Provost’s Special Initiative on Co-teaching & Civic Engagement

In the Spring of 2018, 35 Chico State faculty and staff gathered in a Faculty Learning Community to identify the barriers and opportunities for co-teaching and community engagement at Chico State.

The outcome of the FLC was a list of concrete recommendations to ease the barriers and increase the opportunities for co-teaching and community engagement.

What did we learn?

• Lots of people are doing really great, innovative work across campus. We would all like to share and learn more often.
• There is a sense that many people would like to do more co-teaching and work with the community, but there are barriers to doing this work.
• When it is done well, co-teaching and community engagement is good for students, good for faculty, and good for our campus relationships.
• There is good outcome data from both our campus and others to show this works for student success.  

Recommendations

BIG Picture

• Support a cultural shift on campus, one in which we are continually talking about and supporting innovative pedagogy.
• Add co-teaching/multidisciplinary perspectives/interdisciplinary work to the strategic plan, recognizing its worth as a creative pedagogy.

Funding & Resources

• Recommend a pilot program in which the provost awards FTES/AWTU waivers to colleges who participate in co-teaching, in order to ease department/college concerns about co-teaching.  The waivers would allow colleges to participate without requiring fund transfers.
• Improved flexibility in course planning, especially for room assignments – possibly set aside a co-teaching room.  
• Budgetary commitment for co-teaching and civic engagement.  Increased pay per FTES for co-taught courses or # of WTU per course.  
• Faculty development support for co-teaching and civic engagement.  This should include FLCs on co-teaching and could be a mentoring opportunity for new/seasoned faculty to co-teach.  
• Get advancement involved to solicit money for co-teaching and civic engagement.

Logistics/Tools

• Recognizing that curriculum change could play an important role in offering classes that “count” for students, we recommend the university acquire Catalog and Curriculum Software to expedite at least one step in the curriculum process.
• Recommend establishing a Digital Guidebook/Website as a resource for co-teaching.  It would provide models, shells of course, social-media tools.
• Create a “Match-up” site so that faculty can find others with whom they may share an interest in co-teaching.  Should allow for topic specificity.
• Improved training for chairs to understand flexibility, work-arounds and paying for “expensive” courses.

Assessment

• Provide assessment support to properly engage in broad-based assessment of co-teaching.
• Enlists IR’s support for flexibility in using the SETs for co-taught classes