Sylvia Currie

I saw this tweet + image from Isabeau Iqbal right after reading Gina's comment about how many times Leonne said "like". It got me thinking that it could be a creative way to begin writing a TPS. Start with 10 minutes of free writing then run it through a word cloud generator to see what stands out. 

Write your #teachingphilosophy statement with support from @BCcampus . Free course, online. Starts today: https://t.co/MmNhOLx973 @UBC_CTLT #highered #FacDev pic.twitter.com/s6Bl4zrdO5

— Isabeau Iqbal (@isabeauiqbal) November 26, 2018

Ha, those rumours seem to travel fast and far these days. Just got home from my birthday lunch! Now I feel like I need a nap because launching a MicroCourse and going out is altogether too much excitement in one day. ;-)Thanks for the candles, Gina!

The FLO MicroCourse, Write your teaching philosophy statement, runs for five days beginning TODAY! There are 17 of us so far, representing 8 post-secondary institutions and several private organizations.

In an effort to make it easier for you to jump into the process where you feel you need details and support, this course is organized using "tabbed" pages. They are numbered for the sequential types, and titled for the cherry pickers. 

There is a lot of content in this MicroCourse, and many, many links to additional reading. It's perfect for those of you wanting to really dig in, but if you're a skimmer that's okay! It's possible to write your teaching philosophy statement draft using only the salient guiding tidbits.

Questions? Ask anything, anytime in the Open forum.

Your facilitators,

Sue Hellman & Sylvia Currie

What a mighty group of community builders! We've generated quite a collection of activities to grab and use in our own practice. And the course summary shows 160+ contributions over the week. That includes all of your excellent feedback and community-building creations. 

Please join me in thanking Colleen Grandy and Gina Bennett for their excellent facilitation. These MicroCourses offer a way for FLO facilitators to practice skills and experience team facilitation -- a capstone activity before taking the lead on future FLO courses. Colleen and Gina were very much part of the the planning and design of the course as well -- all volunteer and hugely appreciated!

Before you leave...

We say 5 days, but please feel free to tie up loose ends this weekend. You may also have bookmarked useful tools, articles and websites that would pump up our Resource Collection. I always find it interesting to browse the forum annotations as well. This course will remain available to you forever (if I have my way :-)), so feel free to come back to revisit anytime.

You will have received a course evaluation via email on Friday. Please let us know about your experience!

Our next MicroCourse is:

Write your teaching philosophy statement - November 26 - 30

Sign up before the start date and also complete the pre-course survey prepared by Sue Hellman to help with planning.

Your grateful FLO facilitators,

Sylvia, Gina, and Colleen

This was such an interesting exercise! It took me way too long to fiddle with text, images, layout, and with strange results. Why don't I just do what the smart people do? Use Coggle! Maybe I should add my a #wastefulpersistence hashtag to my tree :) And I'm not sure why I ended up using hashtags but clearly I was inspired to do that by somebody in this MicroCourse! 

It does strike me that this would be very useful way for course participants to share what they bring to a course, what in the course and life will help them achieve their learning goals, and what's next. That's not a community building activity per se, but still offers those opportunities to look for connections. 

I also like the idea of adding leaves to others' trees. Or duplicating leaves to put on your own tree. (Or stealing leaves? ha)  I'm not sure how to achieve that in a technically simple way.