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  1. Home
  2. Faculty and Staff
  3. Faculty Development

Teaching and Learning Collaborative

This Collaborative is a virtual Teaching and Learning Center, a consortium of resources for faculty who want to develop their teaching. Faculty in the TLC are passionate about good teaching and eager to explore ways to refine pedagogical practices and new ways of meeting student needs.

Reach out to the Teaching and Learning Collaborative faculty group.

Their range of expertise gives you many options for individual consultations:

  • Writing instruction & assessment       
  • Pedagogical strategies for working with multilingual students
  • Classroom/lab best practices
  • Syllabus review
  • Online pedagogy/tools to support OL or FTF instruction           
  • Innovative classroom practices and their assessment
  • Math instruction strategies
  • Pedagogies of diversity, equity, and inclusion
  • Canvas tips and tools

 

TLC Faculty

click on faculty names to view how they are able to help all faculty.

I’m interested in helping faculty think of ways to increase student engagement as well as both a sense of belonging and actual equity in classes. There are numerous structural aspects of a class that can be changed with relatively minimal effort but that have huge impacts on student success and enjoyment of classes. I am happy to work with faculty on these solutions, develop new ones that fit the needs of individual classes and instructors, and work on other aspects of pedagogy, classroom management, and course design. I am also on call to help you design assessment tools or look at data to see if what you’re doing is working.

I’m interested in helping faculty from all disciplines in designing what the math education community calls “high cognitive demand” tasks or activities. Instead of lecturing or modeling how to solve a problem, what activities can be designed to challenge our students to reason and think about our disciplines? In addition, I would be happy to mentor anyone new to teaching, as I previously worked at a non-profit offering professional development to beginning secondary teachers and have many educational leadership courses through my PhD around supporting faculty. I personally have also been exploring teaching with social justice activities in my math classes.

I’m interested in helping physics, math, and other STEM faculty who want to make their classes more interactive and engaging. I’ll also be glad to assist with online homework and physics labs ideas. As the number of international students in the Science & Engineering division keeps growing, there are simple strategies that can help them these students feel included and make their learning process more effective. I’ll be more than happy to share some approaches that I found helpful.

How can I make my content more accessible for multilingual students? What can I do to encourage more active participation from multilingual students who are usually very quiet in class? How can I design assignments and tasks in a way that students’ multilingual experiences can be utilized as a resource for learning? How can I promote more interactions between domestic and international students in my class? I’m interested in having conversations with faculty about these or other questions about supporting multilingual students. I’m interested in helping colleagues develop practical strategies, teaching ideas, or alternative approaches to assignment design.

I’m interested in helping faculty from science, social science, arts, and humanities disciplines with low- and high-stakes writing assignment design and assignment sequencing; approaches to responding to and evaluating student writing; digital writing pedagogies that allow students to produce digital objects such as websites, videos, and presentations; approaches to engaging students in active learning experiences; approaches to conducting peer-review sessions; syllabus design; and pedagogies of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which, in my view, should inform all of our work as teachers and scholars.

I’m interested in critical pedagogy to better serve a multicultural, multilingual, international, non-traditional, and mixed-modal student population. I have experience with redesigning classes from the ground up to prioritize student success. Some of my favorite concrete strategies are technology-assisted collaboration, flipped classrooms, game-based and inquiry-based active learning, alternative grading systems, choice-based syllabus design, and radical educational transparency.

I live and breathe educational technology and good teaching practice and its impact on face-to-face and online instruction and am passionate about supporting faculty with any level of pedagogically sound technology integration. From integrating polling software that encourages in-class participation to innovating the Canvas space to support active learning, and everything in between, I’m happy to research, model, and provide support with any number of tools and technologies. But it doesn’t stop at technology: innovative classroom practices like Socratic seminars, problem-based learning and reciprocal teaching, are other pedagogical approaches I’m happy to explore with faculty. I believe that with the right tools, technologies, and active learning strategies in place, every classroom can be exemplary, and I will do everything possible to help make that happen.

Faculty Development

  • Teaching and Learning Collaborative
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Faculty Development Contact

Dr. Rachael Brown
Director of Faculty Development
Associate Professor, Mathematics Education
Penn State Abington
119D Sutherland
 [email protected]

 

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Penn State Abington

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