A Powerful Tool for Perfecting the Faculty Craft

Interactive Stories About Teaching

Precedents: According to Reginald StClair's article in the Fall 2001 Inquiry on "Assessing the VCCS Instructional Leaders Seminar" (pages 66-78 in the hard copy), the most appreciated methods used at the Instructional Seminars have been teaching vignettes and discussion groups.  StClair affirms, "The one item reported as most impacting student learning was the teaching vignette" (71).  The experience of the RCTE Chairs confirms the value of vignettes, stories about teaching, for prompting discussions that generate lots of ideas and reflections on teaching, based on out experience of making up 4 open-ended vignettes for the 1998 New Faculty Seminar and using them for break-out group discussions.

Rationale: This section of the RCTE website, then, is devoted to selected stories about teaching that will make for interesting reading, as well as inviting responses and stories from readers.  Reflecting on teaching and even sharing those reflections and experiences that resonate with those stories in some way can help to minimize the isolation that is a notorious part of teaching in higher education.

Procedure: Read any of the teaching vignettes from the Web that are linked below; click on the underlined topic just beside the number in the listing below to open the reading.  Then, if you wish, return to this page (probably by using your browser's "back" button) to respond to the invitation that follows--usually to offer advice for an open-ended story or to present a reflection on your own related experience.  Responses will be sent to the webmaster's email address; selected responses may be selected to appear in this website section for the benefit of other faculty.

Contents

Vignette 1: A Series of Instructional Design Decisions 

How do you empower disenfranchised students so that they can rise above their fears and the ingrained racism of their peers?

Vignette 2:  Charting

OK, so we're not all reading teachers, but we can use some methods in any class to get our students to make course concepts memorable.

Vignette 3: Gender Equity

What are all the factors contributing to the inequity in this sample?

1999-2011+ by the Virginia Community College System. Prepared for the VCCS by Professor Eric Hibbison, 1998-2001 MRCTE Chair and Chief Chair of RCTE from  2000-2005. Permission is granted to use this content for professional development or other educational, nonprofit purposes.  Animations used on this site are either part of the Front Page theme or from a royalty free collection called "Web Clip Empire 250,000" ©1997, 1998 by Xoom, Inc., and its Licensors.  

Reminder for folks new to the Web: UNDERLINED WORDS (and some graphics images) ARE HOT LINKS. To preview them, hold your mouse on the hotlink (the arrow becomes a hand as you "mouseover" a link) and read the "URL" (Web address) in the "status line" (bottom) of your maximized Web browser. To visit, just click.