This newsletter covers what happened in May (and early June) and will give you a heads up on what to look for in the remainder of June, July, and the months following.

In this issue (please note the links below will only work when viewing this newsletter in a browser):

The Current Academy of Process Educators Executive Board

Recent Board Meetings

Remember, you can find out the Board’s current work by checking the Academy Board Meeting Agendas and Minutes posted on the Academy members’ page:

June 2022 minutes (not yet approved)

May 2022 minutes (approved)

April 2022 minutes (approved)

Summary of Recent Board meeting work:

In May, the Board

• Received updates on...

- A project with Complete College America and Pacific Crest to develop a summer bridge program for first generation students at minority serving institutions
- The final Conference plans and counts
- The Nominations Committee’s work, which includes having a slate for at-large executive positions and the secretary position

In June, the Board

• Thanked outgoing board members...

- Joann Horton, outgoing Past President
- LaShunda Calvert and Betty Hurd, outgoing Members-at-Large (Betty Hurd will continue as Communications Director)
- Marie Baehr, outgoing Secretary

• Welcomed incoming board members...

- Chaya Jain as Member-at-Large
- Grace Ndip as Member-at-Large
- Colleen Taylor as Secretary

• Conducted conference wrap-up work...

- Thanked all who helped make this year’s conference happen
- The 2022 Conference committee will meet to assess this year’s conference

• Discussed...

- A theme/focus for the 2023 PE Conference (“Academically Dismissed Students,” as proposed by Ingrid Ulbrich, who shared a video about recent work at the University of Indianapolis as well as statistical information about the need for this work and how it relates to the Academy’s mission)
- Discussion of expanding this potential theme continues

THERE WILL BE NO BOARD MEETING IN JULY! A date and time for the August meeting will be communicated via email.

All Academy members are welcome to participate. You will be able to find the agenda for the meeting as well as the needed information to attend through Zoom on the Academy Member site, once both are posted.

In the words of one participant, the 2022 Academy Conference at Virginia State University in Petersburg, VA on June 23-25, 2022 was a provocative, collaborative and intense immersive experience. Another participant said it was a whirlwind week and so it was for all of the almost 50 attendees.

While the planning team is still working to review all of the conference assessments, the immediate response from those present was that the time being involved was well spent. A more comprehensive report on the conference assessments will be available in the next Newsletter.

Highlights of the four days included:

• A Pre-Conference Workshop focusing on Student Success facilitated by Dr. Dan Apple was attended by 48 very engaged colleagues. The day long focus on Student Success was followed by a Pizza dinner and a presentation entitled "PE in a Nutshell" by Academy Professional Development Director Tris Utschig.
  
  
• The Conference attracted a healthy balance of about 50 in-person and virtual attendees who remained engaged through the entire 3 days.
  
  
• Opening Session/Welcome presented by Leslie Whiteman and Ingrid Ulbrich focused on the relationship between Academy projects and the VSU Metacognition Fellows Project.
  
  
• The traditional Academy Table Team learning experience was led virtually by Dr. Will Ofstad which carried throughout the entire Conference. Personal and Team goals were established and shared across the participants.
  
  
• Our guest speaker on day 1, Dr. Bill Spady shared a provocative opening Keynote "Transforming Your Relationship with Outcomes" focusing on the ways Outcomes Based Education has been both effective and also misused over time.
  
  
• Our guest speaker on day 2, Dr. Saundra McGuire offered a deep dive Keynote Presentation "The Key to Fostering Self-Growth and Student Agency" focusing on ways College faculty and staff can support student learning by teaching metacognition skills.
  
  
• VSU Staff members Ethyl and Chaya Jain hosted Historic Tours of Petersburg and Richmond on both evenings.
  
  
• Academy members offered 17 unique Breakout Presentations on a wide variety of topics ranging from “Engaging Students Using Gamification” to “Enhancing Student Success through Time Management, Applying “Grandma’s Recipe”, “Building Student Success Tools into your course” and “Exploring and Using the Insight Methodology”.
  
  
• The Hall of Innovation/Poster Session chaired by George Dombi and Wade Ellis, shared over a dozen ideas that Academy members have created to engage student learning.
  
  
• The Day 3 closing Plenary Panel Session “Learning vs. Doing: Post-COVID interventions to Address Student Self-Efficacy” engaged the audience in a whole conference discussion about ideas that the VSU Metacognition team members have been using to connect with and engage students in exploring the concept of Self-Efficacy as it relates to deeper learning.
  
  
• Due to low attendance and some role and/or responsibility confusion, the Closing Session of the conference was abbreviated. However, Table Team/Individuals were able to share their take-aways as related to the goals they had set for the conference.
  
