About the Retreat

The Nevada EPSCoR Early Career Faculty Workshop is an innovative 2.5-day residential retreat designed to enhance the productivity and possibilities of early-career faculty from the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE). Participants in this workshop will gain career-advancing skills and resources, as well as practices in prioritizing and planning projects and proposal writing. Workshop sessions will be led by experts from Nevada and the NSHE.  Sessions include:

Please submit the online application and email your CV to Michele_Casella@nshe.nevada.edu by April 28, 2017 to be considered for this opportunity.

This year’s retreat will be held June 12-14, 2017 on the campus at Sierra Nevada College, in Incline Village, Lake Tahoe, Nevada.  As this is a residential program, lodging will be provided in the campus dorms of SNC.  Meals will also be provided. Reimbursement for airfare and ground travel will be provided to all participants. See travel page for more details.  Please be sure to complete the Participant Application and send your CV to michele_casella@nshe.nevada.edu no later than April 28, 2017 if you wish to be considered for this opportunity.  Your participation in this program will be confirmed by May 5, 2017 so that you can make travel reservations through your department.

For more information contact:

Michele Casella
NSHE Sponsored Programs & EPSCoR Office
michele_casella@nshe.nevada.edu 702-522-7076

This workshop is sponsored by the National Science Foundation’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (NSF EPSCoR), Award #IIA-1301726.

June 11, 2017, 6:00 PM-8:00 PM in Prim Library

Evening Welcome Reception

DAY 1 – June 12, 2017, 8:30 AM-5:15 PM, Tahoe Science Education Center, Room 139/141

7:45-8:10 AM Breakfast in Patterson Hall

8:15-8:20 Introduction – Michele Casella, NSHE Sponsored Programs & EPSCoR

8:20-10:10 Knowing and Operating from Your Strengths – Dr. Meggin McIntosh, Emphasis on Excellence, Inc.

• Tools and strategies for operating from your unique strengths

10:10-10:20 Break

10:20-11:40 Myths & Mindsets for Tenure and Promotion, Dr. Meggin McIntosh

• Strategies and mindsets to promote positive productivity before, during, and after the time you go up for tenure and/or promotion

11:45-12:45 Lunch in Patterson Hall

12:45-2:00 Myths & Mindsets for Tenure and Promotion (Cont.)

2:00-2:15 Break

2:15-5:00 Research Proposal Writing, Megan Cantwell, MQC Consulting, LLC.

• The Current Grant Seeking Climate
• Best Practices in Proposal Development
• The Underbelly of Peer Review
• Funding Opportunities

5:15-6:15 Dinner in Patterson Hall  

7:00 Campfire s’mores conversation

DAY 2 – June 13, 2017, 8:00 AM-5:30 PM, Tahoe Science Education Center, Room 139/141

7:45-8:30 Breakfast in SNC Commons

8:30-9:30 Peaceful, Predictable Productivity – Is That Even Possible? Dr. Meggin McIntosh, Emphasis on Excellence, Inc. 

• Tools & mindsets to design your life as an accomplished academic

9:30-9:45 Break

9:45-11:00 – Prioritizing & Planning Your Projects, Dr. Meggin McIntosh

• Structures to make sure you prepare for, proceed with, and polish off your research and writing projects.

11:00-11:45 – Protecting What’s Valuable, Dr. Meggin McIntosh

• Your calendar, your time, your energy, and your attention are considered fair game by everyone else. How can you professionally protect yourself so you are optimally productive and maintain relationships (both near and far!)

11:45-12:45 Lunch in Patterson Hall

12:45-2:15 – How to Make Academic Promises, Dr. Meggin McIntosh

• Academic integrity is more than you might think. What you learn in our final session of this productivity day will change your life.

