Funded Projects
| Project Title | Overview of the Project |
|---|---|
| Debriefing Training for Healthcare Learners: Learning to Process Distressing Events Together Nasuh Malas Medical School Kelcey Stratton Medical School Kathleen Robertson Medical School Katie Feder Medical School Patricia Keefer Medical School $10000.00 |
Healthcare professionals are likely to be exposed to traumatic events and emotional distress repeatedly during their training and careers. However, many learners report receiving limited or no training in coping with patient deaths and other distressing events, which can contribute to isolation, professional stress, moral or ethical distress, and burnout. The proposed project seeks to fill an important training gap in how distressing events in healthcare settings are identified and discussed. The Departments of Psychiatry, Palliative Care, Clinical Ethics, and the Office of Counseling and Workplace Resilience propose an innovative, interactive, and multidisciplinary training initiative to teach healthcare learners essential skills for debriefing. The debriefing workshop is a 2-hour training session in which skills are discussed, modeled, and practiced. The workshop provides a unique opportunity for self-reflection and active learning, as well as an inclusive forum that recognizes the diverse roles, responses, and experiences of healthcare team members and learners. Debriefing sessions are effective in addressing the emotional impact of distressing events, and can improve concentration, morale, work engagement, and individual and team performance, which are critical components of learning. Funding will allow for the refinement of training materials, assessment of the implementation strategy, and partnership with academic divisions and educators to create multidisciplinary learning opportunities. The project will also contribute to Michigan Medicine and GME priorities regarding learner, faculty, and staff well-being and resilience. |
| A holistic approach to calibrating clinical dental faculty for assessments that support a “growth mind-set” Diane Hoelscher Dentistry Tracy de Peralta Dentistry Carol Anne Murdoch-Kinch Dentistry Vidya Ramaswamy Dentistry Romesh Nalliah Dentistry $9960.00 |
Standardization of faculty, which occurs as a result of calibration activities, is a particular challenge across all of dental education. Dental students must learn and be assessed on literally hundreds of procedures, techniques and clinical activities. At the UMSD as in other dental schools, dental faculty are diverse, graduating from clinical training programs around the world, with variations in clinical philosophies of care. The UMSD employs hundreds of full-time and adjunct-faculty often teaching in different clinical disciplines and in multiple locations, who must be calibrated on teaching and assessment; these factors create barriers to successful and sustainable calibration programs using traditional approaches. Calibration activities seek to achieve “consistent application of protocols, techniques, and philosophies, so the student experience is as consistent as possible.” (McAndrew, 2016). In this proposal, we present a much broader approach to calibration that supports and broadens faculty members’ knowledge of educational principles and their ability to facilitate a growth mind-set culture and humanistic learning environment within the UMSD learning environment. This program will utilize a variety of technology-based solutions to make learning opportunities more accessible to faculty and provide innovative ways to track and communicate the outcomes of calibration activities. Program goals will include increasing faculty intra and inter-rater reliability for selected student assessments and increasing faculty participation and collaboration in calibration activities. Study design and analysis will include a needs assessment, preliminary assessment of current systems using mixed methods, a calibration training intervention and a program outcomes assessment. |
| Training Data Savvy Public Health Practitioners: A Proposal to Modernize Computer Labs for Biostatistics 521 Matthew Zawistowski Public Health $6000.00 |
Biostatistics 521 is an introductory statistical analysis course offered in the School of Public Health (SPH). Designed to foster data analysis skills in future public health practitioners, the course serves a large and diverse audience of >200 graduate students each Fall semester. Increasing expectations on practical data analysis skills have rendered the computer lab component of BIOS 521 outdated in content and philosophy. The current format of closed-ended problem sets and antiquated data simply do not meet the training needs of today’s public health students. We propose to modernize computer labs to an “authentic” learning experience that explicitly mimics the open-ended statistical tasks these students will perform in their future careers. First, we will team with faculty from across SPH disciplines to identify public health datasets that are current standards in their fields and develop a set of timely scientific questions for students to explore. Next, we will design a set of innovative, modular lab assignments that each focus on a specific piece of the statistical analysis procedure. The modules will naturally build upon each other to guide students through the logical steps of a statistical analysis. At the conclusion of the semester, each student will have designed and implemented a complete statistical analysis, from exploratory figures to multivariate inferential modeling, on a modern public health dataset. Our revised lab structure provides hands-on experience and enhances the training of first-year graduate students eager to jump into analyzing data on the latest public health topics. |
| Great Books for the 21st Century Student Carrie Wood LSA $6000.00 |