  
• The Annual Business Meeting included the successful election of new board members; Dr. Chaya Jain and Dr. Grace Ndip from VSU to 2-year Member-at-Large positions and Dr. Colleen Taylor for a 2 year term as Board Secretary.
  
  
• Academy President Ingrid Ulbrich presented closing remarks thanking everyone for their participation and reminding us about the critical needs of students who have become academically dismissed from or left institutions without earning a degree or other credential. Focusing on the amazing power of Process Education experiences in changing their lives for the better, Ingrid offered a video of recent Learning to Learn Camp students who recognized their own potential and the possibility for personal growth. In closing, President Ulbrich offered a hint of potential opportunities for the Academy’s’ future.
  
  
• Thanks again to our VSU hosts for all of their work in making the campus a warm and welcoming home that proved technologically superior for delivering our hybrid conference. The Academy is indebted to our hosts, Leslie Whiteman, Cheryl Tally, Bryan Sayre, Chaya Jain, Colleen Taylor and the entire VSU community.
  
  
• Thanks also to our dedicated and diligent Academy Conference Planning Team: Steve Beyerlein, George Dombi, Wade Ellis, Joann Horton, Betty Hurd, Chaya Jain, Mary Moore, Al Rowe, Peter Smith, Ingrid Ulbrich, Tris Utschig, Matthew Watts, and Patrick Barlow.
  
  

On to 2023! Stay tuned for upcoming news about the dates and location of our 2023 Conference.

Proceedings for this year's PE Conference are available through the Member site.

They are also linked from the 2022 PE Conference site.

This was my fifth PE conference. The first was in person at Gannon University in 2018, where I presented a poster. The second was in 2019 at the University of South Alabama where I presented a different poster. The next two years, 2000 and 2021 were both online and I presented a poster at each and I was the Hall of Innovation wrangler using Panopto as our poster medium. This year, 2022, at the University of Virginia, was my fifth year attending the PE conference and I also presented a poster. This year was the third year that I attended online and the third year that I was Hall of Innovation wrangler again using Panopto. I want to thank Steve B. for his help in getting the posters into the Moodle website space.

There is a lot of before-hand work that goes into the online part of a conference. Also, I want to thank Wade E. for his help in being the on-site poster wrangler and for those folks like Patrick B., Chaya J. and Matt W. and others who worked to make the Hall of Innovation a dual venue activity. This was the first year for having both an in-person and an on-line wing added to the Hall of Innovation.

I did not attend all the meetings in this year's Conference because I was teaching Introductory Chemistry, but I really enjoyed those sessions that I attended. I joined an online waiting room one morning before the first session and I was able to introduce myself to our guest speaker, Dr. Saundra McGuire. She had come to our school, University of Rhode Island, several years ago and I reminded her of that. We chatted about a mutual friend. I was able to exchange several emails with her the day after the conference and sent to her a copy of my slide set from my half of the session that Cy Leise and I presented on Wednesday. She thanked me for the opportunity to look at my slides. She could not attend my session since she was involved with another session at the time. Further, she made several nice comments after viewing my poster online. I think the level of interaction that she and I had was different than if we had been in person, but it was meaningful for me and it developed over a few emails. I might have not had the same level of repeated interaction with her if we were solely in-person as I would have been afraid to monopolize her time.

I did miss not being at the conference for the fellowship over meal-times. I remember when we ate at the local restaurant near Gannon; there were at least 8 of us who played a trivia game together. It was a fun time. It would have been nice to meet more VSU folks, especially from their Chemistry department. I would have liked to have seen their science center. I am not sure if my online experience was typical. There is a certain camaraderie that gets built among the groups that meet, in-person. But I do, very much, appreciate the PE conference committee’s willingness to try to create a hybrid experience so more of us on-line folks could get something out of the conference. I have learned that in PE, as perhaps in many other things, the value is not so much what you get out of the event, but the value you get is from the effort you put into the event. This year’s 2022 PE conference was an opportunity for me to invest myself in a worthwhile event. Thank you all who attended. The conference is only the beginning of what one can do in PE. Thanks, Ingrid, for being our President.

My path toward Process Education (PE) began some time ago when I realized that preparing student-learners required going beyond simply explaining course content. However, it wasn’t until recently that I was first exposed (in depth) a framework to address it. This commenced with my introduction to STAR (Successful Transition to the Academic Realm) program at VSU beginning around 2016. As part of this program we discussed things like metacognition and student mindsets. A presentation on “Teaching Students How to Learn” by Drs. McGuire and Gray in May 2020 was particularly impactful. It was this presentation that first brought “Grandma’s Recipe” for time management (developed by Dr. Gray) to my attention. The STAR program also brought those of us involved into closer contact with Dr. Chaya Jain who has been involved with PE for many years and we began to see the significant overlap in what the STAR program wanted to achieve and what PE had developed (and was developing).

