Development Opportunities

AAC&U Conference: Faculty Roles in High-Impact Practices

Sponsored by: AAC&U
Date: Thursday, March 25, 2010 - Saturday, March 27, 2010
Registration Deadline: March 1, 2010
Location: Philadelphia, PA

Faculty know that increasing students’ effort and engagement are both important to student success. Certain curricular and pedagogical practices—including undergraduate research, service-learning, first-year and capstone projects/programs, and learning communities—by their nature require students to be actively involved in their own learning. These “high-impact” practices, when done well, engage students by helping them to make their own discoveries and connections, grapple with “big” questions whose importance they can see, and address complex problems.

From teaching integrative capstone courses, to running offices of community engagement, to leading national networks devoted to undergraduate research, faculty are at the forefront of developing, improving, and expanding the reach of these high-impact practices. What can others learn from their efforts?

Faculty Roles in High-Impact Practices will highlight the new and expanding roles that faculty are playing in developing and using high-impact practices—in and beyond the disciplines—to foster student learning. The conference is designed for faculty members seeking innovative, robust, and practical designs for learning, teaching, and assessment approaches proven to deepen student engagement, and a network of engaged colleagues. It is also geared toward administrators and others on campus looking to support and partner with faculty to advance the use of high-impact practices for more students, more intentionally, across multiple points in time. The conference thus seeks proposals highlighting models of these high-impact practices and those that address issues of faculty rewards, promotion and tenure, cost-effectiveness, and more.

AAC&U’s Network for Academic Renewal invites faculty, division heads, department chairs, deans, and others to explore faculty roles in high-impact practices.