At the end of the 2011-2012 school year, we provided the following memo to the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences about our activities through the year.

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MEMORANDUM

To: Brian Conniff, CAS Dean

From: Patrick Clark, Jennifer Cutsforth, Tara Fay, Katy Meier, Jessica Nolan,
Jeremy Sepinsky

Date: August 15, 2012
RE: Pedagogy Cohort Update
We are writing to provide you with the year-to-date progress of our pedagogy cohort along with our recommendations for moving forward.

In the past year, our group has met more than a dozen times and has accomplished the following:

• Discussed our courses and provided one another with feedback and troubleshooting advice;
• Visited each other’s classrooms and/or watched videos of each other teaching to provide informal and formal evaluations;
• Shared our novel pedagogies with one another;
• Shared teaching resources and recommended teaching related links;
• Watched and then discussed several webinars related to novel pedagogy;
• Brought in a guest speaker; and
• Supported one another’s interest in and planning for classroom experiments with novel pedagogies. In the future we plan to present the results of our classroom experiments to the larger university community.

Going forward, we would like to request continuing support for our cohort.  We think of this group as a learning community. and have built a foundation of trust and respect for one another in the past year.  As such, we have agreed that we do not want to add additional faculty to our cohort. We feel that a small group of faculty that remains together over time provides a more solid foundation for growth, experimentation with novel pedagogies, and peer evaluation. Thus, rather than adding additional faculty to our current group we would like to recommend that one or more additional groups be formed, based on faculty interest.  We are happy to provide your office with advice on how to structure these new faculty cohorts and to share our experience of what worked in our group.