Back to School

About a dozen Baylor faculty and employees sit in a computer seminar room. The topic is “digital storytelling,” and the participants are learning the web-based technology that uses photos and other graphics to inspire writing.

One of the attendees, Dr. Pat Pierce, a senior lecturer in French, attended an earlier seminar on the topic and thought the concept would be helpful to a wider audience, namely other teachers of foreign languages. And, voila, the seminar took shape.

Using this technology, Pierce can lead her students to a website where they will choose a series of photos and write a story, in French, based on the photos. The students will also record the text as narration for their story, creating a mini-documentary via the web—not to mention an excellent opportunity to practice pronunciation.

It’s a seminar that probably would not have happened at Baylor a year ago, because there was no one to do it then. Now, there is the Academy for Teaching and Learning (ATL). The ATL brought in the original speaker, and when Pierce asked for more, ATL director Dr. Gardner Campbell led the second seminar himself, with the help of the library’s technology personnel. (Gardner is pictured, center, helping Pierce, left, and Spanish instructor Janet Norden.)

Campbell came to Baylor last September to head up the new center, which developed as one of Baylor’s Major Strategic Proposals. Beginning in 2006, the proposals came from faculty and then gained approval from a selection committee and administrators.

The digital storytelling seminar was a good example of all three of the ATL’s start-up focuses: integrating appropriate technology into classrooms, enhancing learning environments, and building cohorts of faculty who will learn from each other.

Campbell believes that bringing faculty together to talk about teaching techniques can reap unexpected rewards, and creating that group dynamic is a part of what the ATL wants to do on campus. For instance, through the ATL Baylor has joined two national organizations that promote learning technology. Campbell assembled a group to attend the convention of EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. So what happens when a medievalist, an astronomer, an environmental biologist, and a curriculum expert walk into a seminar? Well, the result can be the sharing of all kinds of new ideas and ambitions, Campbell says.

Another avenue for interaction is the new Faculty Fellows program, which will begin in the fall. Through a competitive application process, faculty will be chosen to serve for a semester or two. The group will do readings together, take field trips, and devote time to studying teaching practices. “I’m a big believer that the conversation tells you the way the conversation ought to go,” Campbell says. “I think year-to-year, the different groups will experience different things as areas of inquiry.”

Campbell came to Baylor from the University of Mary Washington in Fredricksburg, Virginia, where he was  a professor of English for fourteen years and for three years served as assistant vice president for teaching and learning technologies. He says that the role of the ATL on campus is to produce programs and seminars, but also to respond to faculty members’ needs individually.

One example of that work is the ATL’s relationship with Dr. Blaine McCormick, assistant professor of management in the Hankamer School of Business. McCormick teaches the introductory business course to 450 students in a large lecture hall each semester. While he employs technology in the classroom, he wanted some advice on how to enhance the classroom experience for his students. “I am very serious about teaching,” McCormick said. “I take it as a very serious calling and responsibility.”

So McCormick contacted Campbell, and after a meeting to discuss McCormick’s teaching goals, Campbell visited the class to observe. He brought along a technology expert, and then the two of them brainstormed ideas for McCormick. When they presented their ideas, McCormick was impressed. “This was an evaluation with deep meaning, and it gave me tools,” he said. “They took what I was doing, the technology I was already using, and they took me places I didn’t know I could go.”

McCormick immediately implemented one of the suggestions. He was already using real-time digital response polling devices in the class. Now he uses them in a new way. He will ask the class a specific question: How do you calculate the current ratio for a business? (Answer: current assets over current liabilities.) The class members plug in their answers, and the typical rate of the correct answer is about 25 percent. Then McCormick has the class split into four-member groups and discuss the question before he polls them again. The second time, well over 75 percent of the class gets the answer right. “What happens is that somebody in the group knows the answer, and they explain it to everybody else,” McCormick says.

But the important thing, he notes, is that “research shows that the learning that occurs in that exercise sticks better on the exam,” he says. “There are limits on it, but it’s been very useful.”

In its first academic year on campus, the ATL has reached out to faculty both individually and in groups, Campbell says, and he hopes that will continue.

Campbell says there’s an interesting kind of irony in his presence at Baylor. “One of the reasons I took this job was that Baylor already had an extremely healthy emphasis on teaching,” he says. “So in some respects, the job of the ATL is simply to carry on a tradition, but we also want to bring new opportunities for synergies and interaction. Shared inquiry is a big part of what we are.”

Who do Baylor students count as their favorite professors? Click on Student View to find out.