Staff Spotlight: Kate Goodman
Get to know our TIPS team!
Teaching Innovation and Program Strategy | TIPS Oct 27, 2024
The Staff Spotlight provides our campus community with a chance to get to know more about our TIPS team members and what they do! Today, we are featuring the Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), Dr. Katherine (Kate) Goodman!
How do you bring your previous professional experiences to bear on the work you do here with TIPS? In my role as Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, I find I get to use my breadth of experience in new ways. I remain 50% engineering faculty, so I’m constantly thinking about how what we coach faculty on at TIPS is relevant. I often test out new practices and tools in my own courses. My research is in engineering education, so I think deeply about how we design learning environments, I’m constantly reading new studies from colleagues from other colleges of engineering, and that also informs my CETL work. In addition to my PhD in Technology, Media and Society, I also hold a Master of Professional Writing, and I have taught writing at both a university and a community college. Together, my experiences give me perspective teaching very different courses and working with a wide variety of students. Prior to graduate school, I worked on a software development team as a technical writer, and that experience reminds me of how powerful it is to connect what we’re teaching to other contexts.
What’s a project you’ve worked on recently that you are proud of or excited about? I’m a member of the Inclusive Excellence Counsel, originally the representative for CEDC, and now the representative for TIPS. Learning how to take a strategic plan from paper to action has been invigorating. We are moving toward our goals, even with challenging constraints, and I’m proud to be part of that work.
What do you find most meaningful about your current role? I value connecting with faculty of all disciplines to help them think about how they teach. We hear a lot about student-centered course design these days, and it is definitely important to connect with students, understand their needs and get feedback from them throughout a course. However, I find it more helpful to think about courses having three aspects: the instructor, the content and the students. We connect with students, meet them where they are, and guide their learning. We honor the content, update our materials and methods as new discoveries are made, and do not shy away from necessary complexity. And finally, we engage in practices that allow us, as instructors, to be human. For example, highly flexible late work policies may sound student-centered, but if the instructor cannot respond to all the late work at the end of the semester, it is not sustainable. Helping faculty find a balance among these three aspects of their teaching is very meaningful.
Finally, tell us a little about yourself outside of work! I love reading, and typically have an audio book and physical book going at the same time. I love fiction as well as exploring new topics. My most active hobbies right now are working on my German language skills and going to Tae Kwon Do classes. My husband and I often camp and hike, and our kids enjoy this too. We have two kids in college and one in high school. Our volunteer time is mostly devoted to the youth organizations my kids are involved in, especially scouting (both Girl Scouts and Scouts BSA).