and needed. Her insights have ready application to the ways in which we gather to teach and learn.

Our favorite chapter in the TLC is “Never Start a Funeral with Logistics”!

Dare to Lead by Brene' Brown

Teams and departments working together in higher education today can be more innovative and better meet demands as they engage in four key skills shared by bestselling author, speaker, and professor Brene’ Brown in this book that is all about bravery, courage, and vulnerability. Candace Boesiger collaborated with CSI’s Nursing program in a semester-long reading of Dare to Lead.

Inclusive Teaching by Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy

We feel community learning among higher education faculty can bring about much good, including knowledge sharing, encouragement, collaboration, innovation, adaptability, and the promotion of inclusive practices.

CSI’s Teaching & Learning Center has been an active proponent of, and participant in, CSI’s first Learning Community, focused on inclusive teaching practices and culturally responsive pedagogies, in tandem with CSI’s status as a Hispanic-Serving Institution and recipient of a Title V federal grant. If you are interested in joining us, please reach out to tlc@csi.edu. You can also see more of our work in the Teaching & Learning Resources section of our website; look for Inclusive Teaching & Learning.

Professional Development Opportunities

The TLC partners with the Office of the Vice President for Instruction to identify opportunities to bring impactful faculty enrichment and training to campus. Two examples of this include:

Dr. Kelly Hogan and Dr. Viji Sathy

Dr. Hogan and Dr. Sathy

Drs. Hogan and Sathy are both award-winning instructors with a combined 25+ years in the classroom at the University of North Carolina and Duke University. Passionate about student success, equity, and inclusion in the classroom, they have expertise with inclusive techniques and active learning in any size class because both teach courses routinely with hundreds of students. Kelly and Viji have been active in the scholarship of teaching and learning in their respective disciplines of biology and statistics, and their work has been featured in several national publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and The New York Times.They have published a book together called Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom.

Dr. Hogan and Dr. Sathy participated in a recent In-Service Week at CSI via Zoom as keynote speakers, where nearly 100 faculty participated in a dynamic workshop to better understand inequities that can arise in teaching and learning, and to gain techniques to add structure and equity to our classrooms.

If you are interested in learning more, you can visit:

Inclusified
Dr. Hogan and Dr. Sathy's In-Service presentation. This recording requires CSI login credentials to view.

Dr. Natasha Jankowski

Dr. Natasha Jankowski is a higher education and assessment expert. Having previously served as the Director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA), Dr. Jankowski is the author of multiple assessment-related books, reports, and articles. She is also a sought-after presenter nationally and internationally on student assessment practices.

Dr. Jankowski joined us at CSI for a recent Assessment Week – the period during the Fall Semester when faculty and non-faculty “readers” join to review and assess submitted student work using a portfolio-based process. She presented multiple addresses in large and small groups to faculty and continues to collaborate with the TLC to guide our ongoing efforts in designing assignment charrettes.

If you would like to know more, please visit the Assessment category of our Resources page.

Meet Current Needs

When directed by the Office of the Vice President for Instruction, TLC learning designers respond to institutional priorities and prioritize training and resource development on initiatives and best practices related to these topics so we may support and provide resources to CSI faculty as requested. Two examples of this include:

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

Diversity, inclusion, equity, and equality are common topics in our news feeds and across higher education campuses. Our college president, Dr. Fisher, encourages us at CSI to think of students not as “at risk”, but instead “at promise”! We are tasked to employ resources and pedagogies that serve all students.

We in TLC have embraced the invitation to participate in further training opportunities, read books, and seek mentoring in culturally responsive pedagogical strategies. If you’d like to know more about how we are preparing, please see the next section, “Professional Courses and Programs”. To view the resources and ideas we are curating to create relationships and apply strategies that foster culturally responsive teaching to optimize student outcomes, please see the Inclusive Teaching & Learning section of TLC Resources.

High Impact Practices

HIPs are effective teaching strategies and educational experiences we can foster for students, which, when applied at an appropriately high-level and consistent frequency, lead to improved student engagement, retention, and achievement. Stimulating curiosity, critical thinking, meaningful interactions, and impactful content engagement are desirable goals for all instructors. HIPs can provide a framework and context in which to build improvements to our teaching and learning.

To learn more, please see:

A CSI overview of High Impact Practices.
The great work being done by Pike’s Peak Community College with HIPs, including faculty guides.

