Nominations needed for 2015-16 Innovative Teaching Showcase

The Innovative Teaching Showcase, an online publication created each year by the Center for Instructional Innovation & Assessment at Western Washington University, highlights the best practices of Western's most dynamic instructors.

This year's showcase, themed "Inquiry-based Learning," seeks to honor faculty who use inquiry to guide their teaching practice or the learning process in a course. This might occur in a variety of ways, including the following:

• a single guiding question as the basis for an entire course
• a method of teaching using many questions to guide discussions, such as the Socratic method
• a questioning process used by students as a method in practice, research, or project-based learning
• using inquiry to make meaning in experiential, field work, or internship settings
• using digital technologies to support the inquiry process
• drawing upon literature, data, or other sources to develop and analyze hypotheses, thesis arguments, or other avenues of inquiry

Nominations are needed for the 2015-16 showcase by Jan. 27. The CIIA will announce selected instructors in February for the 2015-16 Innovative Teaching Showcase, to be published in June.

E. Lee May, from Salisbury State University, describes inquiry-based learning as "a method of instruction that places the student, the subject, and their interaction at the center of the learning experience. At the same time, it transforms the role of the teacher from that of dispensing knowledge to one of facilitating learning. It repositions him or her, physically, from the front and center of the classroom to someplace in the middle or back of it, as it subtly yet significantly increases his or her involvement in the thought-processes of the students."