C2C hosts PD events on a monthly basis, and our Community of Practice (CoP) provides an opportunity to engage with education professionals in a growth-minded environment for the purpose of collaborative learning.
If you have questions or comments in advance of the sessions, please email the PD Subcommittee Chair, Melissa Kay Hort. You may also email inquiries at any time to Colleague2Colleague.
April Event
College Instructor Vulnerability Yields Student Achievement, Engagement, and Rapport
Description:
Are we willing to expose ourselves professionally to our college students? Are we willing to be professionally vulnerable in front of them? In the spirit of demonstrating versus explaining, do we share our writings/performances with our overly critical students? When we share our work (writings, performances, etc.) it models the behavioral objectives that we expect our students to ultimately demonstrate. This instructional practice certainly both engages students in instructional activities and builds rapport with them as well. Further, it builds community in our college classrooms and shows students that we will not ask them to complete a learning task that we, as instructors, have not already done with evidential proof (manuscript, recorded video performance, etc.). In this session, participants will:
- Identify which professional work is suitable to share with their students.
- Devise a plan to share their professional work with their students.
Facilitator:
A’Kena LongBenton, Ed.S., is the Instructor/Graduate Advisor/Teacher Prep Program Coordinator in the Instructional Design and Technology department at Emporia State University. LongBenton started her career at age 20 as a substitute teacher in Michigan. Five years later, she was one of the youngest college instructors at Wayne State University. With nearly three decades of teaching experience at the secondary and post-secondary level, she is a former K-8 school principal, interim curriculum director, acting superintendent, grant writer, and researcher for the State of Michigan Department of Education. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Wayne State University in learning design and technology with a double minor in speech communication and reading, language, and literature.
In spring 2021, LongBenton was the recipient of a near six-figure Perkins Career and Technical Education Grant via Macomb Community College (MCC) where she served as the principal investigator/ project director for support of virtual instructional design services. In addition, LongBenton provided leadership to engineering faculty at MCC on content, technology, and tools to support the National STEM Consortium and U.S. Department of Labor’s curricula that she co-edited, which was adopted by Carnegie Mellon and Stanford Universities and recognized by President Barack Obama’s Executive Office of Science and Technology Policy.