Faculty / Staff FAQs
What should faculty/staff expect for Fall 2024?
Fall 2024 marks the open phase of the Embedding the College Competencies Project (funded by the Davis Educational Foundation). In the first year of the project (last year) we have been developing support teaching resources and an awareness campaign. This Fall, many students will be encountering the competencies in a bit more depth, and will be seeing and learning about the competencies more than ever before. Students will learn about the competencies through various orientation activities. On campus student employees will see which competencies are relevant to their positions in the job descriptions. Students and student clubs can apply to a special pool of Davis Grant money to fund student activities connected to competencies and competency development. Students will be asked on class evaluations which competencies they see in their classes. Posters, digital signage, stickers, and other awareness campaign activities will all be reminders of the value of competencies in their learning journeys.
In sum, the competencies are going to be a LOT more visible to students. And because competency learning and development also takes place in our classes, they may be asking you about them.
Better delivering on our collective promise to students to help develop these valuable skills will not happen overnight. But we do hope that the resources that have been developed (and will continue to be developed) will help you, over time, to better integrate competencies that are relevant to your classes.
You’ve already found the website (obviously). The page for each competency contains the shared vocabulary that we should strive to use when helping our students learn these skills. Using the same vocabulary for elements of Collaboration, or Inquiry, or Technology Literacy helps students transfer learning from one context to another.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who are the competency fellows?
For each competency there is a Competency Fellow.
Analysis – Bob Mayer, mayer@champlain.edu
Communication – Kelly Thomas, thomas@champlain.edu
Collaboration – Rachel Hooper, rhooper@champlain.edu
Creativity – Barbara Colombo, bcolombo@champlain.edu
Diversity Equity and Inclusion – Meg Jones, mjones@champlain.edu
Global and Cultural Understanding – Mike Lange, mlange@champlain.edu
Information Literacy – Caroline Toy, jtoy@champlain.edu
Inquiry – Sheila Liming, sliming@champlain.edu
Integration – Craig Pepin, cpepin@champlain.edu
Scientific Literacy – Sarah Beno, sbeno@champlain.edu
Quantitative Literacy – Melanie Brown, mbrown@champlain.edu
Technology Literacy – Mariam Khader, mkhader@champlain.edu
Do not hesitate to reach out to these fellows for ideas in incorporating a relevant competency into your teaching practice. They will also offer individual workshops or presentations throughout the semester.
What are these resources?
Check out the “resources” pages! Each competency has a dedicated Faculty/Staff resource toolkit page to assist with effectively integrating the competency into courses. Each one includes examples of activities, assignments, and reading materials, and serves as inspiration for faculty members to design impactful and engaging learning experiences. This is not a complete list! The Competency Fellows have drawn on their own experience and that of some others to start this section of the website. But, we need your help in expanding the resources to share across campus. Please send your cool pedagogical ideas and tips that relate to each competency to the relevant Competency Fellow.
Where can I find out which competencies are mapped to the classes I teach?
Thanks to Melanie Brown’s MTH 400 class (spring 24), the most up to date, centralized list can be found here.
You can also review course information in the Curriculum Archive.
The most relevant competencies to your class will be scored as 3 on our 0 to 3 scale. This means that the competency should be actively taught to students as a skill, and that students be given multiple opportunities to practice and receive feedback on it.
WARNING! Read before looking up your class, know these caveats.
Many of these classes were mapped in 2015, when our understanding of the competencies was more limited.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion did not yet exist as a competency, and
The four Literacies were joined in pairs (Technology and Information Literacy as TIL, and Scientific and Quantitative Literacy as SQL). In 2018, DEI was added and in 2019 the literacies were separated, giving us our current roster of 12 competencies). You’ll have to decide your course is mapped to TIL if it is Information Literacy or Technology Literacy, and if it is mapped to SQL if it is Scientific Literacy or Quantitative Literacy.
Some courses were never mapped at all.
Courses may have changed since they were originally mapped.
As a result, these mappings may not precisely correspond to how the course is currently being taught. DON’T WORRY! We will be engaging in course re-mapping during this academic year 24-25 to bring them up to date. For Fall 2024, it would be good to review how the courses you teach are currently mapped. It is likely that at least a significant portion of the mapping is accurate.