Get Your Kicks on the Route 6×6 Challenge

Get ready for a road trip to discover our shared heritage of teaching & learning at Chadron State College. The Teaching & Learning Center invites you to share your teaching & learning experiences by creating 6 pieces of writing with at least 16 sentences for 6 months during the 2017-2018 academic year (September, October, November, February, March, and April). That’s a lot of latitude to write about pedagogy, tools, successes, challenges, or hopes and dreams.

The short term goal of the challenge is to give faculty a space to see what colleagues are doing in courses. These writings will also be in a place for new and seasoned faculty to easily access for years to come. The long term goal of the Reflect & Write Route 6×6 Challenge is to push instructors to be reflective practitioners in the field of education and to share their reflections with colleagues. While these 6 pieces of writing may be a start, we hope that some of the participants will continue to write and share their thoughts about the educational landscape.

We will use the Teaching & Learning Center Blog as a place to write and share reflections. Faculty writing will be posted to the blog where you will also be able to read the work your colleagues create and submit.

The TLC will help you build a place from which to write and support you throughout the writing process and challenge. We encourage you to attend the TLC September Workshop, Reflect & Refine: A Writing Workshop Focused on Pedagogy and Praxis facilitated by Elisabeth Ellington, for guidance in reflective writing about teaching for the blog.  Elisabeth hosts the dirigible plum: a Blog about Learning, Teaching, Writing, and Reading and incorporates student blogging into courses to support learning.

What is in it for you besides sharing your thoughts and ideas and learning from your colleagues? Participants will be rewarded with a variety of awesome gifts, such as books about teaching and learning or lunch with CSC’s President Rhine, AVPTLT David Kendrick, or VPAA Charles Snare. To sweeten the deal, we will reward you with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream delivered to your office after completing the first month of the challenge!

So, are you up for the challenge? We know you are busy, and we know you may already be sharing some of your ideas with your department colleagues. But we challenge you to use writing as a way to reflect and share your thoughts about teaching and learning with a broader audience. Imagine if 10 instructors contribute all 6 months–that would produce 60 pieces of writing from Chadron State College instructors about teaching and learning!

Are you wondering what 16 sentences looks like? You just read them!

To sign up, please email tlctech@csc.edu before September 20th. The first writing piece for the challenge is due by Friday, September 22, 2017. Submit your reflection as a Word document, and the Teaching & Learning Center staff will post it to the blog.

Sincere appreciation to Todd Conaway for providing inspiration for the Route 6×6 Challenge and encouraging the reuse of his idea via his Quality Matters conference presentation and Yavapai College’s infamous 9 X 9 X 25.