The University of Colorado Denver Provost’s Award for Excellence in Practices Related to Instructional, Research, and Clinical Faculty (IRCF) is awarded to an academic unit for demonstrated excellence in practices regarding IRCF that supports the mission of the CU Denver Campus. This award is intended to recognize and support a specific area of best practice within a unit with regard to any level of IRCF, including overall, Clinical Teaching Track Faculty, Principal Instructors, Senior Instructors, Instructors, and/or Lecturers. The award includes a $2,500 stipend designed to support the ongoing development and advancement of IRC faculty within the unit.
Candidates for the Provost’s Award are academic units on the CU Denver Campus. The academic unit can be a school or college, library, department, area, program, or center. Academic units are not eligible to receive the award in consecutive years.
UCDALI will announce the annual call for nominees before Winter Break. UCDALI is also responsible for assembling the selection committee. The current structure of the application review committee is:
Questions about the awards, or the nomination and review process, should be directed to the Office of Faculty Affairs, 303-315-2107.
DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY, COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES
THE BUSINESS SCHOOL
AURARIA LIBRARY
DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY, COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES
1. What are the best
practices that are the bases of your proposal?
·
NTTF
in Psychology above .50 FTE appointments have full voting rights (except where
prohibited by Regents)
·
NTTF
have been encouraged to serve as mentors for individual students at both the
undergraduate and graduate levels and have served on undergraduate honors, M.A.
thesis, and doctoral dissertation committees
·
NTTF
are regularly provided with departmental travel funds to attend professional
meetings such as the National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology (NITOP;
Association for Psychological Science or APS), and the meeting of the Society
for the Teaching of Psychology; STP; American Psychological Association or
APA). They have returned from those meetings with new ideas for course
composition and evaluation, major curriculum, and student research
·
Senior
instructors have been encouraged and supported to move into Clinical Teaching
Track (CTT) appointments, which (a) enables them to devote 10% effort to
research and scholarly activity, and (b) provides a career path through the
ranks of the CT track from assistant through associate and full professor
2.
How many NTTF in your unit have been engaged in your best practices?
In 2010 we had
3 NTTF (Bashe, Bihun, Everhart), including 2 senior instructors and 1 clinical
teaching track (CTT) assistant professor. In 2017, we have 6 NTTF, including 4
clinical teaching track (1 full professor [Walker], 1 associate professor
[Everhart], and 2 assistant professors [Bihun; Shyu]), 1 senior instructor
(Bierer), and 1 assistant research professor (Hamilton). All have engaged in
just about aspect of our best practices (although Senior Instructors do not
have research expectations). Below, we identify which NTTF have been most
closely associated with each activity or accomplishment.
3.
How have these practices engaged NTTF in the mission of the unit,
school, or university?
Providing NTTF with full rights and expanded
responsibilities have enabled them to become engaged in every facet of the
department’s mission, from undergraduate education and student mentoring to
graduate education, training, and clinical supervision, to governance at the
department, college, campus, and system levels, and research and scholarship.
Below we detail how our practices have engaged NTTF faculty in our teaching,
leadership/service, and research/scholarship missions.
Teaching
· our
NTTF play an absolutely critical role in undergraduate and graduate education,
generating a high proportion of the department’s SCHs at the undergraduate
level, advising and mentoring our students, making important contributions to
curricular improvements, and adding significantly to our scholarship of
education. At the graduate level, they play a very important role both in the
classroom and in the Psychology Clinic, where they train graduate students to
do clinical work and prepare them as they apply for matches in the national
competition to secure APA-approved clinical internships. Specifically, NTTF
faculty
o
PSYC
2205: Lifespan Developmental Psychology
for Health Majors (Bihun) – in response to changes in requirements for
pre-nursing and pre-PT degrees, and changing MCAT test composition
o
PSYC
3385: Psychology of Mindfulness – a
course on the scientific basis for the mindfulness concept and its
evidence-based applications (Bierer)
o
PSYC 3600: Senior
Seminar – a pilot of a new capstone course preparing seniors who plan to
enter the job market for the transition from university to the workforce (Shyu)
o
PSYC
3615: Positive Psychology (Bierer) –
a vibrant but relatively new area of psychology that was previously absent from
our curriculum
o
PSYC
4680: Behavioral Science Research
(Hamilton) – updated course significantly for MARC-USTAR scholars program and
departmental honors programs
o
PSYC
4780: Behavioral Science Research Ethics
& Issues Science Research (Hamilton) – updated course for MARC-USTAR
scholars and departmental honors programs
o
NTTF
did most of the work in developing and implementing over a short 2-year period
a complete online B.A. degree major
in Psychology (Bihun; Bierer; Everhart; Hamilton; Shyu). This includes 20 new
course preparations. Without NTTF, the
online B.A. major in Psychology would not exist.
