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This is a substantially expanded and enhanced revision of Phyllis Blumberg’s acclaimed and bestselling book, Developing Learner-Centered Teaching: A Practical Guide for Faculty (Jossey-Bass, 2009). This easy to follow how-to-guide provides faculty with both a thorough introduction to this evidence-based approach to teaching and practical guidance on how to progressively implement it to strengthen the impact of their teaching. It demonstrates how they can integrate learning-centered teaching into their classroom practice without sacrificing content and rigor, and how to positively engage students in the process by demonstrating its impact on their mastery and recall of key concepts and knowledge. An added outcome, given that learning-centered teaching is correlated with improved student learning, is the resulting assessment data that it provides faculty with the measures to meet the increased demands by accreditors, legislators and society for evidence of improved teaching and learning outcomes. Phyllis Blumberg demonstrates how to use rubrics to not only satisfy outside requirements and accreditation self-studies but, more importantly, for faculty to use for the purposes of self-improvement or their teaching portfolios. She provides examples of how the rubrics can be used to ascertain whether college-wide strategic plans for teaching excellence are being met, for program review, and to determine the effectiveness of faculty development efforts. The book includes the following features: - Boxes with easy-to-implement and adaptable examples, covering applications across disciplines and course types - Worksheets that foster easy implementation of concepts Rubrics for self- assessment and peer assessment of learning-centered teaching - Detailed directions on how to use the rubrics as a teaching assessment tool for individuals, courses, and programs - List of examples of use classified by discipline and type of course Phyllis Blumberg offers Making Learning Centered Teaching Course Design Institutes and workshops on this and other teaching and assessment topics. Half day to multiple day modules. (From the Publisher)

Research shows that online education, when designed and facilitated well, is as effective as traditional campus-based instruction. Despite the evidence, many faculty perceive online education as inferior to traditional instruction—and are often quite vocal in their skepticism. Simultaneously, however, more and more students are seeking online courses and degree programs. Thrive Online: A New Approach to Building Expertise and Confidence as an Online Educator is an invitation for the rising tide of online educators who are relatively new to teaching online, and also for those more experienced instructors who are increasingly frustrated by the dominant bias against online education. Readers will find: • An approach that empowers online educators to thrive professionally using a set of specific agentic behaviors • Strategies for approaching conversations about online learning in new ways that inform the skeptics and critics • Strategies that celebrate the additional skills and proficiencies developed by successful online educators • Guidance for educators who want to feel natural and fluent in the online learning environment • Guidance for enhancing the user-centered nature of online spaces to create student-centered learning environments • Encouragement for online educators to pursue leadership opportunities The internet is changing how people communicate and learn. Thrive Online: A New Approach to Building Expertise and Confidence as an Online Educator offers guidance, inspiration and strategies required to adapt and lead higher education through this change. This book is for higher education instructors who are seeking community, a sense of belonging, and the professional respect they deserve. Thriving is not a reaction to our environment, but rather a state of being we can create intentionally for ourselves. The time has come to change the conversation about online education. Add your voice – join the community and #ThriveOnline. (From the Publisher)

What does it mean to be a productive professor in higher education? What would it feel like to have more peace and productivity? To have nothing fall through the cracks? The Productive Online and Offline Professor is written for today’s busy higher education professional. Through an exploration of what it means to make work meaningful, this book offers practical strategies and tips to support higher education professionals in efficiently managing and effectively using a wide range of technologies and productivity tools. Higher education instructors will find this guide helps them to fulfill their teaching roles with excellence and to build engaging relationships with students while also successfully managing other priorities in their professional and personal lives. The Productive Online Professor assists those who teach online and blended courses with managing their personal productivity. Faculty are often expected to provide support and feedback to learners outside of normal work hours in non-traditional classes. Programs that are designed with more asynchronous content may cause faculty to perceive that it is difficult to ever press the “off button” on their teaching.The author offers guidance and suggests software tools for streamlining communication and productivity that enable faculty to better balance their lives while giving rich feedback to students. Part 1 addresses the challenges in defining productivity and presents a working definition for the text. Part 2 describes the ability to communicate using both synchronous and asynchronous methods, along with ways of enriching such communication. Part 3 describes methods for finding, curating, and sharing relevant knowledge both within one’s courses and to a broader personal learning network (PLN). Part 4 examines specific tools for navigating the unique challenges of productivity while teaching online. It includes ways to grade more productively while still providing rich feedback to students. Part 5 shares techniques for keeping one’s course materials current and relevant in the most efficient ways possible. The Productive Online Professor is a practical guide for how to provide high quality online classes to diverse students. This book shares specific technology and other tools that may be used in charting a course toward greater productivity. It is intended to be a professional resource for fulfilling our roles with excellence and joy, while managing other priorities in our personal and professional lives.(From the Publisher)

