Submitted by: Heather Brubaker

Doing a professional development “deep dive” around some aspect of subject related progressive practice. This could draw on within department expertise and/or work with an outside consultant.

This year, the English department will focus on our practice as writer/teachers and teachers of writing. We will engage in an immersive day – a writing workshop – with periods of time to write and structured sessions for feedback and reflective work. Faculty can opt to work within one of the three strands below or to move between more than one over the course of the day: creative or personal writing, writing about teaching, or “doing student work” aka actually writing one’s own assignments or others’ assignments (either for the purpose of producing samples, or just to go through the exercise of doing what we ask our students to do). The orientation that we’d will bring to the work is that we are better teachers when we are closer to the practices we are asking our students to engage in, and we’d be seeking the learning from our own process of moving through ideation, generation, feedback, revision etc. After the retreat, we’ll gather later in the year to reflect on how this work has shifted or informed our classroom work. Department members are also seeking, variously: artistic or intellectual sustenance, a reconnection to the work of teacher as public intellectual, the chance to produce high-quality sample writing for use in the classroom.

We will do a full-day retreat (likely in January) and then follow up with a meeting in the spring.