ACTL
Greetings from the Center for Teaching & Learning.
I hope the year has begun well for you. We had a great Orientation for the new faculty and the Teaching Circles have begun in earnest. Workshops for the broader faculty are being planned and the Teaching Observation Groups for the fall term are coming together.
As the new director of ACTL I hope to support your teaching and your student's learning in every way that I can. Of course, to that end, I will need your help. Please watch your emails next week for a needs assessment survey that will be coming from ACTL. And feel free to contact me with any requests or ideas that you may have for workshops, training sessions or any other resources you would like to see offered. Oh, and, I am still hoping to be invited to a department meeting so that I can get a better understanding of ways that the Center can offer support!
Finally, I came across the following recently, reported in the online newsfeed Inside Higher Ed and thought it was worth sharing.
President Obama has a long memory about grades he didn't agree with. The president recently met with Roger Boesche, his politics professor when the future president was an undergraduate at Occidental College. Obama has praised Boesche many times, but took some time during their meeting to reiterate his complaint -- made decades ago -- about a B he received on a paper about European political thought, the Los Angeles Times reported. Obama and Boesche still disagree about the grade. Boesche told the Times that he didn't necessarily think Obama would someday be president, and that there is a lesson there for teachers at all levels: to "realize that in any class, you could have a child, a young man or woman, who could do incredibly great things in the world. So teach as well as you can."
Let me know what I can do to help you "teach as well as you can."
Jon Clauss
Augustana Center for Teaching & Learning