Faculty and Staff
UWF is building on the momentum of our successful 2016-2020 Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) which focused on enhancing students' professional communication skills related to high-impact practices (HIPs). Over the past eight years, we have made great strides in integrating HIPs across the curricular and co-curricular to increase student engagement and learning. Our analysis of institutional data, combined with insights from faculty liaisons and other stakeholders, makes it clear that UWF is ready to take the next step in our HIP journey.
Our new QEP will cultivate students' critical reflection skills across all HIPs. Reflection has always been one of the eight essential elements of HIPs. An intentional focus on critical reflection will help students make connections between diverse learning experiences, analyze personal growth and articulate skills gained through HIPs.
Critical Reflection
Building upon past successes in integrating HIPs to enhance students’ professional communication skills, UWF now aims to infuse intentional critical reflection into these impactful experiences. UWF’s definition of critical reflection is, “Critical reflection is a reasoning process to make meaning of an experience. Critical reflection is descriptive, analytical, iterative, and ongoing. Reflection can be articulated in a number of ways such as in written form, orally, or as an artistic expression. In short, this process adds depth and breadth to high-impact practices and builds connections between course content, the experience and the student’s professional goals” (adapted from the University of Tennessee Chattanooga).
QEP Pilot Projects
HIP Grant Process
Annually, faculty and staff across the institution have the opportunity to seek funding for improving an existing HIP or creating a new one through the HIP Grant. This funding initiative is specifically tailored to improve access to HIPs. Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for the HIP Grant are typically released late in the fall semester. Faculty must meet with their college HIP Liaison prior to submitting their project proposal.
Examples of HIP projects receiving grant funding for the 2024-2025 academic year.
Child Study Team (CST) Collaborative Project
- Grant Recipient: Dr. Melanie DiLoreto
- Project Summary: This project involves students collaborating in teams to create an educational program utilizing assessment data that embeds Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and English as a Second Language (ESOL) modifications.
ePortfolios as Tools for Critical Reflection in First-Year Composition
- Grant Recipient: Dr. Bre Garrett
- Project Summary: This project is designed to archive and showcase students’ learning and development in a course themed around academic writing and research.
Friday Nights at the ER Virtual Collaborative Game
- Grant Recipient: Katie Cavnar
- Project Summary: This project provides students with an opportunity to understand the significance of interprofessional collaboration in healthcare through an interactive, gamified experience.
Rubric Development Process
Rubric development committee:
- UKCOH: Karen Valaitis, Jane Halonen and Vanessa Rainey
- CASSH: Athena DuPre, John Jensen and Bre Garrett
- SOE: Jeff Phillips and Julie Gray
- HMCSE: Shusen Pu (Math), Chasidy Hobbs and Jason Ortegren (Earth and Environmental Sciences)
- COB: Jerry Burch
The collaborative effort to create a straightforward rubric for evaluating critical reflection included representatives from colleges and departments across the University. The committee developed a Critical Reflection Rubric that faculty members across disciplines can utilize to evaluate critical reflection associated with various HIPs. The development of the rubric involved gathering insights from various viewpoints and areas of expertise to ensure its relevance and efficacy in varied academic settings. Through collective input and deliberation over several months, the committee constructed a user-friendly rubric to facilitate the assessment of critical reflection within the framework of HIPs.
Critical Reflection Faculty/Staff Training
UWF faculty, instructors and staff participated in a half-day interactive workshop on integrating critical reflection into the 11 HIPs. Throughout the session, attendees were introduced to practical tools and resources designed to enhance the student experience with high-impact practices through critical reflection. Participants were trained on using a rubric developed through collaborative efforts among faculty from various academic disciplines, offering a comprehensive framework for integrating critical reflection across diverse HIPs. Participants brainstormed best practices and gained valuable insights and strategies for integrating critical reflection into their high-impact practice activities and courses to enrich student engagement and improve learning outcomes.
Sample Critical Reflection Activities
Effective critical reflection is an ongoing, iterative endeavor that occurs throughout a course or experience, and it can be included in any HIP activity.
Examples of what critical reflection might look like in a classroom setting:
- Reflective journals - Guided by instructor prompts, students write entries reflecting on what they are learning, how it connects to previous knowledge and how it may apply in real-world contexts.
- Reflective discussions - Reflective discussion can involve collaborative peer discussion, peer critique, or guided discussion with the instructor where reflective questions such as “How has your perspective changed?” or “What skills did you strengthen in this process?”
- Concept mapping - Students create visual maps of how course concepts interrelate, reflecting on connections between ideas.
- ePortfolios - Students compile work in a digital portfolio over a semester or program, choosing pieces that show development and the portfolio contains reflective overviews of their learning.
- Video reflection - Through structured video reflections, students in high-impact courses and experiences meaningfully synthesize their evolving perspectives over the semester.
Professional Development/Learning Community Information
In the fall of 2024, a small group of faculty will embark on a journey to transform one of their classes into a service and/or community engaged learning course. These transformed courses will incorporate experiential learning opportunities in the surrounding community as additional texts for the class. Faculty will be guided by experts in the community and on campus as they are asked to step outside of the traditional classroom and see the community around them as the classroom for their redesigned course. For more information, contact hips@uwf.edu.