Tuesday, July 31, 2012


GETTING STARTED
Welcome to the blog for the Teaching+Learning Center at Baton Rouge Community College. The Teaching+Learning Center, located in room 311 of the Magnolia Building, is coming together nicely. The goal is to build a center of excellence for all of the faculty, staff, and students at Baton Rouge Community College. We will use this blog to let you know of the progress. We also want to ignite a conversation on campus about the scholarship of teaching and learning, specific to BRCC but also in broader terms when it is appropriate. We are working on a website that will be your one-stop shop for everything about teaching and learning at BRCC. We encourage you to become a follower of this blog. In that way, you will be notified anytime we post updates. Feel free to send us comments as well. This is meant to be an interactive way to discuss the issues important to you. As we move closer to the start of the Fall semester, look for posts about the first day of class, how to engage with students, and implementing active learning in your classes. T+LC is your resource so let us know what you need. You can reach us by phone at 216-8629 or by email at pourciaut@mybrcc.edu. We are planning to begin to create a special resource for you based on the current collection of the Library. Outside of the T+LC are bookshelves that the Library has reserved for our use. We will be placing recommended books there for your use. You will have access to them just as you do anything else that circulates. We will begin to highlight that material here and once our website is up, it will include a PDF link with the recommended reading list. For now, let us recommend two books to get you started. In the brief time remaining before classes begin we suggest you read Ken Bain's masterpiece What the Best College Teachers Do (LB 2331 .B34 2004). In addition, if you are looking for some very effective classroom assessment techniques, you should check out Thomas Angelo and Patricia Cross's excellent Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers (LB 2822.75 .A54 1993). We close with a quote from Bain, "The best educators think of teaching as anything they might do to help and encourage students to learn."