The Institute for Learning and Teaching

TILT Working Groups

TILT sponsors working groups on a range of topcis related to teaching and learning. Working groups are coordinated by one or two individuals. They function like a small research center and have the support of TILT in the form of meeting space, meeting support, and (ideally) funding for projects. To join a working group, or to propose a new group, please contact Sandy Chapman at (970) 491-3132 or Sandy.Chapman@colostate.edu. Current working groups include:

Teaching with Technology: This working group brings together faculty, graduate students, and staff from across campus to discuss the use of information technologies in the classroom. Focuses of the group are likely to include new media, handheld technologies, course management systems, and computers in the classroom in more general (and by now, more traditional) terms.

Coordinator: Carrie Lamanna
Members: Shaun Beaty, David Bowen, David Greene, Brian Jones, Kate Kiefer, Jill Salahub, Stephen Thompson, Ray Whalen

Students with Children Working Group: This group is formed to respond to a problem that has long faced students at CSU. Roughly 11 percent of CSU students are parents, and we are all familiar with the special challenges faced by these students—locating good childcare, finding space to study and write, and balancing academics and family/home demands, among many others. The goal of this working group is to explore how we might respond to the needs of these students and their families.

Coordinators: Lisa Langstraat and Jan Rastall
Members: Janelle Adsit, Lilly Berger,Sandra Chapman, Debora Colbert, Jody Donovan,Cindy Griffin, Kari Jansen, Sari Keilman, Chris Linder, David McKelfresh, Meg Steinweg, Katharine Wormus

Millennial Students: Much of the discussion of the Millennial Generation focuses on apparent differences in learning styles, attention spans, and interests between this generation of students and those who have come before them. Some of us question arguments that these students differ in fundamental ways, suggesting that each generation of students (since at least Plato) has been characterized as differing in some way from earlier generations. Whatever these differences are, or even whether they exist, it nonetheless seems clear that some faculty struggle to reach this newest generation of students. In this working group, we’ll address research on Millennial students. We’ll also ask a potentially intriguing question, and one that appears to have implications for teaching and learning: is there a mismatch between faculty expectations about students and student expectations about faculty?

Coordinator: Barbara Wallner
Members: Pamela Coke, Ian Gordon, Jackie Hartman, Jim McCambridge, Tom Siller, Jamie Switzer, Kathy Zellers

Writing Across the Curriculum: This working group will address issues related to Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) at Colorado State University. The integration of writing into course curricula has a number of benefits, including helping students understand course content and think critically about issues as well as helping them improve as writers. Yet it's a challenge to balance the desire to use writing with the demands of designing, assigning, and responding to student writing. This group will consider how new strategies, as well as those that have been suggested by WAC scholars over the past few decades, might be put into place or adapted for use at Colorado State.

Coordinators: Sue Doe and Tobi Jacobi
Members: Sandra Chapman, Sue Doe, David Gilkey, Neil Grigg, Tobi Jacobi, Lynn Kwiatkowski, Melinda Laituri, Janice Nerger, Andrew Norton, Jennifer Ogle, Sanjay Rajopadhye, and Laura Thomas