AIM Faculty Development

AIM faculty welcome 2015 with curriculum mapping and assessment seminar

 

“(The facilitator) successfully put together during those two full days and one morning session the essence of teaching preparedness and student engagement. The session objectives and content complement the needs of the faculty who may be new or may have been in the teaching profession for a long time.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        -Workshop Participant

 

To kick off the new year, AIM faculty participated in a workshop on curriculum mapping and assessment last January 13-15, 2015. The workshop, held at AIM’s Meralco Caseroom, was led by Phyllis Blumberg, PhD, Director of the Teaching and Learning Center and Faculty Development Provost at the University of Sciences in Philadelphia. This is the second time that Dr. Blumberg visited AIM as a resource person; the first was in May 2014, when she held a seminar on participant-centered learning.    

 

Addressing the participants on the first day, Dean Jikyeong Kang expressed her excitement over the participants’ “commitment to improve their delivery of education and the common goal to make learning a truly meaningful experience for students.” She anticipated that the sessions “will yield outcomes that will allow faculty to continuously improve our teaching and curriculum administration.” 

 

Spread over two-and-a-half days, the sessions provided a venue for faculty to appreciate and apply curriculum mapping tools in their programs; discuss the importance of providing feedback and the use of appropriate feedback techniques; learn to effectively use peer and student assessments; assess a variety of grading techniques; and, learn to assess different types of learning outcomes. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Replete with hands-on individual and group exercises, the sessions showcased a lively exchange of teaching and learning practices and experiences, and a high level of engagement all throughout the sessions. Further enriching the sessions were perspectives from a wide range of participants from other institutions such as the Ateneo de Manila University’s Center for Continuing Education, various units from De La Salle University and College of Saint Benilde, and the University of the Philippines College of Education.  “The learning sessions were animated by the tremendous exchange of ideas and experiences among the participants”, according to one participant.

 

Beyond the learning objectives, faculty also learned from the Dr. Blumberg’s style of delivering the training, taking note of how she was able to capture student engagement throughout the sessions. As one participant shared, “Her delivery helped me think about how I can improve my teaching/delivery as well.  Increasing student engagement is always a priority for me so that each student has more valuable practical and implementable takeaways from the course.” 

 

Indeed, palpable excitement was evident throughout the sessions, as faculty got together and planned to apply insights from Dr. Blumberg beyond mere theoretical knowledge, but through the discussion halls, caserooms, and through higher order levels of cognition.