I began serving as Course-Embedded Consultant (CEC) Coordinator in Summer 2020. As our Spring 2020 semester was abruptly upended halfway through, my supervisor Dr. Clint Stivers decided not to continue the Noel Studio’s weekly professional development seminars for CECs through the remainder of the Spring. Once I came aboard as CEC Coordinator in Summer, though, we had to decide how best to make our seminar program — which had a history of mixed results and reviews from CECs — successful in the fully-online setting that we would be working in come Fall 2020.
The first step I took was developing a survey through Google Forms for CECs to fill out at the end of the Spring semester. The form (presented as a print PDF for convenience here, but sent as an online survey to CECs) contained questions asking about CECs perception of seminar’s effectiveness and ineffectiveness in the past, as well as any ideas they had themselves to improve it.
The first big takeaway from the survey was that CECs liked having seminars tailored to talk about common assignments in ENG 101R/102R courses. The vast majority of the professors use the same assignments, and having a seminar to discuss and work on each of those as a group was key to CECs’ understanding of the assignments and how best to consult students working on them.
In the early Spring, before COVID hit, the prior CEC Coordinator experimented with letting more experienced CECs lead seminar rather than it always being the CEC Coordinator. Another key piece of feedback from the survey responses I received showed that CECs, both experienced and newer to the Studio, loved having a rotating cast of facilitators — it showed that the hierarchy of the Studio was not so rigid, and that everybody was invited and welcome to contribute to each others’ betterment.
The last key takeaway was that more experienced CECs felt fatigued by seminars — some CECs who have been at the Studio for several years had to attend the same seminars nearly every semester. Dr. Stivers and I decided to require all CECs to attend seminars in the Fall so that we could try to keep a cohesive community with the CECs; it was deeply important that everyone talk to each other and see each other as much as possible in an online environment. In retrospect, we should have asked more experienced CECs to only attend seminars they were leading, but that is a lesson Dr. Stivers and the next CEC Coordinator have learned for Spring 2021.
We decided to have seminars weekly over Zoom, having new facilitators every week to talk about assignments/consulting strategies. I led several seminars on various topics such as general writing skills, dealing with confrontational/aggressive students, and administrative tasks such using our appointment scheduling system, WCOnline, and keeping up with CEC spreadsheets to track student progress. However, most assignment-based seminars were led by experienced CECs — I inquired about interest in topics from a select number of CECs, and assigned them topics based on their responses.
I largely let seminar leaders do what they wanted when they led, but I asked specifically for a group activity aspect — for most seminars, that manifested as the leader showing an anonymous student example of a writing assignment, and CECs would have a group discussion about the example’s strengths, weaknesses, and how best to consult the student on improving the piece.
On the week of midterm exams at EKU, I asked CECs to fill out a “Midterm Reflection” sheet asking them how they were feeling about their work, what issues they were having, and how seminar was helping/not-helping them. Most experienced CECs felt that seminar was still repetitive, as I addressed above, but new CECs — who we had to teach how to be CECs in an online setting while we ourselves weren’t really sure how to do that — overwhelmingly praised the seminar format and said they felt very confident in their work as a CEC thanks to seminar.
Sample Activities
Below is a module activity on basic writing skills. Links to refenced student samples and resources are embedded in the PDF, but here is the link to the Google Docs folder for good measure: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Nb-cNzCTSPhsuzFfKskopuULhjPYlyOJ?usp=sharing
Below is an activity I had new CECs and experienced CECs do at the start of the semester to practice online consultations. This proved to be a helpful activity for both experienced and new CECs, as it provided a streamlined way to conduct consultations this Fall (Spring 2020, post-lockdown, was fairly haphazard in our approach to consultations).
Adrian Paul Bryant 