I am still developing my skills as a Course Coordinator. I started out with planned activities for course coordination meetings. However, fewer than 25% of the instructors came to those meetings. In Fall 2005 I began some online coordination meetings through BlackBoard. Though attendance at the weekly face-to-face meetings was still around 25%, participation in the online activities went up to about 60%. In preparation for Spring 2006 I worked with the department chair and the person who schedules class meeting times to carve out a time that no course would be offered (undergraduate or graduate) for which a Math 120 or Math 124 instructor might be required. As a result, attendance at face-to-face coordination meetings was 90% with 95% engaging in the online BlackBoard component. A colleague of mine who coordinates the prospective elementary teacher courses has used the same scheduling technique. Now we both have high engagement with coordination.
My focus 2006-07 has been on the improvements to teaching to be gained from systematic, focused, reflective discussions of practice. One of the ways I have begun to increase communication among the instructors in Math 120 and Math 124 is the use of peer-to-peer teaching observations. A second method for increasing structured discussion of teaching has been an increase in the number of observations I do in the first two weeks of the term. I have decided on this course of action because the folks skipping the meetings most often were those who did not know me and whom I did not know well. A third goal I continue to pursue is increasing funding for coordination-enhancing activities through grant-writing activity (see §4.1).