"Roadmap to Excellence: Celebrating Diversity Through Teaching and Learning"
1995 - 1998

The third grant featured two Consortium-wide programs and small group workshops. Faculty utilized the grant to attend the Great Plains Great Teacher Seminar, while Consortium-wide programs were held the first and third years, and individual campus projects were again a major set of activities.

The first Consortium conference featured keynote speaker Corrine MacGregor who spoke on "Teaching and Learning: A Question of Style." The play "Difficult Dialogues: Talking About Teaching" highlighted the conference. Concurrent sessions included a variety of choices from "Using Technologies to Help Deliver Instruction" to topics such as "F. I. R. E. '0 Up about Thinking: A Four-Part Model to Improve Students' Thinking." Seventy-nine percent of those in attendance stated the conference was very productive and that it offered the greatest opportunities to interact with peers.

The workshop offered in the second year of the grant utilized a slightly different twist. Instead of providing a single workshop, presenter Dr. Tom Creed, Professor at St. John's University, traveled to all five campuses with his workshop "Extending the Classroom Walls Electronically," which offered options for adding outside class discussions and conferencing techniques using the Internet.

The final Consortium-wide conference of the third grant was held in October, 1997, and continued the theme "Creating Diversity through Teaching and Learning." Fourteen Consortium members served as presenters. Sessions dealt with diversity issues, technology, and learning styles as well as sharing information about individual campus projects. Also, discipline-specific faculty met and discussed pertinent curriculum issues. The evaluation report for this conference found that over half of the respondents found the conference to be very productive and that they had gained a better understanding of how to help students learn. An important assessment activity held at the final conference was a series of focus group interviews which were designed to evaluate past grant activities as well as to determine current faculty needs and how these might be addressed (Summary of the focus groups is provided in Appendix F).