SIPS Teaching Forum minutes will continually be added to this post, with the most recent meeting at the top. When new minutes are added, a link will be provided in the SIPS Monday News & Events.

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SIPS Teaching Forum
February 27, 2024

Meeting sponsors & agenda

SIPS Teaching Forum Feb 27 2024-slides

• Joss Rose, SIPS Director
• Kathie Hodge, SIPS Assoc. Director of Teaching
• Marvin Pritts, DUS for Plant Sciences Major
• Frank Rossi, DUS for Agricultural Sciences Major
• Leah Cook, Student Services Lead

Planning regular forums on a range of topics (share your ideas)

Topics for today:
Teaching equity across sections
Visioning – opportunities for curriculum development

Teaching Equity

Heterogeneous landscape of teaching expectations across SIPS

Different teaching types present a variety of complex demands:

• lecture/labs/discussions
• classroom capacity (labs in particular) is limiting
• Some classes have very high enrollments while others are undersubscribed
• Funding for Tas often feels limiting
  • CALS working on universal training for undergrad TAs
  • CALS is also training people in how to mentor UG Tas (Jonathan Russell-Anelli)
• Geography: Ithaca and Geneva
  • a lot of topical expertise at AgriTech (Frank Rossi)
  • we don’t want all teaching faculty in Ithaca and all extension faculty at AgriTech (Joss)
• Support Early Career and future faculty:
  • Need to consider teaching when hiring before they arrive
  • Ensuring success is a main motivator and we don’t want to devalue teaching
  • New faculty aren’t sure of what their appointment means (Gaurav Moghe)
  • Can we pay more attention to mentoring of early career faculty in teaching to promote excellence? Is there something better than course evals? (Dan Buckley)
  • ALI postdocs are working on improving excellence in teaching. Should SIPS have a more permanent instructional assistance? (Anna Levina)
• We also support other important majors and our students are looking to other majors for course work as well (Justine Vanden Heuvel, Marvin, Jonathan)
  • useful classes in other units include non-CS Digital Ag in Animal Science (Frank Rossi)
• Big Red Teaching Days – consider participating! (Marvin, Kathie)

Addressing Issues

Document appointments – courses and effort for each faculty member

Section Heads:

• Individual discussions with teaching faculty
  • For new hires, include specific courses in the offer letter (Jonathan)
  • Do we need to be more equitable about when teaching expectations kick in? (Adam Bogdanove)
  • Should we consider more rotations in who teaches what? (Jonathan)
  • This may be especially important for service classes (1000-3000 level) (Frank)
• Rubric about teaching expectations being refined by CALS
• Explicit teaching expectations decided at the time of search
  • Search committee have representation from different sections
  • be sure that all SIPS has input on teaching needs (Justine)

Measuring excellence – University of California rubric for best practices. Provides evidence based objective metrics for improvement (Dan). Dan shared links on Teaching Practice Inventories from Stanford and UBC.

• concerns about evaluation, that people evaluating may have never seen you actually teach (Greg Peck).
• Seems like it might vary among sections (Joss).
• CTI staff can assist with this and may be more skilled as trained evaluators (Jonathan).
• peer review of teaching has been effective in the past (Marvin).

Looking forward

• Aligning expectations across sections
• Ongoing case by case assessment
• Support early career faculty
• Planning around sabbaticals and retirements. Alternate year classes are a nightmare for the MPS students (Dan)
• Reallocate research effort to increase teaching capacity?

Visioning and curriculum development

• New opportunities
• SIPS grand challenge courses – e.g. climate

Emerging Teaching Needs (Marvin)

54 courses inactivated or at risk of being lost – Examples:

• Field crops systems (hopefully will be taught by Crop Phys hire – in job description)
• Principles of Veg production
• Intro to Agroecology (current course is at the 4000 level. Lower level needed). Important link to new learning outcomes
• Field Botany/Plant ID – Urban Plant Ecology?
• Medicinal Plants – growing interest. Currently no capacity to take on more students in related minor
• Multiple program areas with reduced courses
• New CALS distribution requirements coming on line
• Every CALS student will need a course in Ag, Food systems and nutrition – we could be offering this!
  • Data literacy
  • Ethics
  • Sustainability challenges

Talk to Frank and Marvin about course needs when writing position descriptions

Other options:

• Adam – options for teaching these as modules?
• Jonathan – summer field courses? (Marvin) this triggers summer tuition
• Gaurav – impact of eCornell and certificates? (enrolled UGs can’t access)
• Frank – once a week 2 credit classes for 7 weeks really work for some students
• Greg – Grad needs: plant science stats class for grad students. Graduate physiology. Writing class
• Anna – extension training needed. See Jeff Perry’s class EDUC 3510/5510 Engaged Learning through Extension, Outreach, and Instruction

CSTL Lunch & Learn (Jonathan)

Feb 28 12-1, 213 Kennedy Hall. Identifying students in distress