WAYS 101 courses are high-impact courses that students take early in their college career to develop their critical thinking skills, introduce them to the expectations of a rigorous liberal arts degree, allow them to develop a connection with a faculty member in a small classroom setting, and establish a sense of community. This is an opportunity for us to free ourselves from strict disciplinary content expectations and focus on imparting critical thinking skills relative to topics that we are passionate about. Note: The documents on this page are available only to those with a Campus Computer Account (CCA).
The ability to think clearly and rationally (critical thinking) is something that we all learned to do as part of our education and training as faculty. Although many us have not been formally trained in how to teach critical thinking, WAYS 101 faculty will learn together through a series of workshops, training sessions and regular meetings. Many of the WAYS 101 pilot faculty agreed that this course was both one of the most challenging and one of the most rewarding classes that they ever taught. If you want to contribute to one of the most innovative parts of the new General Education curriculum, here is what you need to do:
Submitting a proposal to the Potsdam Pathways Curriculum Committee to teach a WAYS course for the first time is the culmination of a process that involves professional development in skills pedagogy, consultation with skills experts, the appropriate WAYS Coordinator, and fellow WAYS faculty, as well as support in course preparation and approval.
After consulting the WAYS Getting Started materials and speaking to your department chair, contact the Pathways Director (dorancm@potsdam.edu) to initiate the process, or reach out to the appropriate WAYS Coordinator. At the completion of the course development process the WAYS Coordinator, will instruct you to formally apply for WAYS designation from the PPCC.
To make sure that you have the training, support, and time that you need to prepare your course, there will be three stages of training/preparation in the semester before you teach your course. Just before that semester begins, we will hold a full day workshop run by an off-campus critical thinking expert. It will be a chance for you to refine your ideas, think about course structure, learn about best practices, and brainstorm with other WAYS 101 faculty. Several weeks into the semester, an on-campus expert will hold a half-day workshop to help you shape and develop your syllabus. Near the end of the semester we will hold a two-hour workshop so that you can share your syllabus with other new WAYS 101 instructors and receive final feedback before submitting your course to the WAYS 101 Coordinator and the Potsdam Pathways Curriculum Committee for approval.
In the semester that you teach your WAYS 101 course, we will hold bi-weekly meetings with other WAYS 101 faculty (new and experienced). These meetings will offer the opportunity to share experiences, techniques, and developing pedagogies with other instructors. Pilot faculty found these meetings (approx. 6-7 over the course of the semester) to be very helpful.
After you develop and teach your course once, we ask that you share your experiences with other WAYS 101 faculty so that the program can continue to grow and thrive. To help facilitate that, we ask that instructors attend the bi-weekly meetings every time they teach a WAYS 101 course and to take part in the training process every time their course is reviewed (there is a three-year review cycle).