April 10, 2019

PROGRESS ON THE PRESIDENTIAL INITIATIVES

Dear members of STP:

My thanks go out to the many members of our association who graciously volunteered to work on the Presidential Initiatives.

• Karen Naufel and Manisha Sawhney are co-chairing the task force on promoting undergraduate research. They are joined by Kristin Flora, Kenny Foster, Suzanne Wood, Stephanie Richman, Guy Boysen, Jenna Scisco and Julie Hills.
• Missy Beers is coordinating the effort to increase our membership at R1 universities. Her group includes Miranda Bobrowski, Kathryn Becker Blease and Chris Mazurek.
• The task force that will be working on improving our program evaluation efforts is chaired by Jane Halonen and includes Karen Naufel, Tyler Collette, Jen Thompson and Rob McEntarffer.
• David Daniel is chairing the SoTL task force which includes Lindsay Masland, Anna Schwartz, Karl Robinson, Julie Hill, and Heather Scherschel. They will be reviewing the past 20 years of pedagogical research published in TOP in order to extract principles that describe what we truly know. Also, they will be working on creating a search engine to access SoTL research outside of our discipline.
• The three new proposed e-books now have editors. Chris Hakala will be editing an e-book that translates research into pedagogy. Doug Woody is editing the book on how to organize a student-friendly conference and Anna Schwartz is co-editing the book on high impact practices.

ACTIONS BY YOUR EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

STP’s Executive Committee held is first biannual meeting March 29-30, 2019 at the Menger Hotel in San Antonio. Here are some highlights from that meeting.

For many successful years, the Graduate Student Teaching Association (GSTA) has been organized by a host institution, most recently the City University of New York. Our thanks go to Patricia Brooks and her team for their excellent work. However, this model tends to draw primarily from the region of the host institution. The EC has voted to re-organize the GSTA to a regional model that mirrors the current structure of the Early Career Psychologists Committee.

The EC also voted to create two new awards. The first will be for mentoring new faculty in becoming excellent teachers and the second will be for civic engagement which will be for individuals who use their teaching skills to make a difference in their community.

Yours in teaching,

Rick Miller, STP President