Activities Narrative Report PFF-AHA (July 21, 2000)

Jonathan Grant, Florida State University

I. ACTIVITIES IN PAST YEAR
In the past year 8 of our graduate students took part in campus visits to partner institutions Bainbridge College (November 12) and Valdosta State (November 19), and also paid a call to Georgia Southern University as part of a PFF recruitment trip. These campus visits afforded our students the opportunitiy to ask other schools' faculty about their teaching expectations and what they look for in new hires. The visits also served as a way for us to explain the PFF program in general and our PFF History program specifically. Besides these off campus trips, we also held a series of in-house workshops aimed at teaching and professional development. In all 31 different graduate students participated in 15 weekend workshops dedicated to such topics as "Technology in the Classroom," "Devising and Grading Essays and Papers," "Discussions in Large Sections," "How to Participate in a Conference," "How to Craft CV and Cover Letters," How to Publish," and "How to Apply for Grants." Finally, 12 graduate students completed the Department's Teaching College History Course.

In June, thanks to the AHA grant, we were able to send a delegation of 5 (4 faculty and 1 graduate student) from our cluster to the national PFF conference in Colorado Springs. The conference generated a number of innovative ideas which we will move to implement in the coming grant year. First, we will create a web-based Mentoring seminar for the cluster as a whole. In this seminar all the mentors from the cluster schools will contribute portions, and the students will respond as part of their PFF portfolios. The Mentoring seminar will use live on- line chats to augment the campus visits. Second, the conference discussions drove home the need for accurate and comprehensive data regarding placement and results for the PFF enterprise. Accordingly, we will devise and implement exit surveys for all our graduate students from now on and track down the information for the previous 5 years as well. We hope in this way to go beyond anecdotal measures of success and to provide complete data. Third, we will expand and deepen our working relationships with partner institutions by increasing the number of on campus visits so that each school is visited at least once per semester. Also, we will do more to help the students at the partner schools by reaching out and including them in all our visits and activities. Fourth, we will actively promote more service components for our graduate students. These service projects will include activities in Tallahassee and with the partner schools. Lastly, we will publicize and disseminate our PFF activities by presenting a panel in the Florida Conference of Historians in March.

Last Updated: July 7, 2008