Workshops for New Computing Faculty in Summer 2018: Both Research and Teaching Tracks

This is our fourth year, and our last NSF-funded year, for the New Computing Faculty Workshops which will be held August 5-10, 2018 in San Diego. The goal of the workshops is to help new computing faculty to be better and more efficient teachers. By learning a little about teaching, we will help new faculty (a) make their teaching more efficient and effective and (b) make their teaching more enjoyable. We want students to learn more and teachers to have fun teaching them. The workshops were described in Communications of the ACM in the May 2017 issue (see article here) which I talked about in this blog post. The workshop will be run by Beth Simon (UCSD), Cynthia Bailey Lee (Stanford), Leo Porter (UCSD), and Mark Guzdial (Georgia Tech).

This year, for the first time, we will offer two separate workshop tracks:

• August 5-7 will be offered to tenure-track faculty starting at research-intensive institutions.
• August 8-10 will be offered to faculty starting a teaching-track job at any school, or a tenure-track faculty line at a primarily undergraduate serving institution where evaluation is heavily based in teaching.

This year we added new organizers, Ben Shapiro (Boulder) for the research-intensive track, and Helen Hu (Westminster) and Colleen Lewis (Harvey Mudd) for the teaching-intensive track.

The new teaching-oriented faculty track is being added this year due to enthusiasm and feedback we heard from past participants and would-be participants. When I announced the workshops last year (see post here), we heard complaints (a little on email, and a lot on Twitter) asking why we were only including research-oriented faculty and institutions. We did have teaching-track faculty come to our last three years of new faculty workshops that were research-faculty focused, and unfortunately those participants were not satisfied. They didn’t get what they wanted or needed as new faculty. Yes, the sessions on peer instruction and how to build a syllabus were useful for everyone. But the teaching-track faculty also wanted to know how to set up their teaching portfolio, how to do research with undergraduate students, and how to get good student evaluations, and didn’t really care about how to minimize time spent preparing for teaching and how to build up a research program with graduate students while still enjoying teaching undergraduate students.

So, this year we made a special extension request to NSF, and we are very pleased to announce that the request was granted and we are able to offer two different workshops. The content will have substantial overlap, but with a different focus and framing in each.

To apply for registration, To apply for registration, please apply to the appropriate workshop based on the type of your position: research-focused position http://bit.ly/ncsfw2018-research or teaching-focused position http://bit.ly/ncsfw2018-teaching. Admission will be based on capacity, grant limitations, fit to the workshop goals, and application order, with a maximum of 40 participants. Apply on or before June 21 to ensure eligibility for workshop hotel accommodation. (We will notify respondents by June 30.)

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Many thanks to Cynthia Lee who helped a lot with this post