Based on our STAR experience, my colleagues and I had already begun to present information on metacognition, a growth mindset, and time management (“Grandma’s Recipe”) to our students in our subject courses and through the freshman studies course at VSU. We are beginning to see some positive effects of this and we held a workshop on this at the PE meeting seeking comments and feedback on how to improve this approach in the future which was very helpful. (Many thanks to all who participated and to my co-presenters, Dr. Grace Ndip and Reverend Delano Douglas).

I think what first impressed me at the PE meeting was the range of topics that directly address student learning and development and how these can be applied to improve their self-efficacy for both their present and future success. I was also most affected by PE approaches moving students from the minimal effort (I guess “trained” learner would be the PE term) to the self-growth active learner we want them to be. I came away with one of my key objectives being to increase evaluation of learner performance (beyond simple content) in my courses (and to also evaluate my own development). It can be a bit daunting to know where to begin, but I have begun by reading the primer on PE and plan on using the principles to guide my courses in the future and look forward to more stimulating conversations with members of the PE group.

Thank you to all of the PE Conference participants!

I am Kenneth W. Lewis, Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Statistics & Data Analytics in Psychology, at Virginia State University, Petersburg, Virginia. I served on the VSU planning committee that co-hosted the most recent 2022 Process Educators Conference, held at VSU from 23 to 26 May 2022. I had never even heard of such an organization prior to our connection with them. I am working on a research grant associated with Metacognition or Learning how to Learn – as some would define it, and there is a lot of emphasis on STEM and also learning at the higher levels of the Bloom Taxonomy, which include Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation levels of using and processing the information a student would Acquire, Understand and Apply. There were many presentations made about getting students to become proficient with the information that they learn as well as getting students to become proficient with learning how to learn. For a first-timer at this PE conference, I felt eerily comfortable and right at home and I even gave two presentations; one on Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset Theory (Mindset: the new psychology of success. Ballantine Books, 2016), which I designed to introduce some learning and teaching strategies to the audience that might help a learner find the confidence to change their mindset or mental fixation about themselves from a FIXED MINDSET personality to a GROWTH MINDSET personality. The second presentation I gave was The Five Eyes (I’s) approach to problem solving which is a technique I created or at least modified from having taught operations research courses for 30 years for the Department of the Army. I demonstrated that dealing with the dreaded WORD PROBLEM in a math class, you have to build your path from the problem or question to the valid answer and I reminded the audience that you can’t just ask Alexa or Siri for the answer; you must develop the answer and that there is a logical, procedural, ordered set of steps that you follow to arrive at the answer.

I showed the audience that my “Five Eyes” approach to problem solving consists of the following set of procedures that include; 1) Inquiry – What is the research question or problem statement?; 2) Information – What is the current state of nature of the system or the problem that you are studying; i.e., what information do you already know?; 3) Instruction – What are the procedural model that you would use to solve this type of problem?; 4) Implementation – What are the ORDERED procedural steps or PROCESSES that you would execute to help build your way to the correct answer?; and finally 5) Interpretation – How do you interpret the answer in the context of the problem statement or research question?

These five I’s – Inquiry, Information, Instruction, Implementation and Interpretation make up the procedural steps in approaching and solving any problem. I think the audience appreciated it. I found it very professionally satisfying that the audience was receptive to both of my presentations – one that sought to develop the student learner affectively and one that sought to develop the student cognitively.

As we were ending the conference, it hit me – I guess I knew it all along – but it really hit me that EVERYTHING WE DO IN LIFE is PROCEDURAL. Everything we do in our daily tasks has a PROCESS and once we learn or memorize that process, we execute that process without thinking about it. We don’t ask “What do I do first and then what do I do next?” We simply know it and we execute and for the most part we execute all of the steps, we execute the steps with a certain level of proficiency, and we execute the steps in a certain order. Sometimes, we might be able to skip steps, but for the most part, we will always follow an anal script to arrive at the solution. You get out of bed the same way every morning (for the most part). There are procedural steps you innately follow and you don’t have to ask “What do I do next after I open my eyes?” You don’t put on your outer garments before you put on your under garments. You don’t put on your shoes before you put on your socks or stockings. You don’t operate your vehicle before you start it, and now days, with most vehicles having a remote entry system and a fob instead of a metal key, you have to press the BRAKE pad before you press the IGNITION button, else, your vehicle wont’ start and you won’t move forward to your goal for getting in your vehicle. Yes, EVERYTHING WE DO IN LIFE is PROCEDURAL. Every outcome we desire to achieve requires that we identify and implement a set of procedural steps – that we follow a PROCESS.

