Growth and Development for College Teachers
Good teaching constantly makes demands of teachers: emotional energy, the will to keep caring, intellectual stamina, creative approaches, vigilance, faith in the power of feedback to prompt learning and perseverance to find the way back from failure. During this presentation we will explore all that it takes to sustain teaching excellence across a career, not in the how-to-do excellent teaching sense but how growth and change can be approached so that they make improvement a positive and productive process. Ways of thinking about instructional growth and ways of implementing change that can increase both the motivation to teach and effectiveness in the classroom will be proposed.
Maryellen Weimer
In 2007 Maryellen Weimer retired from Penn State as a Professor Emeritus of Teaching and Learning. For the last 13 years of her career at Penn State she taught communication courses, first year seminars and other courses business students at one of Penn State's regional campus colleges. In 2005 she won Penn State's Milton S. Eisenhower award for distinguished teaching.
Before returning to full time teaching, Dr. Weimer was the Associate Director of the National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning and Assessment, a five year, $5.9 million, U. S. Department of Education research and development center. The Center, a consortium of six universities, was part of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Penn State University where Dr. Weimer was a senior research associate.
Dr. Weimer has a Ph.D. in Speech Communication from Penn State which she received in 1981. For the next ten years she directed Penn State's Instructional Development Program.
Dr. Weimer has numerous publications including articles in referred journals, book chapters, books reviews, and service on the editorial boards of journals. She has consulted with over 450 colleges and universities on instructional issues. Dr. Weimer regularly keynotes national meetings and regional conferences.
Since 1987 she has edited the Teaching Professor, a monthly newsletter on college teaching with 15,000 subscribers. She edited or authored eight books including a 1990 book on faculty development, a 1993 book on teaching for new faculty, and a1995 anthology edited with Robert Menges, Teaching on Solid Ground. She was primary author of a Kendall-Hunt publication, Teaching Tools, a collection of collaborative, active and inquiry-based approaches to be used in conjunction with Biological Perspectives, an NSF-funded introductory biology text, created by Biological Sciences Curriculum Studies (BSCS). In 2002 Jossey-Bass published her book, Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice which has sold more than 15,000 copies. Her latest book, Enhancing Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning, was released in February 2006. Currently she is at work on a book addressing career-long growth and development issues for college teachers.