Great Books, the Freshman Honors introduction to a core curriculum that surveys important works of literature and philosophy, has a storied career in the University of Michigan’s Honor’s Program. Since the retirement of Classics Professor Don Cameron, who taught a two-semester version of course for several decades under the rubric of a Great Books Program, the course has seen several changes. The course is now a one-semester class that is one of several Honors humanities core electives. Therefore, the Classics Department, which now houses the course together with the LSA Honors Program, must rethink the scope and purpose of the one-semester course, in light of the intellectual priorities of the Honors Core and in light of the goals of the University as a whole, which include the fostering of diverse, multi-cultural, global, and inclusive teaching, together with a holistic approach to the education of our first year students. |
| Design-Specific Leadership in Architecture Irene Hwang Architecture and Urban Planning Reetha Raveendran Architecture and Urban Planning Joana Dos Santos Architecture and Urban Planning McLain Clutter Architecture and Urban Planning $10000.00 |
Our team’s objective is to develop and introduce design-specific leadership models and concepts to the architecture curriculum (graduate and undergraduate) and pedagogy at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. The goal is to shift the culture of architectural education and practice from one that is more individualistic and authoritarian, to one more collaborative and inclusive. We plan to begin this project on design-specific leadership through the continued evolution of the required, graduate-level course, Arch 583 Professional Practice. Arch 583 is considered the primary academic course where students learn about the profession of architecture. In spite of this course’s core position in the design curriculum, its format, concepts, and pedagogy have not changed in many decades. Evolving demands placed on the discipline of architecture, where projects are far more complex and require a higher level of collaboration and communication across diverse perspectives and concerns, require that our graduates possess an understanding of updated leadership principles and frameworks. Working with experts from our field and other fields, with our students and our faculty, our project team will learn how leadership impacts our design profession. To improve the effectiveness of Arch 583, as well as to evolve the entirety of the architecture curriculum, this project aims to first understand and discern those concerns and priorities of leadership in architecture and then to create a path to make the teaching of leadership concepts a standard component of architectural education. |
| Girls Encoded Class: Promoting Diversity Within Computer Science and Engineering Rada Mihalcea Engineering Laura Wendlandt Engineering $5725.00 |
Even while the field of computer science (CS) is experiencing rapid growth, women continue to be underrepresented, both in the workplace and the classroom. In an attempt to address these concerns and improve the enrollment of women in UM’s computer science programs, we will be offering a new freshman class “Girls Encoded”. The class will be a one-credit class which, while open to everyone, will be particularly aimed at women with no formal programming experience who are interested in learning more about the field of computer science. We have support from the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) division for this class and will be offering it for the first time in Fall 2018. It will be taught by Professor Rada Mihalcea and PhD student Laura Wendlandt, co-directors of the Girls Encoded initiative, a CSE organization promoting the recruitment and retention of women in computer science (see girlsencoded.eecs.umich.edu). |
| The Design and Implementation of Case Studies for Marketing for Social Change P. Sol Hart LSA $6000.00 |
I propose the development of a series of hands-on, problem based case studies that will be implemented in COMM 417 / ENVIRON 417 - Marketing for Social Change. The case studies will be developed to promote the following course goals: 1) Mastery of course material - theory and application 2) Collaborative team learning 3) Skills in iterative problem solving for real world problems. Funds are requested to support time to research relevant case studies and convert real world cases into classroom projects that will guide students through case-based problem solving class activities utilizing relevant class theory and content. |
| Reproductive justice education: collaborating with reproductive justice advocates to create a video-based teaching. Charisse Loder Medical School Lee Roosevelt Nursing Chris Chapman Medical School $10000.00 |
Reproductive justice is defined as “the human right to maintain bodily autonomy, have children, not have children and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities”. In the United States, there is a history of reproductive injustices in which health professionals were complicit in coercive sterilization, experimentation with sexually transmitted diseases and new contraceptive technologies on women of color. Currently, there is no formal reproductive justice education for health professionals, however, reproductive justice advocates are interested in designing education in cultural humility, reproductive rights and social determinants of health to train providers.Women's studies undergraduates learn about reproductive justice, however, experts in this topic area are often outside of the academic realm. We propose to create video-based education through collaboration with a diverse group of reproductive justice advocates to educate undergraduates in Women’s Studies, graduate nursing students and medical students. These 5-8 minute videos will introduce key reproductive justice topics and can be used in conjunction with lectures, small group discussion and written case discussions. We will assess student and facilitator satisfaction with the video learning tool, student attitudes and confidence with applying reproductive justice skills. Additionally, we will use qualitative methods to determine if learners incorporate key reproductive justice knowledge and skills into coursework. |
