My work spans across three main areas: Faculty development, digital learning, and program management. I practice a coaching philosophy when working with a team. On a regular basis, I often ask myself if I am being empathetic, goal-oriented, supportive, growth-minded, or an active listener. These traits help me achieve clarity when confronting macro and micro aspects of my work. My growth as a supervisor is a result of ongoing professional development; in some cases offered to me at my workplace, and in some other cases when I sought an opportunity on my own. Moreover, my role at the Center has empowered me to establish collaborations with faculty program directors and other staff members at the College.
Program Management
As the Associate Director of The Center for Teaching and Learning, I oversee the ePortfolio program and the Student Technology Mentor program at LaGuardia Community College. In this capacity, I supervise four full-time staff and approximately twenty-five part-time staff members. When working with my team, through one-on-one and group meetings, I strive to integrate the traits I mentioned above as we discuss ways to meet our team goals for the academic year.
Our collective goal across both programs is to provide instructional support to faculty and students with the use of technology (e.g., ePortfolios, Brightspace). I identify data metrics and insights that can help our team respond to user needs. I have leveraged the use of Microsoft Power BI to create data dashboards that inform our decision making process throughout the academic term. We also use these data dashboards to improve our training and to ensure we prevent a common issue from becoming a major roadblock for users.
Digital Learning
My unit plans and executes support structures to help faculty and students learn and use technology platforms in their respective courses. This work has focused on the use of Digication to build ePortfolios and; more recently, CUNY’s new LMS D2L Brightspace. We work with multiple stakeholders (e.g., faculty program directors, administrators) to ensure our support responds to users’ needs.
I coordinate and lead training sessions that prepare the team in providing technical and instructional support to students and faculty. In this training phase, I strive to center Universal Design for Learning (UDL) through the lens of a mentoring relationship. We guide users on how to use these platforms; we don’t do things for them. Our team also creates instructional (written, image, and video) materials to show users how to use these educational platforms.
Faculty Development
Part of my role at the CTL is to foster a community of practice among faculty members and to support faculty pedagogy through seminars. Our offerings vary in length and they all focus on practices that faculty can use in their classes, strengthen assignments, and overall improve their pedagogy. Over the years, I have co-led and co-facilitated professional development seminars focused on reflection, ePortfolio as a High-Impact Practice, Capstone courses, and First-Year Seminar courses.
In doing this work, I introduce core instructional design principles such as Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Backwards Design. I use these principles as guides to help faculty achieve an effective use of these educational technologies in their courses. Through this work, I have gained knowledge in curriculum development; how course learning objectives manifest in course materials and assignments; and how program learning outcomes are present across courses in the curriculum.