Educational development interests and experience

Depending on your background, you might wonder, “What is educational development?” The POD Network (which is one of the professional organizations in which I participate) has a webpage that provides a useful description of educational development. Over the past seven years, I’ve become involved in a variety of educational development work, and through those experiences, I’ve learned that I really enjoy the focus on making teaching and learning communities more effective and inclusive. My educational development work has primarily fallen into two categories: organizing and leading faculty development activities and developing programs and approaches to strengthen the institutional ecosystems for supporting student quantitative skills development.

Faculty development

For four years, I served as the Director of the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching at Carleton. In that position, I was responsible for overseeing the faculty development programming portfolio at Carleton — weekly lunches, book groups, workshops, teaching circles, the junior-senior faculty observation program, the student observer program, and the senior faculty development forum. I facilitated programming, engaged in one-on-one consultations, and organized the new faculty mentoring program.

Sign for Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching outside the door of a room where two faculty members are talking with each other.

I offer workshops, give talks, and facilitate reflective discussions on teaching and learning beyond Carleton. I have engaged with colleagues at Amherst College, Denison University, Hamilton College, Lewis & Clark College, SUNY Plattsburgh, and Wesleyan University. The faculty development programs I facilitate at other institutions most often focus on one of the following topics:

Fostering reflection and metacognition in the classroom.
Creating community in in-person and online courses.
Designing authentic projects and assessments for the laboratory curriculum.
Developing approaches for peer observation of teaching.

I welcome the opportunity for inter-institutional learning, and I am always open to collaborating or consulting on programming at other institutions.

An extremely large sticky note that says "Post observation" with smaller multi-colored sticky notes with peer observation of teaching participants comments about the experience.

QLAB project

Currently, I am one of the leaders of the QLAB project of the Liberal Arts Collaborative for Digital Innovation (LACOL), a consortium of 11 liberal arts colleges. This project, funded by an NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) grant, aims to better understand effective practices for the use of online modules to support students’ quantitative skills development and to explore factors that impact faculty and departmental choices about quantitative skills support. Although the project started out focusing primarily on online modules, QLAB has broadened its focus to support inter-institutional learning and resource sharing among faculty and staff towards strengthening the ecosystem for supporting quantitative skills development.

Carleton Undergraduate Bridge Experience (CUBE)

Students arrive at Carleton with a huge variation in their quantitative skills, often due to opportunity gaps at the high school level. Along with many of my colleagues, I wondered how Carleton might better institutionally support students’ quantitative skills development, in addition to the support that faculty members provide in their own courses. With input from faculty colleagues (especially those on the Future Learning Technologies Group) and in collaboration with staff in academic technology, I designed, developed, and taught the hybrid Carleton Undergraduate Bridge Experience beginning in 2016 to provide incoming first-year students the opportunity to review quantitative skills, explore their application to many disciplines, and create an early connection with the Carleton community. This program included Carleton’s first online course, and I was the primary director/instructor for this program from 2016-2019. Publications and presentations related to this work include:

Peer-reviewed journal article: M. Eblen-Zayas & L. Winton, “Building a Social and Academic Online Bridge to Quantitatively Rich College Coursework”, Numeracy 15, Iss. 1: Article 3. doi:10.5038/1936-4660.15.1.1408 (2022).
Peer-reviewed journal article: M. Eblen-Zayas & Janet S. Russell, “Making an online bridge program high touch,” Journal of College Student Development 60, 104, doi: 10.1353/csd.2019.0006 (2019).
Contributed talk: M. Eblen-Zayas & J. Russell, “Online in Summer and Face-to-Face in Fall: An Experimental Bridge Course for Quantitative Skills,” Blended Learning in the Liberal Arts Conference, Bryn Mawr College, PA (2017).
Discussion circle (with E. Evans, J. Russell, S. Taylor), “LACOL: A Consortium of Liberal Arts College Experimenting with Online Learning,” EDUCAUSE ELI Annual Meeting, Houston, TX (2017).
My experience teaching and building community online for CUBE led to numerous invitations to lead faculty development programming in the Summer 2020. I gave presentations & facilitated workshops for over 600 faculty members from 30 different institutions based on lessons learned from CUBE. The LACOL website includes a video introduction to the workshop I facilitated about designing for community in online courses. In addition, the full presentation that I made for the Claremont Consortium can be seen below.