| Inclusion and Understanding: Assessment and Quantification of Mathematics Exam Problem Characteristics Gavin LaRose LSA - Mathematics Elaine Lande LSA Hanna Bennett LSA - Mathematics $10000.00 |
The primary goal of this project is to understand and develop measures of how accessible exam problems are to different students in introductory mathematics courses, especially to underrepresented groups in mathematics and STEM courses. Additional goals are to determine measures by which course coordinators can quantify the difficulty of exam problems and exams as a whole, and to better understand how to present past exam problems so that students will learn more when using them as a study aid. In sum, these will allow course coordinators in the Mathematics Introductory Program to improve the inclusiveness of their courses, write exams that are more consistent in difficulty and learning objective, and improve student's learning. We will accomplish these goals by analyzing existing data about student performance on past exams. We expect to be able to isolate a relatively small set of such characteristics that are correlated with significantly worse performance by certain student groups, and heuristic measures that will allow coordinators to understand when problems are likely to be less accessible to these students. We will describe the difficulty of exam problems by determining measures to quantify that difficulty, which we expect to include cognitive demand, problem presentation, and the type of work required of students to successfully solve the problem. Finally, we will use the insights gained from the work on the project to improve the presentation and supporting information students have when using old exam problems to study, with the goal of improving student learning overall. |
| Technology-Driven Curricular Innovation for Performing Arts Technology 200/201/202 Jeremy Edwards Music, Theatre & Dance Paul Dooley Music, Theatre & Dance Christopher Burns Music, Theatre & Dance $10000.00 |
We propose innovative strategies for teaching introductory topics in recording engineering and music production. These techniques are intended for a newly created course, PAT 200/Introduction to Electronic Music (targeted primarily at non-PAT-major students, and being discussed for inclusion in a potential Popular Music minor), as well as existing PAT 201/Introduction to Computer Music and PAT 202/Computer Music courses for majors. Together, these courses reach 25 PAT majors and upwards of 300 students from other majors each year. We are developing new approaches to instruction and hands-on practice in microphone selection, positioning, and mixing. Previously, these topics could only be explored in group settings, and in highly-equipped recording studio spaces not accessible to introductory courses. Technological advancements, coupled with new pedagogical approaches, make it possible for us to teach these materials in more modestly-equipped classroom spaces such as our Music Technology Lab, and to give novice students individualized, practical experience with these key techniques. We intend to broaden the musical diversity of our curriculum, and thereby increase the inclusivity of our teaching, by adopting new approaches to instruction in music production. Hip-hop and other styles of global contemporary electronic music production are increasingly centered on sample-triggering hardware control surfaces. By embracing these devices for both new pedagogical materials around electronic drum programming and sample manipulation, and existing topics including live performance, we can convey to students from diverse backgrounds that we embrace genres of music important to them, and help to inspire their creative work in the classroom and beyond. |
| Lessons from the Front Lines: Piloting an Online Platform for Strengthening Community Organization Courses in the School of Social Work Via a Michigan Organizers Video Archive Katie Richards-Schuster Social Work Barry Checkoway Social Work Larry Gant Social Work Joseph Galura Social Work Shanna Kattari Social Work Odessa Gonzalez Benson Social Work Lorraine Gutierrez Social Work Beth Reed Social Work William Vanderwill Social Work Amber Williams Social Work $5970.00 |
The proposed project aims to create an online platform through which community organizers’ experiences and stories can be captured, taped, and archived in a curated video format and used across multiple classrooms in and outside of the School of Social Work. As an innovative and sustainable teaching model, the project would enhance student learning by integrating Michigan’s community organizers into classrooms using a dynamic digital platform. Lessons from the Front Lines: Community Organizing Archives will feature 15 to 20 organizers in 20-minute videos, sharing their own experiences and their practice, key skills and strategies, lessons from the field, and other information in an interview style setting. These videos will be coupled with short biographies, photos, information about communities/issues, suggested readings, and links to additional resources. For more robust access, the information will be searchable by “type” of practice, and will also have keywords connected to organizers’ profiles. We anticipate partnering with Academic Innovations to create the most user friendly and dynamic online experience while also leveraging the A/V, communications, and technology resources already available to us at the School of Social Work. The videos will be used within multiples community organization social work courses at the undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels, to supplement and enhance current course content. We intend to reach approximately 100 undergraduates and over 200 graduate students annually. This project supports the School’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion goals to bring diverse voices and experiences into the classroom in new and meaningful ways. |
