Crown Leadership Projects in Teaching and Inquiry
Crown Leadership Projects in Teaching and Inquiry support faculty to develop innovative, reflective, and impactful approaches to our teacher-scholar model at CC. This initiative responds to requests for increased opportunities to try out ideas and hone project development processes. It recognizes that leadership in a liberal arts context emerges through thoughtful practice, collaborative exploration, and a commitment to learning within and beyond the classroom.
Faculty members are invited to propose year-long projects that enhance the learning community at CC. We are particularly interested in proposals that leverage a faculty member's specific interests and expertise and demonstrate potential for future impact on our campus. Such opportunities could be related to alternative assessment practices, scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) at CC, integrating arts-based learning, etc.
Application deadlines for AY 25-26 will be posted to Today at CC and detailed in the Crown Center newsletter.
Past Projects
What makes a conversation work? What sets an effective conversation apart from one that leaves its participants confused, frustrated, or disillusioned? Do important conversations have to be difficult? And how can we experience even difficult conversations as valuable?
The Crown Conversations Project starts from the conviction that we already have the tools to work through our conversational impasses. We facilitate and participate in conversations every day: in the classroom, among colleagues, and with our broader community. Many of us know what makes for a successful class discussion, but struggle to apply the same principles outside the classroom. All of us can learn from each others’ expertise and experience.
The Crown Conversations Project aims to gather that individual expertise into a collective resource. This fall, we will interview educators across campus to learn how they define good conversation and what they do to facilitate it. We will observe conversations happening around us and have our own conversations about what we’re seeing and learning.
The first tangible result of this process will be a user-friendly collection of practices and perspectives housed on the Crown Center’s website. The collection will serve as a resource for all members of the CC community and showcase CC faculty expertise for an outside audience.
Join us! The Conversations Project will be powered by a core group of committed participants. We encourage (short!) applications from those who are:
- Able to commit to a two-hour kickoff session in Block 1 and subsequent blockly meetings during AY 2024-2025. We understand that things happen, but expect that participants will make a good-faith effort to prepare for and attend sessions.
- Excited to seek out and speak with colleagues and convey those colleagues’ ideas to the group. This is a chance to gather and learn, not to impose our own views.
- Interested in building their own capacity for effective conversation and creating a supportive atmosphere within the group.
Please direct any questions you may have to Assistant Professor, Arabic, Islamic, & Middle Eastern Studies, Political Science, Sofia Fenner (sfenner@coloradocollege.edu).
What does it mean to assess student understanding in STEM courses? How effective are assessments at demonstrating a students level of understanding and competency towards the learning goals of a course? How can an assessment strategy on the Block Plan foster an inclusive and supportive classroom environment that values learning, growth, and conceptual mastery?
This Crown Center project on Alternative Assessment Strategies in STEM run by Faculty Fellow Dhanesh Krishnarao seeks to face these questions through a collaborative, year-long effort to discuss, develop, implement, and assess the effectiveness of different styles of formative assessments on the Block Plan.
Towards this goal, we are forming an Educator Learning Community (ELC) on Alternative Assessment Strategies in STEM - open to all STEM faculty at CC. Through this community, we will plan and workshop through different assessment methods that will be implemented in the Spring semester with a means to collect data and formally assess the impact of these strategies.
This group is designed to be a space for anyone interested in sharing their assessment strategies, learning from others ideas, and developing new formats together. As an example, I have been developing and testing a continuing assessment strategy, where a closed-book, closed-note, and timed assessment is spread out over multiple class sessions. This allows students not to worry about memorization and focus on genuine attempts at conceptual understanding interspersed with the ability to study and learn material to fill gaps between class sessions.
Fostering an inclusive and supportive community in the classroom, even with how we assess students, is a necessary step to move towards an antiracist STEM classroom. We hope that this ELC will promote this shift at CC and improve the STEM experience for students.
Please direct any questions you may have to Assistant Professor, Physics, Dhanesh Krishnarao (dkrishnarao@coloradocollege.edu).
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