In this time of uncertainty and grief, religious leaders need new and old imaginations to unleash the power of liturgy and sermons to heal, comfort, and inspire. What intellectual, spiritual and creative wells can be drawn upon to address the suffering of the people? Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield hosts Dr. Lisa L. Thompson (Vanderbilt University) and Dr. Richard Voelz (Union Presbyterian Seminary).

Without fail, every recent conversation that even remotely touches upon assessment leads to an increasingly intricate and technical discussion about how to prevent the cheating, presumed to be rampant, now that we’re all online. Should we use Lockdown Browser? Should we enable webcams? But what about smart phones? What proctoring services are available? Will time limits help? How many questions should we have in our question bank? What’s a good proportion of questions in the bank to questions drawn for the exam? Should we shuffle questions? Should we show only one question at a time? Should we allow students to see their incorrect answers right away? The questions concerning cheating proliferate—with each solution presenting further considerations and, often, new challenges. These conversations can’t help but remind me of one of the many theories for the pandemic “panic buying” of toilet paper: psychologists claimed that such hoarding was an attempt to retain or regain a sense of control over an uncontrollable situation, in which feelings of fear, disorientation, and overwhelm (in addition to actual physical danger) abound. We can’t control Covid-19 (yet), but we may be able to control how many toilet paper rolls we have stashed away in our homes. Perhaps teaching online feels similar to instructors: something that was thrust upon us, something most of us didn't want to do, something that most of us probably aren’t doing very well (either by default or by design). Trying to tamp down on cheating may be the academy’s version of toilet paper hoarding. When I’m part of these conversations, I keep James M. Lang’s Cheating Lessons in mind. (If you don’t have time for the whole book now, he wrote a series in The Chronicle of Higher Education that offers many of the same insights in shorter form.) Here are a few important considerations about cheating: • So far, we don’t have evidence that students are cheating now more than ever—though our worries about cheating have obviously increased. Even typical indicators of cheating, for instance, fast time on a test or an unusually high score, may be attributable to other factors. One colleague told me that some of her students were studying more at home, without all the distractions, and were more relaxed about taking tests—which led to better performance. • Most students in any given class won’t cheat (even if most people admit to having cheated at least once over the course of their lives; I know I have); this seems to be an especially important time to be viewing our students charitably, with positive regard, and avoiding a “deficit” lens. • Why do people cheat? Well, among other reasons, we know that certain conditions in a learning environment can incentivize cheating; one example is a single, high-stakes assessment for which students have been given little to no practice or preparation (e.g., one exam worth 50% of their course grade). To the extent that we can give students multiple opportunities to demonstrate knowledge or mastery of a skill, to the extent that we can offer them practice and timely feedback, and to the extent that we can help reduce their anxiety at this anxiety-inducing time, we will go a long way in creating conditions where they will not make the choice to cheat. • What is cheating anyway? We can’t assume students will know in the context of our specific class; even within the same field, the same department, these definitions and expectations may vary (just as there is no consistency across what we mean by different assignment types). Some students, like the first-generation population, are severely disadvantaged by this kind of “hidden curriculum.” The less that’s tacit, the more that’s explicit (or “transparent”)—on cheating and otherwise—the better for all students (but especially for underserved populations). • But okay, let’s assume, for a moment, that students know it’s cheating to look up answers online or in their books, and they do it anyway. One colleague of mine said, “Who cares? The point is I want them to learn. Maybe looking up the answers will help them learn.” What is our end goal here? How can we leverage or even embrace (perhaps newly) open testing situations? • Or, rather than focusing on the cheating that we defeatedly accept will occur—and trying to prevent the inevitable with complicated surveillance and other apparatuses—perhaps we might sidestep the issue entirely by designing our assessments to be as “cheat-proof” as possible. Questions of foundational knowledge are easy to look up; “higher-order” questions—application, analysis, evaluation, or creation—are not. (“Which of the following is the best definition of karma”? is easy to find in the textbook I use. “What would a Marxist interpretation of this [current news headline about religion]?” isn’t.) For those teaching large classes, those with heavy teaching loads, those without TAs, those stretched to capacity already, etc., these questions needn’t be asked only in short-answer or essay form, which can take way longer to grade. Multiple-choice questions can work here too, even if we don’t usually think of them as such. (A caveat: some folks find these kinds of multiple-choice questions harder to create.) I’m not convinced that we have to accept cheating as inevitable, even now. We, as instructors, have some control(!) over the learning environments, the testing conditions, and the assessments themselves. Let’s continue to use the influence we do have to encourage authentic, deep, transformative learning—not short-cuts or hacks.

