A Look Back at Last Fall

Since this past Fall was my first semester at USA, I thought it would be useful and appropriate to look back at the things that PETAL was able to accomplish last semester. In addition to our five New Faculty Seminar sessions, which were very successful, we had good response to our PETAL Brown Bag Lunches and Faculty Roundtable Discussions. The Roundtables included Dr. Richard Wood’s session on Writing for Publication, which provided some of our new faculty with a great deal of valuable information on the publication process.

The other Roundtable last Fall, on Teaching First-Year College Students, was led by Dr. Nicole Carr. This event was so well attended that we had to redo our seating arrangement at the last minute, and the discussion was so lively that the session had to be extended 30 minutes. We also continued the discussion online on the PETAL blog.

The PETAL Brown Bag Lunch series began the semester with Dr. Zohair Husain’s excellent presentation on Student Oral Reports. Dr. Husain testified to the many advantages of having students give oral presentations in class and provided several tips on how to maximize their effectiveness.

The second Brown Bag Lunch featured Dr. William Young on Writing as an Assessment Strategy, which looked at how all disciplines can make better use of writing courses to not only assess their students’ writing abilities, but to also ensure that all graduates of USA are competent writers.

The final Brown Bag of the semester had Dr. Jack Dempsey and Ms. Dawn Wright discussing the advantages of Reusable Learning Materials, with particular attention paid to efforts that the College of Education is taking to design a repository of such learning objects for future use by all USA faculty.

The PETAL Technology Workshops were also well received, including Clicker workshops which were particularly popular, and sessions on using PowerPoint and Dreamweaver in the classroom were also well attended.

Overall, it was a wonderful first semester, but we are looking forward to making things even better this Spring and in the future.