Participate in the CAE Lessons Learned Project

Dear Colleagues,

We are writing to you to ask for your participation in what we are calling the CAE Lessons Learned Project, which seeks to gather and share faculty impressions from teaching during the Fall 2020 semester.  Our aim is to engage faculty in a process of reflecting on the lessons this challenging teaching semester held for them, partly because we wish to celebrate those lessons learned, and partly to engage faculty in the processing of this semester prior to moving into the next.

To this end we invite you to share your insights about the fall semester in a brief 5 - 7 minute video, the shape of which will be unique to you, your teaching approach, and your experience. In addition, if there is someone whose teaching especially inspired you this semester, we invite you to pass their name on to us.

It’s our plan to broadly celebrate these videos at the close of our Back-to-School Workshop Week, as a way of acknowledging the great achievement of having come through the fall semester as well as embarking on the continued work of adapting our teaching to the ongoing challenges of the COVID pandemic.  If you agree, we would like to have your video by Monday, January 4, and we are available to chat with you about what you might focus in particular.

Some suggestions:
  • You could share a particularly effective (or challenging) lesson or classroom situation that you feel caused you to adjust your teaching.  
  • You could showcase a few final assessments that seemed to illustrate the ways in which your teaching impacted yourself or your students
  • You could reflect on what you expected the semester to be and what it was
  • You could narrate the modifications you made to a lesson or assignment
  • You could talk about the surprising ways you were able to build community online and/or across modalities
These are just a few suggestions, and we can provide further assistance should you wish to participate.  Those who team teach or co-plan are invited to undertake a shared video.  We are asking you because we believe that this semester demonstrated a faculty that is deeply committed to teaching, and we want others to benefit from your singular experience.  In addition, we also know that reflecting on our teaching, both individually and together, will strengthen our community of practice and help to sustain it going forward. Please indicate your interest in participating or in nominating a colleague by filling out the form at https://form.123formbuilder.com/5753716/form.  We hope many of you will nominate both yourselves and others.  

All the best,

Carol Ann Davis
Jay Rozgonyi
Emily Smith
Directors, Center for Academic Excellence



For more information, contact Jay Rozgonyi / 2416 / jrozgonyi@fairfield.edu