Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Effective Grading Workshop
This workshop considered a variety of ways to make grading more effective and less time consuming. Important topics covered that I stil use include focusing on discipline-specific comments (as opposed to marking more general grammatical issues, etc); designing assignments that are clear and that focus on specific skills or knowledge; and using (and even publishing for students) rubrics for assignments, to make marking fair and consistent.
Turnitin Workshop
This workshop helped me to understand better how to use turnitin.com for evaluation of written assignments. I now regularly use turnitin.com to collect student work and to check for originality.
Served as Departmental Liaison for General Education Committee
I briefly served as the departmental liaison. While doing this I designed and implemented a “Content for Validity of Ethical Reasoning” exercise in Ethics, PHIL 2103. We have since used this as a department to assess general student learning in this course. The activity helped me to formalize my ideas about how to teach theories of ethics with the purpose of applying them to concrete cases.
Open Educational Resource Fellowship
I am currently engaged in the OER Fellowship for the purpose of turning PHIL 2203 ID into an open access course. This will save students money on textbooks, but also provide a core set of materials to others who teach sections of Health Care Ethics at City Tech and elsewhere.
Interdisciplinary Lecture Exchanges
I currently exchange interdisciplinary lectures with at least three colleagues at City Tech. Our work together to offer ID lectures to our students has forced me to think how philosophy can be integrated productively into an economics course (I lecture on the ethics of Libertarian Paternalism in Behavioral Economics), a psychology course (I lecture on philosophy of race and the meaning of health justice in a Health Psychology course), or a sociology course (I lecture on the health impacts of environmental pollution in the Environmental Sociology course). Exposure to my colleagues’ teaching in my own course also helps me to think about how to incorporate methods of teaching from other disciplines and how their disciplines can impact philosophical ethics.
First Year Experience Committee
This committee is responsible for overseeing the range of programs and initiatives that help students successfully integrate as college students during their first year at City Tech. Over the last couple of years we have been reading Mindset by Carol Dweck, the City Tech Companion, and other resources that are designed to help teachers better understand the minds of typical undergraduate students. In 2017 I presented some of the ideas we discussed in this committee to the Social Science Department, and have begun to integrate some of the basic ideas from these sources into my regular teaching.
