Case Study: Faculty development at Japanese universities

Jul 25

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Japanese universities are increasingly seeking to draw students from outside the country’s borders.  As a result, their faculty need assistance in learning to improve their English language speaking and–more importantly–moving away from passive, lecture-based courses to the interactive classrooms students from elsewhere have come to expect.  Via the University of California, Davis, Teaching Resources Center, Eager Mondays partners Mikaela Huntzinger, Andy Jones, and Leslie Madsen-Brooks have provided extensive assistance to both large and small groups of faculty.

[more details coming soon]

NAISTThe Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in Nara, Japan
photo by Hiroaki Sakuma, and used under a Creative Commons license

Consulting, hold the cheese

Jul 25

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Here at Eager Mondays, we like to practice what we call “cheeseless consulting.”  Meaning: No management-speak, no one-size-fits-all templates or systems, no cookie-cutter “solutions.”

You won’t see clip art like this around our site:

cheesyclipart2

. . .unless, of course, we deface it first by adding a giant block of cheese.  (Yes, Leslie has a Wacom tablet and isn’t afraid to use it.)

Instead, we offer authentic learning experiences, knowledge, and services designed to help your organization, not promote some byzantine management process or efficiencies consulting.  Our services are limited only by your imagination and ours.  Drop us a line today to talk about your vision–and remember, it doesn’t cost extra to dream big: inquire -at- EagerMondays -dot- com.

How We Help

Jul 25

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Eager Mondays uses creative and unconventional means to help companies make employees better learners, and therefore more effective and innovative thinkers, and educators of their colleagues and clients.  The result?  Your business grows both in quality and quantity as you reach new markets with new products and services.

Specifically, we cultivate in employees what we call the “Four Cs” of professional development:

  • curiosity
  • creativity
  • competence
  • confidence

Drawing on contemporary research on learning, Eager Mondays increases employees’ motivation and ability to learn about their job duties, industry or field, and customers.  We encourage this professional development through approaches that develop curiosity, creativity, and confidence.  This process aims to improve employees’ interest in and engagement with their field, loyalty to their organization, and retention.  We make employees not only more thoughtful learners, but also better educators of their clients regarding an organization’s products and services.

Broadly speaking, we will help your organization’s management and staff with such challenges as these:

  • delineating goals for employees;
  • determining employee learning objectives in support of those goals;
  • creating a professional development plan tailored to these objectives;
  • crafting a holistic evaluation system based on learning outcomes and goals.

Of course, we do much, much more, but this process is at the heart of what we provide.

We also help by practicing what we call “cheeseless consulting”–that is, no management-speak or buzzwords, just plain talk about learning using terminology that makes sense.

Contact us at inquire -at- EagerMondays -dot- com to discuss your vision of a more engaging, learner-centered workplace.  We look forward to speaking with you!

A Special Note for Colleges and Universities

Jul 25

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The folks behind Eager Mondays—Drs. Mikaela Huntzinger, Andy Jones, and Leslie Madsen-Brooks—have ten academic degrees among us and decades of experience in higher education as students, faculty, and staff members.  We are, in short, your people.

If your unit, department, college, or university needs assistance with improving learning or instruction, we’re here to help.  Our goal is always to make instructors more thoughtful about teaching, but this desire stretches to staff trainers as well as teaching faculty and graduate students.  We have worked with universities as diverse as the University of California, Davis; the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan; and Kyushu University in Japan.

We encourage you to contact us to discuss your vision of what a renewed focus on teaching and learning would look like in your workplace, campus, or community.

In particular, however, we have expertise in establishing and running a teaching center, creating a collegial corps of graduate student instructors that provides peer advising, and helping individual instructors and departments move beyond the tyranny of content and coverage to student-centered classrooms.  We can show you how to use both traditional teaching technologies (e.g. the blackboard) in concert with new media to craft learning communities of engaged students who not only remember what you taught them, but also want to put it into practice in the future.

Contact Leslie Madsen-Brooks at leslie -at- EagerMondays -dot- com.  We look forward to speaking with you!