Dr. Catherine Ritz Begins Year Two of Faculty Learning Community
Clinical Assistant Professor and Program Director of Modern Foreign Language Education Dr. Catherine Ritz has been selected to participate in her second year as part of Boston University’s Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Faculty Learning Community (FLC). The program operates within BU’s Center for Teaching & Learning, and serves faculty members across the University who are engaged in research related to educator inquiry and investigation, with the aim of improving their teaching practice.
Last year, Dr. Ritz started her research project, titled “Connecting Second Language Acquisition to Theory: Using a Self-Study Framework to Investigate Course Design, Student Outcomes, and Instructor Learning.” The study then focuses on three research questions:
- What course sequence, assessments, and learning strategies are effective in helping pre-service language teachers make connections between second language acquisition theory and practice?
- Through self-reflection, student feedback, and journaling, what patterns of instructor learning emerge?
- Through student written reflections and course products, what patterns of student learning emerge?
This semester, Dr. Ritz intends to collect data for this study – her third semester of data collection – and will begin to analyze findings this spring. Referring to the experience, she says, “Participation in the SoTL FLC has been valuable to me in improving my practice as an instructor, as well as in developing a research study and learning how to conduct research into my own teaching. It’s also been wonderful to meet and learn from faculty members across BU, and I value the collaborative nature of the group.”