·
· have
played a crucial role in providing much of the clinical training for our doctoral students. NTTF faculty have been
involved with clinical supervision of doctoral trainees (Bierer; Everhart),
have served as our Coordinator of Clinical Training (Everhart; Walker), and
have directed our Psychology Clinic (Everhart; Walker). They have significantly
enhanced the quality of clinical supervision by transitioning the Psychology Clinic
to an electronic health record system and a state-of-the-art audiovisual
recording system that allows supervisors and students to watch live and
recorded assessment and therapy sessions
· were
key developers of our Psychological
Clinic, and two of them have served as clinic directors (Everhart; Walker).
Dr. Barbara Walker, our current Coordinator of Clinical Training and PC
Director, has been instrumental in continuing the development of our portfolio
of external clinical practica, which
now include an astounding array of student placement options, such as Aurora
Mental Health Center, A.F. Williams Family Medicine, Children’s Hospital of
Denver, Denver Health, the Denver VA Medical Center (Traumatic Brain
Injury/Rehab Team; General Neuropsychology; In-patient Rotations), Mental
Health Center of Denver, Mental Health Partners in Boulder, National Jewish
Health, Neurosurgery at the University of Colorado Hospital, Presbyterian St.
Luke’s Bone Marrow Transplant Unit, Spalding Rehabilitation, Salud Family Health
Centers, St. Joseph’s Hospital, and the University of Colorado Hospital.
Leadership and Service
Our NTTF faculty have at least a 10% effort involvement in leadership/service. They have served in critical system-, campus-, college-, and department level governance committees, and have been active in the community and in professional organizations
· At the CU System level
o
the
system-wide FCQ Pilot Committee (Bihun)
o
presenter
at Women’s Symposium at CU Colorado Springs (Bierer)
·
At
the campus level
o
UCDALI
Executive Committee Member and President (Shyu)
o
Faculty
Assembly CLAS representative (Shyu)
o
UCDALI
Bridge Network Liaison (Bihun)
o
Consolidated
Campus Staff Council (Bierer)
o
Commencement
Ceremony Marshall (Shyu)
o
Undergraduate
Experiences Symposium Table leader (Shyu)
·
At
the CLAS level
o
CLAS
Clinical Teaching Track committee (Shyu)
o
CLAS
Outcome Assessment Committee (Bihun, chaired behavioral science core)
o
CLAS
Faculty Mentor Program (Bihun)
·
At
the Department level
o
CU
Succeed Program liaisons for Psychology (Bihun; Hamilton)
o
Psychology
Department Undergraduate Scholarship Selection committees (Bihun;
o
Faculty
co-advisor for Psi Chi, the National Honor Society in Psychology (Bihun;
Hamilton)
o
Psychology
Department Curriculum Committee (Bierer; Hamilton)
o
Psychology
Department Merit Policy Committee (Bierer; Shyu)
o
Psychology
Department Space Committee (Bihun)
o
Organizer,
Departmental Brown Bag Series (Bierer; Shyu)
o
CHP
Steering Committee (Everhart; Walker)
o
CHP
Doctoral Student Admissions Committee (Everhart)
o
Clinical
Core Competency Exams (Everhart)
o
Clinical
Supervisor in CHP program (Bierer, Everhart, Walker)
·
At
the Professional level
o
American
Psychological Association’s Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP)
Adjunct Faculty Excellence Award Committee Chair (Bihun), STP Teaching of
Psychology Skills Matter Task Force (Shyu)
o
AP
Psych Reader/Table Leader (Bihun)
o
Associate
Editor of the journal Translational
Behavioral Medicine: Practice, Policy, and Research (Walker)
·
At
the Community level
o
volunteer
neuroscience outreach at local-area school (Hamilton)
o
volunteer
for Adam’s Camp for developmentally disabled children (Everhart)
Five
out of six of our NTTF have at least a 10% involvement in research and
scholarly activity. This involvement ranges from laboratory basic research
(Everhart; Hamilton) to applied or clinical research (Everhart; Walker) to the
scholarship of pedagogy and education (Bierer; Bihun; Shyu). By way of brief
summaries:
·
Bethann
Bierer, Senior Instructor, is a licensed clinical psychologist who has no
formal research responsibilities. Even so, she has brought expertise in positive psychology and the psychology of
mindfulness to our faculty and students, and has been active in the
scholarship of pedagogy. She presented a paper on the psychology of mindfulness
as a college course at the meeting of the Mindfulness
in Education conference in 2015.