When we take a moment to relate procedural learning to daily life tasks, so to can we apply the same procedural learning to achieve proficiency in academic tasks. We educators must focus not only on the information that we teach, but the process we use to teach it and that process includes all factors that contribute to learning, to include the information, the delivery, the environment, the activities, the assessments, the materials, the objectives and the desired goals and outcomes. When we can make students aware of their power to learn procedural steps to perform psychomotor tasks, then we can help make students realize that they can also develop their proficiency in addressing cognitive tasks.

That’s my take-away from having participated in this 2022 Process Educators’ Conference. I will do my best to help students learn information as well as helping them learn the best way to learn information. I charge you to think about PROCESS in the morning when you wake up; when you have to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner for 20 family members and friends; or when you have to teach statistics students how to construct and interpret a 95 percent two-tailed confidence interval around the true value of the population mean of a distribution when you are given a sample size of n, a sample mean of X-bar and a sample or population standard deviation value of S or Σ, respectively. It’s all the same because they are all PROCEDURAL EVENTS that lead to a desired outcome.

Can you ever go home again? I found myself asking this age-old question when considering a return to active participation in the Academy of Process Educators.

I started questioning my preconceived notions of what it means to be an instructor in higher education after attending a workshop given by Dr. Saundra McGuire at Virginia State University around 2008. Yet with my involvement in chemical education, I did not find the fit for what I considered the issue in my general chemistry course - students must be taught how to learn not just the course content. In 2014 at a conference at VSU for technology in teaching, I ran across an enthusiastic comrade-in-arms, Dr. Philliph Mutisya, who introduced me to the Academy and Pacific Crest. Dan Apple took me under his wing and the Academy of Process Educators took me into the fold. I found camaraderie and intellectual stimulation in an environment which fit my outlook on education.

Life pressure and overcommitment forced me to step back from a leadership role in the Academy not long after joining. I drifted from the friendships I had formed. With the recent COVID crisis, and subsequent return to campus, I considered how I could return to the Academy where I might find support in efforts to reach students during these pivotal times. The camaraderie with others facing similar challenges will certainly be different than before, yet the foundation is still the same. I was happy to see an embracing atmosphere once again and was welcomed to serve as secretary on the board of the Academy to where I expect to find a new appreciation for some old friends. Maybe you can go home again.

Did you attend the recent Process Education Conference? If you attended in person or online then your membership dues were covered with your registration fee. This means your membership is valid until October 1, 2023!

In case you didn't know, Academy membership is so much more than the conference. We also offer:

• Winter meeting
• Professional Development events
• Academy Newsletter
• Research opportunities
• Self-Growth Community
• Online access to the Faculty Guidebook

and more. To find out how to make your membership work for you, contact Matthew Watts at Matthew.Watts@rrcc.edu.

If you were unable to join us at the conference then you can renew your membership online HERE or by clicking the button below. A regular membership is only $70 and for renewing members and $60 of that is tax-deductible.

We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and welcome any donations using the link available on our "Membership" page.

We have wrapped up another delightful year of Academy members supporting Academy members as we explore and practice self-growth. Next year’s activities will begin soon. All are welcome. Please join us!

2021-22 Recap A core group of a dozen process educators, augmented by a dozen periodic attendees, contributed to the success of the Academy’s fourth year of the self-growth community. Previous years focused on implementing practices from the Professional’s Guide to Self-Growth, learning community activities around scholarship in learning/growth/self-growth, and cultivating mentoring relationships to overcome barriers to self-growth. This year’s sessions complemented the PE Expert Initiative which seeks to advance practices in different process areas while engaged in a self-growth coaching journey. The biweekly, hour-long community sessions continued to be highly interactive, featuring 30-40 minute small group discussion of topics with teams investigating critical thinking questions from different perspectives, and 10-15 minute group synthesis. Real-time adjustments to facilitation plans were made based on the size and composition of the audience. Multiple sessions built on past efforts to create a mentoring skills handbook, including preparation for and collaboration surrounding the creation of eighteen different performance measures for mentoring skills. A number of sessions featured practices for annual planning and weekly scripting of growth. A particularly popular session was on the role of awe and its associated storytelling in inspiring personal transformation. Community sessions incorporated a special role for raising awareness of different levels of consciousness that was deployed in the session: knowing, learning, learning to learn, performing, growing, and self-growing. Sessions also provided a laboratory for piloting and refining the insight methodology. There is a forum on the Members Site devoted to the Self-Growth Community. This was regularly used to support session preparation, capture session documentation, and summarize outcomes for archival use. The Moodle Site is available to all Academy members. Feel free to explore and comment.
 