Committees, Courses & Programs

We prioritize active participation in shared governance committees that promote teaching and learning and related initiatives at CSI, while we also work to identify and participate in professional courses and personal development.

TLC Committee Work

The CSI Committees that include representatives from the Teaching & Learning Center include:

Academic Excellence Committee
Assessment Committee
General Education Review Committee
LMS Optimization Committee
Math Pedagogy Committee

TLC Professional Development and Course Participation

A sampling of recent courses and professional development TLC learning designers have completed includes:

We're headed to Stanford! – In June of 2024, all three of CSI's learning designers have been accepted to attend the 5-day d.school Teaching and Learning Studio. The Stanford d.school is a design thinking institute with a mission to help people unlock creative abilities and apply them to the world. It has become one of the most highly sought-after academic programs at Stanford University, while also offering a competitive application process to invite attendance from educators and designers nationwide.

At d.school, we are excited to explore the use of design thinking to -

Foster innovation and experimentation, helping us to incorporate diverse ideas into our thinking and application of learning design to instruction.
Apply an interdisciplinary approach to an immersive and collaborative experience, working in partnership with faculty and designers from across the country on real-world problems and opportunities we each bring from our respective campuses.
Create change inside and outside of the classroom, through a student-first perspective.

We anticipate great results and impact as we represent CSI and experience d.school together. We look forward to learning and curating key ideas for application that we can bring home to share with our CSI instructors.

Lumen Circles Fellowship: Belonging and Inclusive Teaching – Terina, Candace, and Bethany participated in this 9-week curriculum, which included a virtual community where we engaged with faculty and learning designer peers from across the country to explore and reflect on our inclusive teaching praxis. Our primary goal was to learn how to facilitate inclusive environments where all students feel they belong and can thrive personally and academically. Weekly, we were invited to apply what we were learning by changing a component of or implementing something new into an active course we were teaching. This learning-by-doing approach was valuable as we reflected on our experiences, strengths, and opportunities to improve.

Institute for Emerging Leadership in Online Learning – Candace completed this four-part leadership development series over a period of five months. Sponsored by the Online Learning Consortium, participants in this elite program collaborate with others from around the world to explore, identify, and act upon opportunities to improve digital education.

Inclusive STEM Teaching Project – Bethany completed this 6-week MOOC (massive open online course) and can highly recommend it if you are willing to undertake a 3-hour weekly time commitment. The course is free, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. To date, more than 2,000 higher ed faculty have completed the course, and preliminary qualitative data show gains in awareness, attitudes, confidence, implementation, and student benefits. Bethany found value in the blended approach, where online materials combined with virtual, in-person learning communities to create deliberate interactions centered around identity, privilege, and positionality.

Questions? Please ask, we’d love to share what we’ve learned! Email tlc@csi.edu.

Professional Associations

We regularly seek opportunities to train with and learn from the following national organizations:

New Technologies & Tools

In the Teaching & Learning Center, we partner regularly with campus committees, departments, individual instructors, and third-party vendors to learn more about educational technologies and how to apply them to instruction to improve outcomes. A few examples of this include:

Canvas – A TLC learning designer meets monthly with our Canvas Customer Support Manager and representatives from all Idaho higher education institutions using Canvas. This is a rich opportunity to learn about what is new and what is under development in Canvas while also connecting with other teams supporting faculty and student use of Canvas. This means the updates we share with you monthly in Teaching & Learning Takeout are immediately relevant and directly informed by Canvas, and that we have a direct route to take your suggestions and questions back to our Canvas support team!

Kahoot! – We’ve helped facilitate multiple sessions where Kahoot! has presented directly to CSI instructors, showing tips and new functionality together with ideas about how to engage students using gamified opportunities available through Kahoot!.

Packback – as a relatively new tool integrated into CSI’s Canvas environment, Packback shows exciting promise to improve student engagement and participation in online discussion environments. We in the TLC have been early adopters of Packback in our own courses, organized webinars to bring Packback introductions and Q&A sessions to instructors, and actively developed documentation when needed to illustrate Packback best-practices for course integration.

Zoom Rooms – the TLC partners with CSI’s IT Department to offer regular training to instructors who teach from or to CSI’s Zoom Rooms. This technology regularly improves and changes; consistent training is important to ensure instructors are prepared to share content, engage with students in multiple locations, and correctly schedule and manage all technology associated with these learning spaces. To know more, please see the Zoom Room Instruction section of Teaching & Learning Resources.