·
Joan
Bihun, Assistant Professor CTT (awaiting word on promotion to Associate
Professor, CTT) is an expert in
developmental psychology, and is currently also active in the scholarship of pedagogy. She has
published a peer-reviewed paper about students’ perceptions of their
department’s learning objectives for the major in the Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research. She received a Center
for Faculty Development grant to study how students perceive and use feedback
on their written work, and has presented conference papers at the National Institute for the Teaching of
Psychology and the Rocky Mountain
Psychological Association on this and other topics. She has also received
grants from UCDALI and the CLAS Dissemination program.
· Kevin
Everhart, Associate Professor CTT, is an expert
in child clinical psychology and co-Director
of the Infant Learning Laboratory in the Department of Psychology, where he
supervises and mentors four doctoral students and numerous undergraduates. He
has been co-author on two peer-reviewed papers in the journal Infant Behavior & Development, has
co-authored conference presentations at the International
Society for Infancy Studies, the Society
for Research in Human Development, the Society
of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, and the Society for Neuroscience. He was co-investigator on a completed R01
grant from NICHD and a co-PI on a small grant from our Office of Research
Services.
· Lindsey
Hamilton, Research Assistant Professor with expertise in behavioral neuroscience, is also MARC/USTAR and Psychology Honors Program coordinator. She will be
co-PI on the application for renewal of that program grant, which proposes a
significant expansion of the program. She recently published a paper in the
journal Neurochemical Research, and
has two other articles in preparation. She supervised six student presentations
at the meeting of the Society for Advancement of Chicano/Hispanics and Native
Americans in Science (SACNAS) in 2016.
· Vivian
Shyu, Assistant Professor CTT, has been active in the scholarship of pedagogy.
She received a professional development grant from the Center for Faculty
Development to perform a comparison of student perceptions and learning outcomes of in-class, online, and
hybrid formats in PSYC 2220: Biological Bases of Behavior, and subsequently
a grant from CU Online to attend a Society for Teaching and Learning workshop
to prepare a manuscript based on her findings. She received a grant from the
CLAS ACT program to improve collaborative assignments and projects in our
required research methods class (PSYC 3090), and a CLAS dissemination grant to
present the results at a professional conference. She was awarded a grant from
the campus-wide Professional Learning Community program on HIPs to pilot a new
capstone course for B.A. in Psychology majors. She was a co-PI on a funded grant from the National Science
Foundation on “engaged student learning” for STEM education ($249,967 in
direct costs), and that group has submitted a request for a renewal. She
co-authored a paper in the journal Scholarship
of teaching and Learning in Psychology.
· Barbara
Walker, Professor CTT, obtained a grant from the CLAS SITFAC Fund to purchase
psychophysiology equipment to enable doctoral student trainees to learn the practice of biofeedback for treating
patients or carrying out research. She has been a tireless advocate for “evidence-based practice” in clinical
health psychology research, and has developed a training module on this. In
addition, she has presented a paper on medical marijuana at the meeting of the Association of Psychology Training Clinic
Directors, and a workshop for online support groups and treatment of
Borderline Personality Disorders at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. She
published a peer-reviewed paper with two doctoral students in the journal Family Systems and Health in 2015.
4. How have these practices contributed
to NTTF development?
Relative to the
“teaching-only” role ascribed to NTTF in the past, changes to departmental and
college policies have enabled NTTF to develop their careers in research and
scholarly activity, curriculum development, faculty governance at all levels,
mentoring of students, and service to the profession. They have attended
national meetings and been officers in national professional organizations.
Several have joined the ranks of the CTT and have been recommended for
advancement within that track’s ranks in recognition of their experience and
career developments. Dr. Shyu’s letter of support is informative in this
regard. NTTF in our department have won campus and national awards
·
Awards
o
National
Teaching Award, APA Division 2, 2013 (Bihun)
o
Award
for Outstanding Service, UCD Faculty Assembly, 2015 (Shyu)
o
Award
for Outstanding Service, UCD Faculty Assembly, 2016 (Bihun)
o
Campus
and CLAS Excellence in Teaching Awards, 2012 (Bihun)
5. How have these practices benefitted
the unit, school, or university?
