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Stewart Bellman Award for Exemplary Leadership for the Advancement of
College Teaching and Learning

Nomination Statement
for David Schodt
Recipient of the 2009 Bellman Award

Submitted by
Mary M. Walczak, Associate Professor and Chair of Chemistry
Arnold Ostbee, Assistant Provost
Jo M. Beld, Director of Evaluation & Assessment
Dolores Peters, Associate Professor of History
Chico Zimmerman, Professor of Classical Languages and Coordinator, Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching

We are pleased to nominate Professor David Schodt for the 2009 Stewart Bellman Award. Professor Schodt is the founding director of the Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts (CILA) at St. Olaf College. Specific examples of ways in which David has met the award criteria are described below. 

Advocating for and showing leadership. Advocacy and leadership have been key features of David’s leadership of CILA. David emphasizes not just innovation in, but also inquiry into, teaching. CILA’s programs supporting the scholarship of teaching and learning (in particular, the CILA Associates program) have ensured that ascertaining what is effective in promoting student learning is a key component of faculty development. Sensitive to institutional context, he has fostered development of a distinctive model for doing the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) that is grounded in classroom teaching, builds on local expertise, and radiates outward from a core of SoTL practitioners to engage concentric circles of colleagues in vibrant conversations about how and why learning takes place. As a result, campus culture has shifted from one in which that good teaching is informed by research on student learning and sustained by a process of systematic reflection. David’s work has also significantly advanced faculty engagement with assessment at St. Olaf. He sees assessment, like SoTL, as a form of inquiry in support of student learning, and he has helped our faculty to see it that way as well. 

CILA presentations have featured a wide variety of teaching innovations, which means there’s “something for everyone.” Faculty who have served as CILA Associates, participated in workshops, or engaged in the Faculty Conversations program, represent a broad cross-section of the campus. Thanks to compelling programming, CILA has become the center of discussions of teaching and learning on campus. Much of CILA’s success is due to David’s particular style of leadership. HE asks thoughtful questions, listens carefully to what people have to say, and is genuinely interested in their success. His demeanor invites people to talk about their teaching, their students’ learning, their successes and their failures. At any given moment, David knows who’s doing—or thinking about doing—a SoTL project. His capacity to see connections between projects has led to some of the most surprising and productive collaboration on campus. At a recent local conference, about two-thirds of the presenters were St. Olaf faculty from all across the College who David suggested based on his familiarity with their interesting work on teaching and learning.  

Leading and inspiring the engagement of others. David has a gift for organizing thoughtful and productive gatherings of faculty from different disciplines and different institutions around the issues of learning and teaching. He manages to make both newcomers to SoTL and old hands feel welcome in conversations. David has used this gift in a variety of settings at the local, national in international levels.  

At the local level, David has played a key role by securing external funding for CILA and by providing leadership in two inter0institutional grant-funding collaborations. Under David’s leadership, CILA has provided a venue for faculty to work on strategies for improving college teaching and learning as well as financial support for many St. Olaf faculty to share their work nationally. David has also collaborated in the preparation and implementation of two inter-institutional grants from the Teagle Foundation; currently he serves as a steering committee member for a grant to Carlton, Macalester, and St. Olaf Colleges. This collaboration has forged stronger linkages between faculty development and assessment at all three institutions, and has created vital partnerships both within and across institutions.  

At the national level, David was founding participant in the Assessment Scholars Program at the Wabash College Center for Inquiry in the Liberal Arts. This program created a cadre of smart, thoughtful individuals who visited institutions and helped students, faculty, and staff develop strategies for using assessment evidence to improve student learning. Since the program’s inception three years ago, David has participated in number of site visits focused on the development of strategies for using formative data from the Wabash National Study to enhance student learning. 

Nationally and internationally, David has been the leader of the Liberal Education: Core Curriculum group in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) Institutional Leadership Program. This multi-year initiative group of institutions sharing pedagogical innovations and scholarly research aimed at “developing, advancing, and sustaining liberal learning in different institutional contexts and with different goals.” The inter-institutional knowledge-sharing generated from this initiative has helped each institution in the group to better define its own liberal learning goals, promote innovative strategies for achieving those goals, and develop more intentional processes for assessing and evaluating improvements in student learning. Under David’s leadership, this group has met annually to share new developments on campus-based initiatives such as the use of electronic portfolios, to discuss factors that promote or hinder the attainment of liberal learning outcomes with an eye toward similarities and differences across institutional type, and to explore the use of SoTL methods to address institutional questions on liberal learning more broadly. 

Providing leadership for improvement in college teaching and learning. Under David’s leadership, St. Olaf has maintained a presence in national conversations on SoTL in a way that few liberal arts institutions have. Although approximately 200 colleges and universities have participated in the CASTL Program since 1998, St. Olaf is one of only three liberal arts colleges represented among the 96 institutions in the most recent Campus Program.  

David was a co-organizer of (and the prime mover behind) the initial Innovations in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at the Liberal Arts Colleges conference held in 2005. That conference brought together faculty and staff members from institutions across the country to share information about SoTL projects. Two more Innovations conferences have been held subsequently, both with David’s enthusiasm and expert involvement.  

Engaging actively in the programs of The Collaboration and the broader professional community. David’s has promoted St. Olaf participation in The Collaboration conferences and has encouraged St. Olaf faculty to present their work. David is also well–known and admired by his counterparts at other institutions and is also an active member of the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network. 

David’s stewardship of the Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts at St. Olaf has been marked by tremendous growth and energy in faculty interest in SoTL, as well as the college’s emergence as a vital center for conversations about SoTL in the landscape of higher education. Beyond starting and listening to conversations, David possess an acute practical wisdom that allows him to create innovative faculty/staff development programs and activities that capture the faculty and staff desire to improve their craft. We are very fortunate to have David as a college and consider him an outstanding candidate for the Stewart Bellman award.