For many years I have been involved with a team of instructors teaching a required first-year formation class at the Iliff School of Theology. Initially called “Identity, Power, and Difference,” we designed this class to invite students to reckon with the realities of structural inequality and oppression in relation to their vocational paths. Our goal was to increase student commitment and capability for seeking justice as a core part of their religious leadership in multiple contexts. Additionally, the course was designed to allow students the space to begin to wrestle with the emotional and personal implications of these systemic issues before they encountered them in classes in Christian history, theology, ethics, sacred texts, and practical theology. In those courses, they would need to work with these issues in more complex academic ways, and not become overwhelmed or resistant because of fragility or novice learner status. This is particularly important for students whose identities often place them on the upper side of hierarchies of privilege and oppression and who were not practiced in understanding and navigating such realities. One of the commitments early on was to attempt to work intersectionally, rather than learning about oppression identity category by identity category. We didn’t want to begin working with racism, then sexism, heterosexism, classism, and maybe have time in a ten-week quarter to get to oppression rooted in ability, religion, nation of origin, age, etc. We wanted to avoid setting up the idea that these are competing categories demanding attention and redress. Many helpful resources (such as the Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice textbook edited by Maurianne Adams and Lee Ann Bell) take precisely this approach, providing  materials that focus on one area of identity-based oppression at a time. There is a clarity of focus on each particular form of oppression in this approach. However,  the realities of intersectionality, first articulated by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, mean that doing so often makes invisible the experiences of those who reckon with multiple forms of intersecting oppression. It also obscures the ways that a single person may have a complex identity matrix that includes both targeted and dominant elements (gay white men or straight women of color, for example). The concern is that imagining that these forms of oppression work independently from one another, or that they do not develop together historically or inflect one another constantly, sets students up to focus on one aspect and fail to recognize complex social dynamics in which their work occurs and the shifting ways their embodiment is interpreted by those around them. Of course, all forms of oppression and inequality do not function in the same way. But, we found that working thematically, and then providing examples of how those themes play out within different contexts and structures, helps students see patterns and intersections as well as distinctions between particular forms of injustice as they are practiced and institutionalized. For example, we begin with the theme that difference is socially constructed at particular moments in history, becomes embedded in institutions and systems, and creates material inequalities with its hierarchical sorting of humans. We look at this from multiple vantage points, from disability studies to critical race theory to gender studies, privileging personal narratives and historical examples that involve more than one identity category. Likewise, when we work on the theme of the relationship between privilege and oppression, we explore how these dynamics work with Christian privilege, class privilege, white privilege, cisgender, and male privilege. Other themes we explore include everyday intersectionality, modes of resistance, solidarity and accomplicing, and communal vocational discernment. Teaching intersectionally means that students often find themselves simultaneously being challenged and their experiences affirmed in relation to various themes. At times they recognize their own privilege, and at times they recognize how their experiences and embodiment have been targeted and made invisible by social structures and practices of distinction. Our hope is that by working at the intersections, we help build empathy, solidarity, and recognition of difference that will allow our students better to acknowledge, navigate, and dismantle injustice in the everyday interactions of religious leadership. Such work begins in the classroom and, of course, requires committed communal work of all of our lifetimes to complete.