Generally
speaking, expanding our NTTF and empowering them to participate in all facets
of the department’s mission has returned enormous dividends to the department,
as detailed above and summarized in the bullet points below. They have become
the department’s experts on teaching and the scholarship of pedagogy. At the
college and campus levels, they have become leaders of NTTF on committees, in
UCDALI, and on Faculty Assembly. They have represented our institution
admirably at national meetings. Importantly, we believe that our practices with
regard to NTTF have contributed to their staying with us, which creates a
stability that is important for students as well as the department (Bihun = 18
years; Everhart = 13 years; Shyu = 7 years; Walker = 6 years; Bierer = 4 years;
Hamilton = 2 years).
·
Redesign
of departmental undergraduate Honors program
·
Significant
revisions of undergraduate curriculum
·
Development
and implementation of our fully online B.A. major in Psychology
·
Development
and leadership of CHP Ph.D. program and the Psychology Clinic
·
Outcomes
assessment upgrades
·
Peer
mentoring in teaching program
·
Mentoring
and advising students
·
Community
outreach through CU Succeed, high school neuroscience education programs, and
low-cost services for community members as well as students in our
Psychological Clinic
FACULTY RESEARCH CENTER, SCHOOL OF EDUCATION & HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
To accept the award for Excellence in Practices Related to Non-Tenure-Track Faculty, we have Dean Rebecca Kantor, Associate Dean Dorothy Garrison-Wade, and Faculty Research Center Director Courtney Donovan.
SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS
Congratulations to the School of Public Affairs, Dr. Jane Hansberry, and Dean Paul Teske for winning this award for Excellence in Practices Related to Instructional, Research, and Clinical Faculty.
DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY, COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES
Congratulations to the Department of Psychology for winning the Provost’s Award for Excellence in Practices Related to Instructional, Research, and Clinical Faculty. Accepting is Department Chair Peter Kaplan, and joining him are nominators Christina Collins and Paula Schmidtlein.
THE BUSINESS SCHOOL
Congratulations to the Business School for winning the Provost’s Award for Excellence in Practices Related to Instructional, Research, and Clinical Faculty. Accepting are Associate Dean Jahan Karimi and Lecturer Liaison Jim LoPresti.
THINQSTUDIO
Congratulations to the ThinqStudio for winning this award for Excellence in Practices Related to Instructional, Research, and Clinical Faculty.
Starting in 2023, award recipients were also asked to detail how they planned to utilize the $2,500 stipend.
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICAL AND STATISTICAL SCIENCES, COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES
The committee rated the department's application very highly with respect to the number of IRC faculty engaged, engagement of IRC faculty with the department's mission, contribution to IRC faculty development and benefit to the department overall. In particular, the committee recognizes and wishes to commend the following:
The impacts of the actions outlined in the application are well attested in the supporting letters from IRC faculty in the department, which the committee noted also represented a full range of IRC faculty titles. What came across in these letters is that the multi-pronged efforts of the Mathematical and Statistical Sciences department are fostering IRC faculty confidence in all areas — teaching, research, and leadership and service — to the benefit of IRC faculty, MSS students and the department as a whole. The committee believes these are practices well worth celebrating and sharing with the campus community. We also feel that the plan to use the award money to support a peer-mentoring program is a well-placed use of these funds that will further benefit IRC faculty and the department (although we also want to clarify that proposed use of funds did not factor in the formal evaluation of proposals, as the other applications were carried over from last year when a statement regarding use of funds was not requested in the application materials).
Congratulations to the Department of Mathematics and Statistical Sciences for all of the ways you are engaging, advocating for and building up your IRC faculty!
Stipend Information:
The award stipend will be redirected to fund a pilot peer-mentoring program for part-time lecturer, where a senior lecturer would mentor a more junior lecturer. This would be a voluntary remunerated professional development opportunity offered to lecturers. The fund would be used to compensate the lecturers for their time. The program will have peer-mentoring, general sessions to go over inclusive pedagogy and social events. The program would replicate at the lecturer level our existing graduate TA training program. See for example “Promoting Success in Undergraduate Mathematics through Graduate Teaching Assistant Training”. See: https://www.mathvalues.org/masterblog/promoting-success-in-undergraduate-mathematics-through-graduate-teaching-assistant-training
This program is a flagship program at CU Denver that many other math departments are studying and trying to replicate. This TA training program is currently sponsored by the NSF. The idea is to capitalize on our experience with TA training to expand to professional development for lecturers. The money would be used to support financially the lecturers for their time in participating in the program. We would assess the impact of the program and communicate our results.