ALEXANDER CITY, Ala. – Central Alabama Community College president Jeff Lynn recognized five of CACC’s outstanding faculty members for their completion of the one-year, Alabama Community College System Instructional Leadership Academy. Kathleen Thompson, Vanessa Clark, Kristine Kelley, Nancy Adams, and Ben Bailey all participated during the past academic year, with each graduating with at least a 92% completion rate.
The Instructional Leadership Academy is a rigorous, comprehensive experience for which participants must be determined to complete. The activities are curated not only to develop faculty to become more intentional in many key areas of inspiring and facilitating learning in their classrooms, but also expressly formulated to produce a complete course redesign of the participant’s highest enrolled course.
“I am extremely proud of all five of our instructors who completed the ILA this past year,” said Jeff Lynn, president of CACC.
“The ILA is a very comprehensive and intensive academy that demands quite a bit of an instructors time. Commitment and dedication are a must and our instructors demonstrated why they are so good in their respective classrooms. They did a great job, all while managing the challenges presented by Covid-19.”
“I had the honor of presenting each one of them with an ILA lapel pin to recognize their outstanding accomplishment.”
The course provides students with objectives, instructor lecture videos, frequent assessments and active learning strategies for every unit of content and with a list of expectations for success, ongoing surveys to gather student feedback, and early intervention strategies for identifying/fostering those students who most need assistance to be successful.
The objective of the ILA is to help participants more intentionally develop and apply evidence-based teaching practices to improve student learning and promote a greater degree of equity in higher education, By diversifying instructional, support, and assessment strategies a greater diversity of institutional completers are produced.
The ILA provides a much more extensive degree of collaboration and active engagement than short-term keynotes or workshops, while also providing the accountability for action needed to ensure future improvements. Each cohort, comprised of faculty from community colleges throughout the state (20-25 faculty), met for half-day workshops six times throughout the year to discuss and collaborate on topics such as intentional teaching, the neurology of learning, five high-impact strategies guaranteed to increase learning, critical thinking and problem solving for the 21st century, and understanding generational poverty.
