Thomas B. Day Freshman Success Programs
August News from FSP
Here are the
topics for this month
§
Revised Summer Workshop Calendar
§
Faculty Week FSP Orientation
§
Course Staffing
§
Teaching Materials
§
Course Activities
§
Course Planning
§
Seminar Peer Assistants
§
FSP/Seminar Directors Communication
(See the related articles
below for details about these workshops/orientations)
Annual
Fall FSP Orientation/Luncheon:
August 23 9am-2pm
296 Orientation (grad students) 9:00-11:30am DRWS
Blackboard Intro 9:00-10:00am Library
Summer Reading/USem 10:30-11:30am Casa Real
FSP Luncheon
11:30- 1:00pm Casa Real
(Please contact lvanhorn@mail.sdsu.edu
for reservation.)
I/C Teams 1:00- 2:00pm Casa
Real
Stand-Alone/Peer Assistants
1:00- 2:00pm Casa
Real
Syllabus
Planning Lunches (Please contact
lvanhorn@mail.sdsu.edu for reservation.
Aug 9 12-1pm Fac/Stf
Aug 10 12-1pm Fac/Stf
Aug 11 12-1pm Fac/Stf
Sep 1 12-1pm Fac/Stf
Sep 3 12-1pm Fac/Stf
(Please contact lvanhorn@mail.sdsu.edu for reservation.)
Aug 12 1-2pm DUS conf
Aug 13 11-12am DUS
conf
Aug 23 10:30-11:30am Casa
Real
Blackboard
Intro (BATS classrooms in
Computing Center of Library)
(Please contact lvanhorn@mail.sdsu.edu for reservation.)
Aug 10 10-11am LL261
Aug 11 10-11am LL261
Aug 23 9-10am LL261
Fall FACULTY
WEEK ORIENTATION
The
Annual FSP Orientation event during Faculty Week is scheduled for Monday, Aug 23. The format for the event has been changed to
accommodate our increasingly busy and complex schedules.
The morning sessions will be individual workshops for those who still want orientation to the Summer Reading Program, the Blackboard system and/or the 296 course. After that we will assemble for lunch in Casa Real, pick up our FSP gifts and hear some general program announcements. Following lunch we will meet in small groups based on seminar type: Stand-alone Directors will meet with their Peer Assistants and the I/C and LLC Seminar Directors will meet with their entire package team, including the faculty and graduate students working with the students. (Stand-alone Directors who will not have Peer Assistants may want to meet as a group to share ideas, etc.)
We
hope this schedule will allow FSP faculty members to choose the orientation
topics they need as well as collaborate and prep for the semester.
COURSE
STAFFING
We still have un-staffed sections of University Seminar in IC
packages. The students in these
sections are, for the most part, commuter students who see the FSP as their way
to get connected to the campus. Seminar
Directors in these packages will be working as part of a team of instructors,
so that your efforts can be reinforced and coordinated with the other package
courses. If you have yet to determine
what day or time to take a section, please contact us today and we will let you
know what is still open. If you know
someone who is interested in directing a section, please let them know we are
waiting for their call. Please contact lvanhorn@mail.sdsu.edu.
TEACHING
MATERIALS
Last year's textbook, Your Guide to College Success by
Halonen and Santrock, will not be a sold by the bookstore as a required text
for all students in University Seminar. It is still available from the
publisher, however. If you plan
to require the textbook for the students in your
section, please contact Mary Dettweiller at the SDSU Bookstore to place
your order. Students in your section will be directed to purchase the
text..
(4-7546 or mail to:
mary.dettweiler@sdsu.edu>mary.dettweiler@sdsu.edu)
University Seminar students will be required to purchase the
Mortar Board Planner and Calendar again this fall. This is a valuable resource for students and
can be quite useful in class activities.
All Seminar Directors will once again be given their own copy of the
Planner for '04-05 as a gift from FSP.
It will be available at our Faculty week Orientation on August 23.
The FSP office is developing a University Seminar Director's Sourcebook,
which will include a full set of lesson plans for the course, as well as other
important teaching and campus resources. A copy of the text will be delivered
to all 2004 Seminar Directors as soon as it is available from the printer.
In collaboration with the
SDSU Summer Reading Program, FSP is encouraging all instructors in our
programs, University Seminar, Integrated Curriculum, and LLC, to integrate the
text where appropriate in your course.
