Although in the communication studies department we discuss teaching in meetings at the level of area of specialization (organizational communication, public communication, and so on) and in bimonthly departmental faculty meetings, several years ago we noticed that our many responsibilities prevented us from reflecting upon the intellectual work of teaching for a significant period of time with undivided attention on a departmental level. We decided that we could do it only if we made time for it and set it at a time when our other burdens and passions would not be so pressing. Our solution: an annual faculty retreat. Each fall, about a week before the new semester’s class meetings begin or shortly after, we meet for a day or two— sometimes a weekday, sometimes a weekend—to discuss specific issues related to teaching and learning. In what follows I will discuss how our three department teaching retreats came about and what we did, as well as what they have meant to us.
As I mentioned, much of our reflection upon teaching and learning takes place among faculty members working in one of the areas of the field including organizational, interpersonal, intercultural, new technology, and public. The retreats have provided an opportunity to systematically reflect upon connections among areas and the challenges and successes we have had teaching undergraduate and graduate students and assessing their learning. Each retreat has had a different focus. The first addressed issues related to teaching and learning for undergraduate students. The second focused on the same issues as related to graduate students. Our most recent focused on assessment.
Undergraduate retreat
We tried to systematically analyze and resolve issues about undergraduate teaching and learning that surfaced during faculty meetings by holding a retreat. At the retreat, faculty members received a stack of index cards, and on each card they wrote one issue regarding undergraduate education in our department that they felt needed to be addressed. We collected the cards/issues into a single pile and organized them into themes. We then decided which were most important and began developing potential solutions for them. Among the key themes to emerge were that students in higher level courses were not always well prepared by lower level courses, that students did not have a clear sense of how the major fit together, and that too many students decided they wanted to be majors without knowing what we teach. We decided that one solution was to create COMS 104, Introduction to Communication Studies, a collaboratively prepared survey of the field that would introduce students to the major, help them see connections among the department’s courses, and be better prepared for higher level courses. Since this idea had been discussed before but never implemented, the remainder of the retreat focused on how the course would be developed. Following one semester, the course was taught and has been taught every semester since then.
The course has been truly collaborative. Faculty members have contributed lesson plans and visited the class to discuss topics in their areas of expertise. In each semester in which it has been offered, a different faculty member has served as instructor. Due to the number of students enrolling in it—rising from 30 in its first semester to 122 this semester and still growing—we now employ a graduate teaching assistant. Faculty members who teach and have taught the course meet to discuss assignments and continue to work with a collaboratively-developed syllabus and course materials. The course has received positive student evaluations. Students report that they appreciate the course and that it is meeting our goals of introducing the major, integrating the different areas of the department, and preparing them for higher level courses.
Graduate retreat
The impetus for the graduate retreat was the same song, second verse: in faculty meetings we regularly shared some of our problems and successes with graduate teaching and learning and thought that we could repeat the positive outcomes of the undergraduate retreat with one focusing on the graduate program. This retreat was a twoday affair. On the first day, faculty members generated a list of issues regarding the graduate program that they believed needed to be addressed. On the second day, Carol Nalbandian, a professional facilitator, led the discussion on what we liked about the program, what needed to be improved, and what programs and initiatives could be developed to address problems. In the area of graduate student teaching and learning, we concurred that our discipline expects doctoral students to graduate with publications (difficult due in part to the lack of large, funded team projects), graduate students needed assistance making research presentations, and their proficiency in research methods needed to be strengthened.
One initiative that we developed to address these issues was a department-wide research colloquium. Three faculty members agreed to lead it. Because we wanted to continue to foster two-way communication with graduate students, two different graduate students each year also participated in organizing and running the colloquia. All faculty members regularly attended colloquia and sometimes presented their own work. At each monthly meeting we typically heard two graduate student presentations: one using social scientific methods and one using rhetorical methods. To date at least two of the graduate student presentations have been published.
