Professional Assignment

This section of my APS reviews my teaching assignment for the 2014 year. My
teaching assignment was really relegated to the fall 2014 semester since I was on
sabbatical for the first part of the year. Though I suppose we might consider my
sabbatical part of my teaching assignment or reassigned time, I will still discuss it more
in the professional development section of my APS.
At any rate, in fall 2014, one of the things that I did was, for the first time ever, to teach
three sections of the Accelerated Learning Program. This meant I taught an overload in
fall 2014. I taught one online section of ALP that means one section of English 052
and one section of English 101. And I taught two face-to-face sections of ALP that
means two sections of 101 and two sections of 052 for a total of six classes. This was
a very interesting experience. I have been involved in the Accelerated Learning
Program since the second year of its inception, and I find it very gratifying to teach in
that program, but this was the first time that my entire teaching schedule had been
dedicated to working with ALP students. I enjoyed it immensely. It could be a little
confusing some days to move from my Monday/Wednesday/Friday ALP class to my
Tuesday/Thursday ALP class, but other than that, I found the experience rather
enlightening. Ive taken some of those lessons and am applying them to my ALP
teaching this semester. In fact, I am teaching two ALP sections in the spring 2015
session.
At any rate, one of the big changes that happened in this past year in the English
department was that we shifted away from a pass/fail model in developmental writing to
a letter-grade basis for scoring our developmental writing students, and while this may
sound like not a very big deal, it does require some considerable rethinking of my
assessment strategies. For one, I use grading rubrics in both my online and face-to-face
courses. I had to go through and completely revise and redevelop those rubrics. An
example of one of those rubrics can be found here on this page amongst all the other
artifacts demonstrating my teaching assignment. Also, I had to revamp my syllabi and
my grading scale to reflect a letter-grade system as opposed to an S/U system, and that
can be found in copies of my syllabi on this page.
Additionally in my teaching assignment, this is the year of my comprehensive
evaluation, so in fall 2014, I was observed by both David Truscello and Pat Rennie, and
copies of those observations can be found here on this page.
Last but not least, I received my first-ever student evaluations from online courses from
my fall online ALP classes. One of the disappointing things was that not many students
opted to participate in those evaluations. The ones who did gave me overwhelmingly
positive reviews, so I was thrilled to see that.
So all in all, a very good semester in the fall, and Im looking forward to doing a lot more
work toward refining, revising, and redeveloping curriculum in this school year.