Teaching and Learning Colleagues: Guiding Principals
Teaching and Learning Colleagues: Guiding Principals
Goal and Guiding Principles Developed by TLC Team (Summer, 2014)
Goal Statement
To support learner-centered teaching (active learning ecosystem) through collaborative faculty work that aims to increase and enhance student learning outcomes through modeling “best practices”, encouraging innovation and reflection, and understanding how current research supports authentic student learning.
Guiding Principles
The following principles will guide our work. These principles have been synthesized from prior research and best practices related to maximizing authentic student learning.
• Maryville’s community will benefit from understanding and working toward a shift from an Instruction to a Learning Paradigm? (Barr & Tagg, 1995)*
• Great teachers are not born; they develop greatness through thoughtful preparation of and reflection upon meaningful learning outcomes, learning experiences, and methods of assessment.
• Faculty at all levels of expertise and experience can learn new approaches to enhance their students’ learning.
• Faculty learn best in a collaborative, democratic, trusting, low-risk, transparent environment that offers them the time/space to reflect and encourages them to actively take responsibility for their own learning.
• The effort to improve student learning must incorporate and build upon the ideas as stated in the Maryville strategic plan, the the Characteristics of the Maryville Graduate, and the Core Values as exemplified by the Maryville Centers of Excellence.
• Best practices are learner-centered and designed to support the theory “that those who do the work, do the learning”. (Doyle, 2011) *As courses are being developed they must be continuously assessed for rigor and relevance and then delivered in a way that builds positive peer and student/faculty relationships.
• Innovative and experiential learning opportunities for our students are necessary if our graduates are to thrive as adaptable problem-solvers in their rapidly changing world.
• Students learn best when they are actively engaged, experience choices, share control, and feel respected by faculty.
• Our role as members of this group is to grow together (with each other and other faculty colleagues) through facilitating, mentoring, and modeling.