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Dominican University Borra Center for Teaching & Learning Excellence: Information

Notes

Welcome to the CTLE Information homepage. Use this to reference our Mission, links to partnered branches of the University, and introduce a Teaching Circle (TC). Note the Faculty Handbook can be downloaded on the bottom of the University Partners menu. The top menu tab for this page, titled Information, features a drop-down menu that leads to more resources. 

Mission Statement

As a Sinsinawa-sponsored institution, Dominican University prepares students to pursue truth, to give compassionate service, and to participate in the creation of a more just and humane world.

The Center for Teaching and Learning enhances the University’s mission of teaching and learning excellence.  We collaborate with campus partners to help faculty succeed as teachers and scholars, recognizing that they have different needs at different moments in the arc of their career.

Framing Document

Dominican University

Borra Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence

Inclusive Teaching and Learning – Who Our Students Are

Inclusive teaching is a student-centered approach to teaching that validates students’ cultural perspectives, learning styles, and interests by using dynamic practices to engage and motivate.  Inclusive teaching incorporates multicultural content, uses varied assessments to measure student learning, and allows students to explore their interests as they meet course objectives. 

Interactive Teaching and Learning – How Our Students Learn

Teaching for interactive learning is a set of approaches—including team-based learning, strategic uses of technology, community-based learning, collaborative research projects, internships, study away, learning communities, capstone experiences, and other high-impact practices—that encourage students to be dynamically engaged with what they study, to experience teaching and learning as a two-way process, and to see themselves as agents of their own learning. 

Integrative Teaching and Learning – Why We Teach and Learn

Integrative teaching and learning are the practices of making meaningful wholes—synthesizing knowledge across academic boundaries; connecting personal, academic, and community experiences; and evaluating and reflecting on one’s own learning—with the goal of developing increasingly complex frameworks for future learning and action in multiple communities.

Each of these approaches has a distinctive emphasis, but they complement, support, and strengthen one another.  Each approach is most effective when used in conjunction with the others.

Contact Information

Mary Pat Fallon, Interim Director, CTLE
mpfallon@dom.edu
708.524.6602

Father Samuel Mazzuchelli, Founder

Founder's Court sculpture inspires during COVID-19 outbreak ...

Health Disparity Learning Community Event Friday, April 30

Time

Presenters

Topic

9:30a – 11a

 

Join Zoom Meeting

https://dom.zoom.us/j/96775256623

Venoncia Bate

Linda Rockwell

Angelica Gomez

Addressing Inequities in End-of-Life Care through Inter-professional Patient, Family and Caregiver-based Engagement, Education and Care

11a – 12:30p

 

Join Zoom Meeting

https://dom.zoom.us/j/98936446498

Joyce Shim

Ada Cheng

Speaking the Unspeakable: Health, Inequity, and Storytelling  

1p – 1:30p Recognition of Sponsors

Joyce Shim

 

Join Zoom Meeting

https://dom.zoom.us/j/95345151056

 

1:30p – 3p

 

Join Zoom Meeting

https://dom.zoom.us/j/93267719449

John DeCostanza

Pastoral Care, Grief and Loss, and Chaplaincy in the Time of COVID-19

3p – 4:30p

 

Join Zoom Meeting

https://dom.zoom.us/j/98501007669

Laurie Zack

COVID Long Haulers: The experience of health disparities within the Post-COVID Syn

Starting in 2021

 

More information can be found on the Book Club page

Distracted: Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do About It

Lang, James M. Distracted : Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It . First edition. New York: Basic Books, 2020. Print. 
Keeping students focused can be difficult in a world filled with distractions. Lang rethinks the practice of teaching, revealing how educators can structure their classrooms less as distraction-free zones and more as environments where they can actively cultivate their students’ attention.
 
Join us as we dive into James Lang's timely read, "Distracted: Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do About It."
Date:
Monday, April 5
 
Location:
Innovation Lab and Zoom
 
Time:
12:00-1:00
https://dom.zoom.us/s/96149047294
Book Club
 

 

 

CTLE Speaker Series  (2:30-3:30)
More information can be found on the Speaker Series page
Previous sessions can be found on the Speaker Series page
 
 
April 21: at noonDistracted: Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do About It
 
Lang, James M. Distracted : Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It . First edition. New York: Basic Books, 2020. Print.  ISBN : 9781541699809
Teaching Distracted Minds: Old Challenges, New Contexts:  Faculty concerns about distracted students have intensified as we have all shifted online, but our real focus should be on how we help students achieve attention. This session draws upon scholarship from history, neuroscience, and education in order to argue that distractions are endemic to the human condition and can’t be walled out of the physical classroom or online course. Instead, we should focus on creating educational experiences that cultivate and sustain attention. Participants will learn about a variety of potential pathways to developing such experiences for their students. 
James M. Lang is a Professor of English and the Director of the D’Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, MA. He is the author of five books, the most recent of which are Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It (Basic Books, 2020), Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2016), and Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty (Harvard University Press, 2013).Lang writes a monthly column on teaching and learning for The Chronicle of Higher Education; his work has been appearing in the Chronicle since 1999. 
His book reviews and public scholarship on higher education have appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including The Conversation, Time, the Boston Globe, and Chicago Tribune.  He edits a series of books on teaching and learning in higher education for West Virginia University Press; he co-edited the second book in the series, Teaching the Literature Survey Course: New Strategies for College Faculty (2018). 
He has conducted workshops on teaching for faculty at more than a hundred colleges or universities in the US and abroad, and consulted for the United Nations on the development of teaching materials in ethics and integrity for college faculty.  In September of 2016 he received a Fulbright Specialist grant to work with three universities in Colombia on the creation of a MOOC on teaching and learning in STEM education.  He has a BA in English and Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, an MA in English from St. Louis University, and a Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University.