We are rocking and rolling in Fall 2016! Last year, we piloted the Learning Fellows program at Dartmouth and the program has been rapidly growing ever since. Just this term, we more than doubled our number of Learning Fellows working in Dartmouth courses – from seven in two courses this summer to 18 in five courses this term! Thanks to additional funding from the Experiential Learning Initiative and the continued support of the Gateway Initiative, we will be placing many more Learning Fellows in Dartmouth courses. We are very grateful for the immense support we have received from the college and especially our faculty, and we’re thankful for the great work of the 2015-2016 Learning Fellows, who led the way.

As program coordinator, I’d like to extend a special thanks to the people behind-the-scenes who make some of this great work happen.  Cindy Tobery at Dartmouth’s Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL) and many of our instructional designers (Erin DeSilva, Adrienne Gauthier, Scott Millspaugh, and Adam Nemeroff) have been helping organize and facilitate our teaching huddles, where faculty and Learning Fellows meet to discuss how the course is running. These huddles give us a great chance to see how students are connecting with course material and to evaluate strategies for reaching more students in more efficient ways. At the huddles, faculty and students share their wins and challenges from the past week, and here’s just a sampling of our voices from the past week:

“I watched a few students this week have some lightbulb moments, which was a lot of fun.”
“[There is] lots more interaction in both group work and lectures.”
“I noticed when walking around, most (if not all) students were engaged with class material ([even with] laptops, surprisingly.”
“Students love the Learning Fellows!”

Hey, we love you too. Thanks to our faculty, fellows, the DCAL staff, and the instructional design team who are making innovation happen here at Dartmouth.

-Kes