[su_youtube_advanced url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1v1Z7Yj0OU&feature=youtu.be"] Teaching is an inherently creative act. We have been taught to teach as we were taught.  I was taught by classic lecturers.  If it wasn't the lecture it was the socratic method, seminar method or students present and lets see who can do the best. When I started teaching I taught like I was taught.  I have come to discard the old ways of teaching and allow myself and my students the freedom to explore and create an experience that is saturated with the creative spirit of the times in which we live. In this Vlog I ask what creative rhythms do you have in your life that inspire creativity in your teaching?  I share my creative rhythms and I invite you to celebrate yours and realize how they inform the creativity in your teaching. 

Like semesters before, Spring 2020 began with little “pomp and circumstance.” After four semesters on-site, I had finally adjusted to the rhythm of university life as a rookie faculty member. My courses, students, and committees had become old, reliable friends; everything was predictable, or so I thought. In the “blink of an eye,” my students, colleagues and my old, reliable routines were swept into a new, unpredictable world. Courses were canceled, closed, or moved hastily to online formats. Our students were forced to return home or find new places to sleep—all while dealing with the financial strains and stresses that this pandemic has brought. Yes, the old is very much gone, and the new “normal,” whatever that might be, now reigns. What exactly is this “new normal?” I wish I could look into a crystal ball and tell you, but I can’t, no one can. But I do know that in these last few days, universities, their administration, faculty, staff, and students have done something just short of incredible. At my university, for example, over $100,000 has been raised by alumni, faculty, students, and staff to help support current students who are finding it hard to pay rent or buy groceries during these uncertain times. Lending support like this to our students will free them from some anxiety about their basic necessities while trying to finish their courses, or even college careers. I hope that these types of financial support continue well beyond this pandemic. What a beautiful “new normal” this would be.  Regarding instructional design and teaching strategies, teaching during these times has allowed some fresh air to flow into the field of education. Teachers, veteran and rookie, have been provided a gift to re-think old teaching styles and try out new ones. Although it would be nice to jump back into my normal course routine and see my students in person again, I have found moving my course online to be largely enjoyable given the innovative support and great conversations that this move has stirred among my students and colleagues. The sharing of ideas and collegiality that has arisen among colleagues who are searching for new ways to keep their students engaged has broken down many of the instructional silos that have stood for far too long across the vast fields of higher education. This “new normal” is also one that I hope remains long after we return to campus. The “new normal” that I enjoy does not come without its share of difficulty. For one, although I have enjoyed testing new online teaching strategies, I have also had to re-think others and even eliminate some in response to the “new normal” my students now face. Like many of my colleagues, my students have been separated across the country, each living different experiences at the hands of Covid-19. For some of my students, other than being at home and taking courses online, life is normal; for others, life has become unbearable. I have found that most of my day is spent less on teaching, and more on “checking-in;” cheering on my students that “they can do this!” Many of our conversations and discussion board posts have been designated as points for quiet reflection and solidarity. Within these conversations, I have learned to be more pastoral and better at letting go. The exams, quizzes, and daily assignments can wait—the personal needs of my students cannot. This “new normal,” although hard to navigate, is also one that I hope to hang on to for as long as I can. As awful as this pandemic has been, I have learned a great deal about myself as a professor of theology and religious education. And I have learned an even greater deal about the lives of my students and my courses. How I teach will never be the same and that, I have found, is the beauty that lies just beyond the “new normal.” May our “new normal” continue to breathe fresh air into what we have done—may our teaching never be the same.