We refined this initiative as we realized that the challenges facing students working from a social science perspective were different from those working from a humanistic perspective. We replaced the department colloquia with more specialized, intense efforts to assist graduate students in preparing their work for submission to academic journals. We initiated two new programs— the Social Science Journal Club and Rhetoric Writing Workshop—designed to help graduate students develop research projects begun in courses into journal submissions.
The Social Science Journal Club met every two weeks, and all graduate students were invited to participate. Participants first completed an evaluation of the manuscript they would work through during the meetings so Joann Keyton, the faculty facilitator, would have information about their needs and be able to use her experiences as a researcher and editor of a national journal to help students meet them. She provided examples of published research and created short writing guides. Students were responsible for establishing a plan of writing for their manuscript, demonstrating progress at each meeting, and giving feedback to one or more students at each meeting. Because social science often requires intercoder reliability, participants also used the time to code data for those who needed it.
The Rhetoric Writing Workshop meets about every month during the academic year to workshop one or two graduate student papers. Since research in rhetoric tends to be singleauthored, faculty and students agreed that a workshop format would be appropriate. Authors post papers on BlackBoard at least a week in advance, and participants write comments on the manuscripts. At meetings, the author briefly introduces his or her paper, reads one paragraph, and then is a “fly on the wall” as participants discuss the draft. The author may then question participants. We expect this initiative to enhance graduate students’ research presentations and result in publications.
Assessment retreat
Our most recent retreat focused on assessing undergraduate teaching and learning. We decided that this was an appropriate topic because on an individual level, we want to know if students are learning what we’re trying to teach. On a departmental level, we want to be able to show external audiences what our courses equip students to do.
Since I was directly involved in planning this, I can say a few words about that process. It took time and effort but not an inordinate amount of either. Our department’s administrative staff took care of reserving a room, ordering food, and gathering supplies. I spoke with Dan Bernstein about who we could invite to facilitate the discussion and what we could do. Although bringing in an assessment expert was too expensive, Dan offered guidelines about what we could do and how. I then met with several colleagues to try to tailor these guidelines to our needs and particularly to the fact that the entire faculty would be meeting as a group. We wanted to provide people with some ideas about what they could do in their individual courses, but we also wanted to focus on accomplishing something that we could do only as a department. We thought we could first generate department teaching and learning goals, break into smaller groups based on our areas to discuss ways of assessing whether the goals were being achieved, then return to the large group to share what we had discussed.
This was an ambitious plan. We covered some of the basics of assessment: setting learning goals and identifying student performances where we can see if goals are being achieved. But we spent the rest of the time reflecting on course, area, and departmental goals. First each of us thought about the one or two undergraduate classes that we frequently teach and took a few minutes to individually generate goals for the courses. Faculty members in each area met in small groups to generate a set of area goals which we wrote on flip charts. Each group then walked around the room and read the other groups’ goals. We taped each area’s goals to a wall at the front of the room and from this generated a list of department goals.
We recognized that we would need to continue to refine this list, so following the retreat we circulated a document that summarized each area’s goals and department goals. We also reflected on potential uses we could make of our reflections. Not only would they help us to think about assessment in our individual classes but would also help with departmental assessment and attract students with appropriate interests to the communication studies major.
Although each of our retreats has produced tangible results, the less tangible results also help us to sustain a department culture that values teaching excellence. At these annual retreats we see our colleagues from all areas of the department and from all career stages voluntarily committing a full day or two, not to teaching activities as such but to reflection upon the intellectual work involved in teaching. We enact core departmental values as we collaboratively reflect on this work. We see that despite and perhaps because of our methodological and other differences, we can come together to think and share ideas about how to achieve common pedagogical goals. The retreats have provided us with a time and space to reflect upon our teaching practices— something that it is difficult to do individually but, without the retreats, would be impossible to do as a department community with shared values and a shared commitment to teaching excellence.