"The Student Learning and Development competency area addresses the concepts and principles of student development and learning theory.  This includes the ability to apply theory to improve and inform student affairs practice, as well as understanding teaching and training theory and practice" (ACPA & NASPA, 2010, p. 26).



Growth Within Competency

HIED 7340 Syllabus Assignment to Chapman Leader Syllabus

​One of the ways I experienced growth in this competency was through a crossover of a class assignment and my internship responsibilities.  The assignment was the creation of a syllabus for HIED 7340:  College and University Teaching.  Throughout the course, I learned of a variety of teaching techniques and strategies and was challenged to create a syllabus in either a field of my interest  or for a course I could be teaching in the future.  I selected a course I was already teaching as part of my internship in the Chapman Learning Community.  The course was called RESC 2000:  Chapman Leader Seminar and its purpose was to provide a leadership development opportunity to the sophomore peer mentors who mentor the first-year students in Chapman.



The course originally focused on three core areas:  the Social Change Model of Leadership, the participation and planning of 200-person, community-wide events, and the planning and implementation of smaller scale programming.  In redesigning the course, I focused on three areas as well:  a broad understanding of "leadership," connecting the planning of events to academic learning, and helping students articulate their personal philosophies regarding "leadership."  New strategies such as minute papers, informal and formal leadership statements, reflections on experiential activities, and peer evaluations of group effectiveness called upon much of the learning gained in Marilla Svinicki and Wilbert McKeachie's book  McKeachie's Teaching Tips and Ken Bain's book What the Best College Teachers Do.  In addition, I was challenged to provide a narrative that provided a rationale for the choices I made in designing the syllabus and "justify using learning theory to create learning opportunities" (ACPA & NASPA, 2010, p. 26).



Although the syllabus for HIED 7340 could not be implemented in its entirety for logistical reasons and the larger departmental conversations that would need to occur, many curricular decisions and teaching strategies were implemented in the fall 2012 syllabus for the new group of Chapman Leaders with whom I worked and taught.  This greatly improved my ability to "construct effective lesson plans and syllabi" (p. 26).



Leaders-in-Residence (LiR)

​Leaders-in-Residence is a seven-week leadership development workshop put on by the Office of Residence Life for students seeking to broaden their understanding of leadership and develop their leadership skills.  The program is fully voluntary and does not bestow academic credit.  The program utilizes a leadership model developed by Kouzes and Posner in their book The Leadership Challenge that focuses on five practices of leadership.  For the past two years, I co-facilitated a section of Leaders-in-Residence with fellow master's student Jessica Chung.



Jessica and I were given full autonomy regarding how we taught our students about the five practices of leadership.  For the two of us, this was the perfect opportunity to "take advantage of opportunities for curriculum and program development" as outlined in the ACPA and NASPA competencies (2010, p. 26).  We focused on objectives related to community-building, general comprehension of the model, application of the practices to actual situations, and personal reflection.  For each session of LiR, we created a lesson plan that outlined all of the activities we intended to do with students.  Later lesson plans drew connections across weeks based on the type of activity we were facilitating.  Before our students became deeply involved in the model, they took the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) developed by authors Kouzes and Posner.  The LPI was used at the conclusion of the experience to see how their comprehension of leadership had changed from the time they took the inventory to the present.



In Week 1, the focus was on introducing all students to each other and building community.  During the first session, Jessica and I invited all students to take part in the planning of recurring components of our LiR Experience:  icebreakers, an activity relating to the practice of the week, and a closing reflection/thought for the week (called "What I Want to Leave You With" and pictured to the right).  The remaining weeks each focused on one of the five practices of the Kouzes and Posner model:  Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart.



In addition to the standard assessment form issues by the Office of Residence Life, Jessica and I asked our students to fill out an evaluation about us as facilitators so that we could gain additional feedback for our future development.  Please click here for student evaluations from the spring semester of 2013 and refer to the aforementioned evaluation to see the questions asked of participants.  These artifacts provide an example of how Jessica and I are both working towards teaching in a way that "utilizes the assessment of learning outcomes to inform future practice" (p. 26).



CSP 6020:  Theory and Assessment of College Student Development - Informal and Formal Theory Papers

The goal of the informal theory paper was to identify my personal philosophies and views on student development in the context of my own undergraduate experience.  This laid the groundwork for understanding and utilizing student development theory not only throughout the rest of CSP 6020, but also throughout my work at BGSU.



For the formal theory paper, the objective was demonstrate understanding and ability to use student development theory to identify a given student's level of development and propose methods of increasing that student's development over a given period of time.  I used this assignment as a way of getting to know one of the first-year students in my internship site.



By completing these two assignments, I have been able to develop in the following parts of the Student Learning and Development competency:  "articulate one's own developmental journey and identify one's own informal theories of student development and learning," and "articulate theories and models that describe the development of college students" (ACPA & NASPA, 2010, p. 26).