Faculty In-Service at PIU

This past week began with two days of faculty training sessions. New acting VP of Academics Christel Wood (Christel is now “retired” since 2005 but has been teaching two classes per semester since then as a volunteer, and has agreed to be our acting VP until we can find a new one) oversaw the training session. Both of the main sessions this year featured a speaker from California coming to us via Skype. We were a little afraid of technical difficulties (the router died two days after the sessions finished) but the technology worked, the snacks were excellent and the conference went off as planned.

Our speaker the first day was Maria Keckler from San Diego. She is Director of Instructional Technology for a consortium of K-20 Christian schools and ministries, which include San Diego Christian College, Southern California Seminary, Christian Unified Schools of San Diego, and Shadow Mountain Community Church and Ministries. Her sessions were designed to help our faculty construct our traditional and on-line classes effectively to help our students become lifelong intentional learners. Basically, she taught us how to teach using new technologies in a way that would maximize student learning. Many faculty members mentioned to me that they thought the training was valuable and they planned on implementing several of Maria’s suggestions into their classes.

Our 2nd day speaker was Jo Romaniello, a family therapist from Santa Cruz. Jo has already been out to our campus twice to teach counseling courses for us and to help us set up our PIU counseling center. Jo led the faculty and staff  through several lessons on effective communication and conflict resolution. We had several opportunities to practice our listening skills on each other. Joyce and I even got in some meaningful communication during the workshops! Again I think it was very helpful.

We also had short sessions on organization from Nino Pate, using on-line library resources from our librarian Lisa Collins and an short session on using our Moodle site from Hartmut Scherer. I thought the time was well-spent and the training was effective. It was great to see all the faculty and staff together after the summer break and I am looking forward to another great year working with them.