We are offering summer workshops for Seminar Directors who would like to
discuss how to use the book in the
University Seminar (see Workshop Schedule). Although there is an article on the SRP Website about leading a
discussion about the book, the workshop will include ideas for integrating
themes from the text into the seminar activities.
The grad students who instruct sections of 296 (Discussion and Analysis) in the IC and LLC
packages will be oriented to two new resources for teaching that course. One is a text that helps students adapt
their learning style to the teaching styles they are encountering in their
classes, and the other is a text that helps students apply critical thinking
strategies to their courses and coursework.
Maureen Sipp will be attending the Orientation luncheon and will have
copies of these texts for those who may want to look through this
material. We expect this content to
help delineate the work in 296 from that in University Seminar for students in
the packages.
COURSE
ACTIVITIES:
As usual, University Seminar will include 3 site visits, the Library, the Career Services Center, and
Academic Advising. The dates for your
class visits are included in the class schedule accompanying this newsletter.
The calendar for the Campus
Resource Forum has been shortened from 10 weeks to 7, beginning Oct 4,
ending on November 19. This will give
us more time to settle into the semester before the Forum begins. As last year, a central calendar will appear
on the FSP Website, but we are developing our own reservation system, which
will simplify the process.
All campus activities
related to the Summer Reading Program
will be announced through University Seminar, in the hope that students might
choose as a group to attend, or get credit for a class activity.
The calendar of events related to the SRP includes:
All-campus Book Discussion Sept
9
Cross-cultural film night Oct
6
Anne Fadiman campus visit Oct
15-16
For
more details, look for a calendar of SRP activities on the SRP webpage at http://dus.sdsu.edu/srp.
COURSE PLANNING
LUNCHES:
For those who would like to attend a small informal lunch meeting
to discuss seminar course plans, the FSP will be hosting lunch meetings in the
Faculty /Staff Club in August and early Sept.
The purpose of these lunches is to give Directors an opportunity to
discuss and develop the details of their syllabi
UNIVERSITY
SEMINAR PEER ASSISTANTS:
This fall we will have 25
sophomores, alumni of '03 USem, who have volunteered and been oriented as
classroom peer assistants (PA) for the fall.
They are being assigned to stand-alone sections of the course, as
students in these sections usually have the weakest connections to the
campus. If your section has a peer
assistant, s/he is expecting to be asked to greet the students upon their
arrival each class session, make weekly announcements, collect/track yellow
tickets from Campus Resource Forum workshops, and offer his/her insights and
experience to classroom discussions. Lynnette Van Horn is the Peer Assistant
Coordinator and she will handle any questions or concerns related to the
program or the individual PAs.
FSP/SEMINAR
DIRECTORS COMMUNICATION
We have our own classroom site on the campus Blackboard Classroom
Management System. The Seminar Directors
Lounge, the classroom for all Seminar Directors, is our site for
announcements, sharing ideas and materials, and communication. You can use our
site just like the students will use theirs, and then be able to understand
their questions about how to use the system.
If you have never used the system before, trying it as a Seminar
Director can be a low stress introduction.
Shari Shelton will be offering 1-hour Blackboard Intro Workshops just for Seminar Directors who want to
practice how to get into the system and how to use our Directors Lounge
classroom site (see workshop schedule).
Every year each section of University Seminar is set up as a
classroom on Blackboard, just like
the other courses on the schedule.
If you are interested in using your section’s Blackboard classroom site with
your students, Shari offers a number of new instructor orientations to the
system that help you learn the basics.
ITS requires all new instructors using a Blackboard classroom with their
students to attend the basic orientation before Shari is able to give you
individual coaching. This is another
great way to increase your own technological literacy and enable yourself to
help students learn the system . Using
the system allows you to cut down on copying and distribution, post your course
documents, clarify instructions, communicate last minute changes, etc. Best of all, you and the students can keep
up a dialogue between your weekly meetings that can build the sense of
community so important to University Seminar students..
This e-newsletter
minimizes the need to send messages from the FSP. However, upon e-mailing our first newsletter we discovered that
many Directors did not receive it because it got picked up in a Spam filter or
for other reasons we cannot fathom.
That is why we are sending out two versions this month, print and
e-mail. We will not be able to do this
on a regular basis. Please be sure to
check your Spam filters and any other mailboxes that might intercept this
newsletter, so that you can be sure of receiving this vital source of news from
the program.
As more Directors become accustomed to using and checking
Blackboard, we may be able to avoid e-mail/paper announcements altogether, and
simply use e-mail for individual messages.