I have significant experience working with faculty, staff, and administrators across disciplines on projects aimed at improving teaching and learning and institutional success. (Including being invited to deliver a range of workshops and talks.)
On the Strategic Planning and Oversight Committee at Kankakee Community College, I have spearheaded efforts this past year to redefine the core values of our institution and establish new customer care standards as part of a broader “Culture of Care” initiative. This work entailed conducting focus groups with all employee groups, developing new performance standards aligned with our institutional mission and priorities, and codifying these standards into a “Cavaliers Care Book.”
Similarly, this fall I was charged by Senior Leadership with planning and co-facilitating IdeaFest, an all-day employee forum in support of KCC’s strategic planning process. This work entailed training 20 “table hosts” from across the college in the World Café method, which we then used to gather feedback and new ideas around five strategic themes, and then compiled the results in a framework that will serve as the basis for KCC’s next five-year Strategic Plan.
At College of Dupage, I worked closely with the office of adjunct faculty support, the teaching and learning center, and the office of learning technologies to implement several new professional development initiatives at the college. One such project was Writing on the Edge (WOTE), the first-ever adjunct faculty conference on the teaching of writing in the Midwest.
Nominated for an ICCB Innovation Award in 2015, WOTE featured presentations and panels on topics ranging from teaching with technology, flipping the classroom, and addressing the needs of diverse learners, with over 100 adjunct faculty from more than 15 institutions across four states attended the conference. In 2016, WOTE expanded to include professional development opportunities for full-time faculty through a pre-conference workshop focused on teaching multimodal composition. Similarly, I redesigned the onboarding and mentoring that lecturers in the division received, including implementing portfolio-based evaluation.
While at Northwestern University, I served as a Peer Reviewer of the Higher Learning Commission (North Central). I also worked as a Senior Research Associate for the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching at Northwestern, where I completed a major needs-assessment for the School of Continuing Studies (SCS). At the Searle Center I also assisted in a number of faculty development initiatives, including providing technical and administrative support to the Searle Faculty Fellows Program as well as research support for the “Enhancing Critical Thinking in the STEM Disciplines: A Faculty Development Model.”
At Roosevelt University, in addition to my duties as Director of Composition, I directed the Graduate Credential in the Teaching of Writing Program, where I provided pedagogical training and mentoring to approximately 30 graduate students as they completed internships throughout the Chicago area.
At the University of Southern Mississippi, I served for three years on the executive committee of a Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) focused on improving undergraduate speaking and writing competencies university-wide. In this project, I worked closely with colleagues from each college to implement an outcomes-based portfolio assessment system, as well as to create a faculty fellows seminar that is serving as the framework for USM’s first Center for Teaching and Learning.
I provided curriculum planning and consulting services to the Mississippi University for Women as part of a major redesign of the first-year experience for students in the Department of Languages, Literature and Philosophy.
I have also been involved in several broader faculty development initiatives. For two years I served as a consultant to the Developmental Education Task Force for the Mississippi Institutes of Higher Learning (IHL), where I worked closely with coordinators of basic writing and math programs across the state as they piloted new course models aimed at improving the retention and success of historically underrepresented students.
Stemming from a workshop I facilitated for the Live Oak Writing Project, I also collaborated with colleagues from the Two Year College English Association of Mississippi (TYCAM) to organize the first statewide conference on teaching and technology for two-year college faculty and administrators on the USM campus.
With Joe Janangelo and Duane Roen, I launched the WPA Mentoring Project for the Council of Writing Program Administrators—an initiative that included conducting national surveys of the professional development and mentoring needs of the council’s more than two thousand members, and developing multiple professional development strands that have since become permanent features of the annual CWPA conference.
I have also been asked to present on the use of technology in teaching and administration at several national conferences.
In addition to several course and program redesign projects I’ve initiated as a writing program administrator, I have done instructional design work in a variety of settings.
In 2003, I received a University Fellowship to work as an Instructional Designer in the Technology Assisted Curriculum Center at the University of Utah for a year (2003-2004). At TACC my duties were split between working with faculty from across the disciplines to developed multimedia content for their courses, and serving on the Scholars Portal Group.
The Scholars Portal Project was a collaboration between Fretwell-Downing Informatics and seven American Research Library (ARL) institutions to design and launch one of the first meta-search interfaces in the world. In this position I worked closely with campus administrators, subject librarians, and IT staff to improve the overall quality of user-experience with the University of Utah’s implementation of the SPP interface: zPortal.
(To see an example of some of this work, see “zPortal Proposal.”)
While the Scholars Portal Project came to an end in 2005, based on our experiences with the project, Alison Regan (then Director of TACC) and I co-authored “Environmentalist Approaches to Course Management Systems“ — in which we argued for new ways of conceptualizing dynamic online learning experiences.
In 2001, I also worked as a Project Writer creating assessment modules for the Online Competency Program for Western Governors University. This experience exposed me to issues of alternate credentialing very early in my career, and WGU very much remains at the forefront of competency-based credentialing in the private non-profit sector.
Administrative Portfolio 