2:15-2:30 Break

2:30-5:15 Transparent Teaching Promotes Equitable Opportunities for Student Success – Dr. Mary-Ann Winkelmes, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

• Strategies for transforming courses to improve student learning, motivation, and retention in STEM
• Draft course assignment/activity, and set of strategies for designing transparent assignments that promote students’ learning

5:15-6:15 Dinner in Patterson Hall

DAY 3 – June 14, 2017, Tahoe Science Education Center, Room, 139/141

7:45-8:30 Breakfast in Patterson Hall

8:30-11:00  Instructional Practices and Departmental Leadership for Improving STEM Teaching Practices – Dr. Linda Slakey, Senior Fellow, American Association of Colleges & Universities

• Where are we now in a national trajectory of change?
  • Adopting active learning approaches
  • Equity – how do we attend to all students’ success?
  • Networking on many scales
• Working within a community
  • Assessing your local climate and resources
  • Accessing print and online resources that support your work and connect you to others.
• Will students be receptive or resistant to active learning approaches?
• Is active learning pedagogy more or less work than lecture?
• Engaging undergraduate students in research

11:00-11:30 Nevada STEM Mentor Network, Michele Casella, Nevada System of Higher Education

• Interactive session that addresses the many facets of mentoring relationships (faculty-to-faculty; faculty-to-peer) and engaging in these relationships with diverse participants

11:30-12:00 Program Commencement and Evaluation

12:00 Prepare Your Boxed Lunch (Patterson Hall) – Depart Tahoe to Reno Airport

Travel Reimbursement

Invited participants will be reimbursed for all travel costs associated with the retreat.  Process travel through your department at your institution and after the retreat furnish a copy of your completed travel claim to michele_casella@nshe.nevada.edu to reimburse your department.

In the event more than twenty faculty apply, applications will be reviewed by the Retreat Planning Committee and selections will be made based on academic and research interests and optimal group composition.  You will be notified by email if you are selected by Friday, May 5, 2017 in order to make your travel arrangements.

Please complete the online application and submit your CV to michele_casella@nshe.nevada.edu by Friday, April 28, 2017.

Lodging

The Retreat is meant to be an intensive and immersive experience and lodging will be provided in the Campbell Freidman Hall dormitory on the Sierra Nevada College campus.  Each participant will have a single dorm room with a private bath.

Check-in will be from 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm on Sunday, June 11, 2017 at the Front Desk in Patterson Hall.    SNC Campus Map

The dorm rooms come standard with 2 bunk beds with linens, each bed has 1 pillow, desk lamp, trash can, private bathroom with (1 bath towel, 1 hand towel), 1 bathmat, cups, soap and toilet paper.  There is no maid service, but if you would like clean linens or towels you can exchange the dirty ones at the front desk in Patterson Hall throughout your stay. Dorm Room Quick Facts

Reno Airport Shuttle

North Lake Tahoe Express runs shuttle service to and from the Hyatt and Reno/Tahoe Airport for $49 per person each way. *Passenger discounted rates valid for guests traveling on the same date/shuttle time, utilizing a single reservation.  For reservations and additional information on Lake Tahoe shuttle transportation, view their website.

Meggin McIntosh, Emphasis on Excellence, Inc.

Dr. Meggin McIntosh, Professor Emerita (University of Nevada, Reno), is now known as The PhD of Productivity®. After an award-winning and productive career at the University of Nevada, including being the founding director of the Excellence in Teaching Program, she decided to launch out on her own to focus on writing, teaching, and coaching academics.
She works all over the country with overwhelmed academics who would prefer to be overjoyed instead. Since one of the broad categories where bright people often become overwhelmed is completing (or not completing!) their projects, we wanted to bring in someone with practical, straightforward strategies to help all of us with time, project, and academic life management. And we found Meggin!
Meggin has been called “an educational treasure”. Her 6-word bio is, “Put on Earth to teach. Thankful.” Learn more about how she inspires joyful work at https://meggin.com.

Megan Cantwell, MQC Consulting

Megan Queen Cantwell ​is an independent proposal development and strategic planning consultant based in Washington, DC.

