Career Development with CTL
Reflect on career efforts for your students and yourself.
The workforce is rapidly changing, so preparing our students for the jobs of tomorrow is more critical than ever. In the Center for Teaching and Learning, we want to help you develop your own teaching practice, but also be sure you have the tools and resources necessary to help your students build their future careers.
Student Development - Employability Skills
Two of Ac's goals for students are:
- Align with Labor Market Demands
- Learning
These goals are central to career development. In the CTL Corner blog last month we explored ideas for incorporating employability skills practice into all content areas. Getting our students to employability and a life-sustaining wage is at the heart of who we are as an institution. Making small changes in our courses can have a big impact on our students and their employability. For example:
- Could we build relationships with those in our community for volunteer and work-based learning, apprenticeships, or internships (Adams Earn and Learn)? Encourage your students to get a jump start on a job search or career development activities.
- Could we tweak some of our assessments and classwork to be portfolios and performance tasks instead of traditional tests and assignments?
- Could we incorporate collaborative work and projects to simulate teamwork in the workplace?
The workplace is changing; therefore, we need to adapt and prepare our students for the future of work. But the efforts to better prepare our students must come with support for faculty to also learn and grow these areas in their own teaching practice.
Faculty Career Development
Student learning is intricately intertwined with faculty continuing to learn, and both are essential to student success. Therefore, career development for a faculty member must start with what is critical for the students to learn and how they best learn it. One way to maximize the ability for faculty to learn and grow is for an institution to build a culture of continuous professional learning based around the student's learning needs. When a faculty member develops new teaching practices, the students benefit with the most up-to-date and rigorous techniques to prepare them for the workplace.
Multiple Ways to Develop Your Career as Faculty
As educators, we all know the importance of lifelong learning. High-quality, engaging, and relevant instruction techniques are the backbone of what CTL offers in the process of learning. Amarillo College's CTL can impact your career development and professional learning in multiple ways:
- Professional Learning Cohorts: The cohorts offer a great way to learn and try out a new technique, tool, or strategy in your classes. In addition, this is a great opportunity to network with other faculty from different departments and campuses and learn about the great things going on in their courses.
- Rank and Tenure Pedagogy Courses: Are you looking to advance in Rank? Are you looking for a more intensive learning experience? These courses can provide extra learning and research for you.
- The CTL Corner Blog: The blog serves as a quick way to get monthly information about how the strategic plan can be effectively and efficiently integrated into your teaching.
- Hire to retire: This tool can help guide you through the continuous development of your teaching career here at Amarillo College.
Career development is an ongoing process that allows everyone to learn, reflect, and implement new strategies and techniques while on their career journey. Ultimately, when we empower faculty through high-quality professional learning, we will positively impact the careers of their students and the lives of countless more around them.
For more information or questions, please contact CTL at ctl@actx.edu
Blog post written by Lori Petty, PhD
Director, Center for Teaching and Learning
