Fall Semester Happenings

There are several important events happening over the rest of our Fall semester through till May 2011. Each of the major events is described below.

Peer Review Committee

The final votes were due October 1. The elected new representative to this committee is Susan Katz (she will serve through May 2013).

September 23 Meeting

Many thanks again to the dynamic duos of Patrick & Noah and Emma & Shabnam. They did a fabulous job at our meeting with Provost Turpin. Meeting notes (taken by Cori) can be downloaded here:

september 23 notes download

Since that meeting Provost Turpin and I have agreed that the SOE will host a meeting with her every fall semester in either September or October. So this is not a one-or-two off connection, but we’ll be formally meeting with her every year.

October through January Meetings

There are a lot of important issues that will be on our upcoming meeting agendas. The three main issues are: future contract negotiations, faculty international experiences, and the collaborative teaching initiative. I’m trying to balance the needs of all three of these issues. Given that, here’s the basic structure for the upcoming meetings:

October 28 Meeting

(1) Paul Zeitz (Mathematics) will present on key financial issues related to upcoming contract negotiations. (30 mins)

(2) Yvonne Bui and Judith Lambton (Nursing) will make short presentations on their international experiences in Malawi and Lebanon respectively. I’ve asked both to present at our meeting because each did an innovative job of including students into the international experience even though the students never left their homes in the Bay Area! Their stories and reflections may provide some faculty with new ideas about how they could also create meaningful international experiences for students using the magic of the internet and other tools. (30 mins)

(3) Collaborative Teaching Initiative. Yesterday in the Chairs Meeting we finally agreed to the intent and mechanics of this initiative. Some details are still to be worked out, but we now have an exciting initiative to roll out. I’ll present about this initiative and there will be time for questions. I’ll also probably need to cover some business items also in this time period. (30 mins)

November 18 Meeting

(1) Xornam Apedoe and Terry Patterson will lead a discussion about items we want to bring up for the upcoming contract negotiations. (30 mins)

(2) Kevin Oh, Xornam Apedoe & Chris Thomas, and some others (I’m in Paris currently and I don’t have all relevant info in front of me) will discuss their recent international experiences. In this case the focus is on international experiences where faculty took students with them to the international location. (30 mins)

(3) Collaborative Teaching Pilot Study. Yvonne Bui and Chris Thomas will discuss their current experiment in cross-departmental collaborative teaching. Their insights may make you more excited (or scared) to attempt to do the same thing. At any rate, their reflections and experiences will be useful to anyone remotely considering starting a collaborative course. (30 mins)

January 27 Meeting

Terry Patterson, Yvonne Bui and others will discuss international experiences involving only faculty (i.e. no students) but that had a meaningful impact on how they think as professionals. (30 mins) There will be other things happening at this meeting also.

Doctorate of Professional Practice

In yesterday’s Chairs meeting we also agreed on a general approach to investigating the “alternative doctorate” that is generally referred to as the Doctorate of Professional Practice. The overarching idea is we’d like to investigate this possibility with the idea that a recommendation will be made to the Dean by May 1, 2011.

The working ideas are:

1. We may easily decide not to go in this direction.


2. If we adopt a “professional practice” option in our doctoral programs it would be in addition to the standard dissertation—not as a replacement.


3. Since this is an increasingly large movement in the U.S. we want to be at least highly informed about this “professional practice” option.

Early in the Spring a task force will be formed to look into this issue. This semester we’re simply going to try to educate ourselves as much as possible about the various issues surround this professional practice approach. As part of this “educating ourselves” phase I’ve included an article written by Lee Shulman and others in 2006 (published in Educational Researcher). This article really is a must read to gain a foundational understanding of the issues impacting the development of the “professional practice” option. You can download the article using this link:

shulman et al. 2006 article

In addition, Dean Gmelch has graciously invited two key people to come to USF and discuss their experiences. Below I’m giving days and times for both. One is not finalized yet, but right now these are the dates and times you should put in your calendars. These meetings, ideally, should be attended by everyone (looking right at you Counseling Psych and Teacher Education) as there are some implications of a professional practice option that could impact even those two non-doctorate departments.

David Imig (Maryland) is coming first. For many years he headed the organization that is formally looking in the professional practice doctorate option. He comes to us with several years of experience working/talking with doctoral institutions across the country. David is scheduled to be with us November 15. Regular presentation from 12 to 1 (brown bag). Extended discussion for those interested: 1 to 2.

Karen Gallagher (University of Southern California), Dean of the School of Education. Karen is current Dean, but more important was the Dean at USC when they completely redid their doctoral programs. Today they offer a traditional dissertation plus a professional practice option. She has great hands-on knowledge about the opportunities and problems inherent when trying to combine both options. Karen is scheduled to be with us December 9. Regular presentation from 12 to 1 (brown bag). Extended discussion for those interested: 1 to 2.