Meg has led and contributed to a range of strategic planning efforts for secondary and postsecondary institutions and nonprofit organizations since 1994.

She served as senior consultant for special initiatives in the AASCU Grants Resource Center for 13 years, and continues to consult the organization on an ad hoc basis. During her full-time consultancy, she was editor of GrantWeek, the lead on GRC’s external partnership and advocacy activities, and advisor to the executive director on long-range planning activities.

Meg has extensive experience as a peer reviewer for the U.S. Department of Education and has conducted proposal development workshops on college and university campuses throughout the country.

Her experience also includes positions with federal and state agencies; she worked as an analyst in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and a program manager for the Florida Department of Children and Families.

She holds a B.A. in comparative literature from the College of Wooster.

Mary-Ann Winkelmes, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Mary-Ann Winkelmes is Coordinator of Instructional Development and Research and an Associate Graduate Faculty member in the Department of History at the University Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), where her aim is to promote teaching and learning initiatives, student success, faculty development and instructional research in all the University’s academic units. She also serves on UNLV’s Path to Tier One Executive Committee. She is a Senior Fellow of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and a partner in the AAC&U’s LEAP project—Transparency and Problem-Centered Learning. She also serves on the Nevada Humanities Board of Trustees.

Dr. Winkelmes (Ph.D., Harvard, 1995) has held senior leadership roles in the campus teaching centers at Harvard University, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois. She has consulted and provided professional development programming for faculty through the Lilly Endowment’s higher education grant-making and teacher training programs, and for teaching centers in the U.S. and abroad. She has also served as an elected member of the Board of Directors of the Professional Development Network in Higher Education (POD Network), and Chair of its Research Committee.

Her work to improve higher education learning and teaching, especially for historically underserved students, has been recognized nationally by the Chronicle of Higher Education and by the POD Network’s Robert J. Menges Award for Outstanding Research in Educational Development. She founded and directs the Transparency in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education Project (TILT Higher Ed), which promotes direct conversation between teachers and students about methods of teaching and learning, and helps faculty to share data on students’ learning across institutions and countries. The impact of this project on students’ learning has been the focus of publications in the National Teaching and Learning Forum, Project Information Literacy, the National Education Association’s Higher Education Advocate and AAC&U’s Liberal Education.

Dr. Winkelmes advocates her view that research, teaching and learning are best practiced as a unified enterprise that benefits students and society in An Illinois Sampler: Teaching and Research on the Prairie. Dr. Winkelmes has also published book chapters and peer-reviewed articles on college teaching and learning and on the history of art and architecture in Renaissance Italy, Benedictine church design and decoration, acoustics, and religious architecture. She has received numerous teaching awards as well as grants for her art historical research from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Kress, Delmas, and Mellon foundations.

Linda Slakey

Dr. Linda Slakey was a member of the faculty of the Biochemistry Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, then department head, and then Dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. From 2000 – 2006 she was Dean of Commonwealth College, the honors college at UMass Amherst. As Dean she was active in supporting teaching and learning initiatives through the University. From 2006 – 2011 she was Division Director of the Division of Undergraduate Education at the National Science Foundation. At present she serves as Senior Advisor for the Association of American Universities STEM Initiative and as Senior Fellow at the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Michele Casella, NSHE Sponsored Programs & EPSCoR Office

Michele Casella is the education, outreach and diversity administrator (EOD) for the Nevada System of Higher Education Sponsored Programs Office (NSHE SPO). In this role, she is responsible for ensuring that EOD activities are integrated throughout the three NSF EPSCOR projects currently funded in Nevada.

Through NSF-funded programs, Casella works collaboratively with other research-based projects to provide continuity in STEM education and research and to build a more diverse STEM workforce.

In 2002, Casella received her bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her formal education and professional experience working for state and federal agencies, as well as for-profit and non-profit organizations, has made Casella successful in planning, implementing and evaluating pathway programs for traditional and non-traditional students in a variety of different disciplines.