In spring 2020, as the debate about delivering college courses got Zoomed into the national consciousness, a cross-campus partnership of Northwestern entities, including the Libraries, responded with a thoughtful program that could guide beleaguered instructors through the tumult.
That three-week practicum, the first of its kind at Northwestern, introduced more than 700 faculty and teaching assistants to the most current thinking about online teaching. Other iterations of this practicum program have continued every academic year since, expanding to other relevant topics for educators in an era of prolific innovation around effective teaching.
“This started out as a grassroots effort among five different groups coming together to help people teach online,” said Michelle Guittar, head of Instruction and Curriculum Support at the Libraries. “Now it’s an official pilot program for demonstrating Northwestern’s commitment to programmatic assessment, growth, and curriculum.”
The practicum is a collaboration between the Libraries, NUIT’s Teaching and Learning Technologies, AccessibleNU, the School of Professional Studies, and the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching. After the first year, the project received support from the Provost’s office in the hiring of a coordinator who could manage that set of diverse — yet nonetheless correlated — campus units. Eun Lee joined the Searle Center as an inclusive teaching project administrator in 2021. That marked a significant shift in the typical tradition of units working independently across campus.
“In that Northwestern way, there was nothing like this offered across the university by multiple departments,” Guittar said. “It could have just remained five separate groups each offering different programming to address these teaching needs. Now we can really work together and build on expertise from throughout the university.”
Each practicum is series of synchronous and asynchronous workshops and one-on-one interactions broken into cohorts of 10 to 15 faculty at a time to promote collaboration. Since 2021, the curriculum has been developed with the leadership of a content committee that includes librarians; meanwhile, librarians have led cohorts and taught workshops throughout.
One of the immediate benefits for the Libraries, Guittar said, is that librarians who contribute to practicum courses get more face-to-face contact with faculty as they develop their courses, rather than — as has often been the case — being brought a syllabus after the fact to see how the Libraries might be of service. In turn, that has helped transform librarians into pedagogical partners, Guittar said.
“We’re challenging the perception that librarians are just the keepers of the books,” she said. “We don’t just purchase materials and help with bibliographies. We’re educators too.”
In 2021, the practicum addressed inclusive teaching, which trains educators to consider students’ social identities when cultivating a welcoming learning environment; in 2022, it covered Universal Design for Learning, an approach for overcoming barriers to learning for each student. More than 200 faculty enrolled in each of those programs.
For the 2023-24 academic year, the practicum will focus on the emerging topic of equitable assessment, or “grading that is equitable, strategic, and fair,” Guittar said. That includes the concept of “ungrading,” or moving away from summary grade traditions and toward more meaningful assessments that account for mastery and engagement with the material.
“We have to see if Northwestern is ready to learn more about this,” Guittar said. “It will be useful to learn how amenable our faculty are to these sorts of strategies and explore how the Libraries can contribute.”
Enrollment for the 2023-24 practicum will open this fall.