2022-23 Invitation We would be honored to have you join us for all or some of the self-growth community sessions during the upcoming academic year.

Welcoming and individually supporting all Academy members who would like to participate in our network is of high priority. We will continue to evolve based on summative assessment feedback collected in our May 4th session, and as we progress through the year. We plan to again run online sessions from September until May. To maximize access, we will again run an early session at 5:30 Eastern and a late session at 7:00 Eastern nominally on first and third Wednesdays. One of these sessions each month may also be part of the Academy Professional Development series. We want to give special attention to recruiting a diverse set of session facilitators interested in modeling innovative performance mentoring/coaching practices. This could include fishbowl sessions where some participants work on problem solving/coaching and others serve as observers, followed by a collective debriefing. Please be forthcoming in sharing leadership for a session idea that is close to your heart. Steve Beyerlein (sbeyer@uidaho.edu) will again be coordinating the Self-Growth Community. If you would like to join more than forty other Academy members on the Googlelist that receive self-growth community announcements, send Steve an email.

The Academy has focused on two major professional development opportunities in recent months.

First, we have held a series (still ongoing) of Performance Measure Institutes where we been developing performance measures for a set of 36 mentoring skills you can use to enhance growth for others and for yourself. These measures are essentially a rubric with additional documentation to support development. We held these events in January 5-6, February 12, March 19, and April, 23, with our newest event happening June 13-14. Approximately 20 people have been participating.

Second, we were planning and hosting our highly successful annual conference, which you can read more about separately in this newsletter.

Upcoming events include the following (and are available from the Professional Development page of the Academy website):

• June 22 (Wed, 5:30pm Eastern) Finding Your Niche in PE Research (Grace Onodipe, Steve Beyerlein, David Leasure) Join us to explore opportunities and learn more about what research in PE as all about. Click HERE for workshop details and pre-reading requirements.  REGISTER HERE!
  
  
• July 13 (Wed, 5:30pm Eastern) Qualitative Research Methods in PE: Creating Implementation Plans for Research Around Coaching (Grace Onodipe, Steve Beyerlein, David Leasure) 
  
  
• Early August (dates TBD) Activity Design Institute (Dan Apple) Available as a hybrid event (both online and F2F). This event is designed to leverage what participants learned at the PE conference about incorporating metacognitive strategies into the classroom and what they learned about student success at the pre-conference Student Success Workshop. With a focus on the learning process, the activity design methodology intentionally integrates and enhances these strategies within the student learning experience.

Additional opportunities we are planning include one or more sessions on Scripting Your Week to Improve Performance, two or three additional Performance Measure Saturdays, and more!

If you have questions about any of these events, if you would like more information, if you delivered a conference session and would like to follow up on it by delivering a PE Professional Development Session, or if you have other ideas for professional development events, please contact Tris Utschig (tutschig@kennesaw.edu).

The full facilitation plan is available here.

Part A:  History of PE Research Efforts
Part B:  Mapping the Trajectory of PE Research

Facilitators

David Leasure (University of Maryland Global Campus)
Steve Beyerlein (University of Idaho)
Grace Onodipe (Georgia Gwinnett Colleg)

Pre-Reading

• Community of Research Practice (PEARL) by David Leasure (2 pages)
• Academy of Process Educators 2020-25 (2 pages)

Why?

Process Education has a thriving practitioner-scholar community that seeks to…

• advance the understanding of PE concepts and their application in real-world settings
• explore the boundaries of PE to discover new concepts
• develop capabilities as a practitioner scholar or research mentor
• publish results through workshops, presentation, and publications
• support the interests of PE members to participate in these activities through cooperative and collaborative projects

In this session we will query the strength of audience interest in each of these areas, providing an opportunity to share your educational philosophy, your interest in research-based teaching/learning practices, and scholarship needs associated with your current position. You will learn about the landscape of PE research over the last three decades, special developments in the last four years, gain insight about future research opportunities, and become connected with affinity groups around topics of personal and/or professional interest.

Outcomes

• Understand the context for development and learn how to access different PE research resources assembled over the last three decades
• Explore the relationship between different bodies of PE research over the last four years in a graphical representation by research area
• Begin to construct insights about PE research that will benefit our Community of Research Practice
• Learn about, join, and/or lead emerging research opportunities for which we are forming research teams

www.processeducation.org