LEADING NOVANS
Woonsocket High grads turned CCRI professors put CCRI on the right track
WOONSOCKET — Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI) professors Leslie Dolan and Heidi Henry have been in education together a pretty longtime when you consider they first got to know each other in the first grade at the Leo A. Savoie Elementary School.
They were also classmates at Woonsocket High School, where they graduated in 1988 and stayed in touch when they went off to different universities to continue their education.
Now at CCRI, the two Villa Novans are collaborating again, this time to help their college faculty peers adopt and share best teaching practices.
Dolan and Henry were members of CCRI’s first class of faculty members to complete a year-long “Effectiveness in Teaching” professional development course the college offered in conjunction with the Association of College & University Educators (ACUE). They are now also working with the school’s inhouse Teaching and Learning Collaborative coordinated by Karen Kortz, a geology professor, and its vice coordinator, Rachel Rogers, an associate professor of psychology to offer a range of professional development events and services to the college’s faculty overall. Dolan, a professor of English, and Henry, an associate professor of English, are board members with the TLC in addition to being ACUE fellows.
As another school week wrapped up at CCRI on Friday, Dolan and Henry helped the TLC to put on an Idea Exchange roundtable at the Warwick CCRI campus as part of the group’s efforts to promote best teaching practices.
“It’s professional development and it keeps us fresh,” Kortz said of the voluntary after-work gathering.
“We don’t have to do this but it is something that we want to do as a faculty,” Kortz added.
CCRI faculty stopping in shared some of the innovative things they are doing to
inspire their students and also got to listen to what their peers are doing in a similar manner. Sharing best practices is one way CCRI’s faculty is working together to make sure their students are gaining the skills they will need in a 21st-Century workforce, according to the educators.
“We want to empower them to be effective in the real world,” Henry explained.
Dolan said the innovative teaching concepts shared between the faculty members included examples of active learning strategies and ways to encourage student participation in the classroom dialog.
“Very few of us stand at a podium and lecture throughout a class today,” Dolan explained. “You keep lessons shorter and give more time for students to get involved,” she said. That can mean breaking up into groups for work on a particular project or self-study, according to Dolan.
The diversity of CCRI’s student body is a strength the faculty can tap while trying to promote innovation and new concepts in learning, according to Kortz. CCRI’s faculty members can gain motivation and reward while using the new approaches to reaching students and helping them achieve their education goals, according collaborative members.
And it is an teaching improvement initiative that comes from the faculty itself, according to Rogers.
“This is professional development for the faculty, by the faculty,” Rogers said.
Studies have shown that students become more involved when they feel they are a part of community, a learning group, and that feeling of being connected can override other factors that might put obtaining their goals in education at risk, the faculty members offered.
“If they feel that sense of community, it will give them a reason to stay in school,” Henry said.
Both Henry and Dolan, who also teach at CCRI’s Lincoln campus, could tell their students that the path to a job like their current roles with CCRI can be a rather long one with several stops along the way.
Dolan’s parents, Ray and Simone Bacon, were both teachers while she was growing up, and Henry’s mom, Patricia, retired last year from her job as first grade teacher at Bellingham’s South Elementary School.
Dolan headed off to the University of Rhode Island after high school and earned a degree in communication with a minor in English before spending some time in the business world initially. She eventually went back to school to earn her master’s degree in art and English from Rhode Island College before starting to work part time at CCRI in English as a Second Language and GED Prep before becoming an adjunct professor in 2002, and a full-time professor of English in 2007.
Henry graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1992 and then earned her secondary education teaching certificate from Providence College before spending six years teaching English back at Woonsocket High School. She took time out to raise her three children, now all in their late teens, and in 2013 started thinking about getting back into teaching after getting her master’s degree from RIC.
Dolan, today a resident of South Kingstown, and Henry, who lives in North Kingstown, connected again at CCRI when Henry was hired for an adjunct professorship.
After “proving herself to be a high quality teacher” as her longtime friend notes, Henry was then hired as a full-time faculty member at CCRI.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the two Novans opted to take the ACUE training together and earn their fellow certifications.
It’s just part of the role the two have taken on as educators and lifelong learners.
“We are both driven to follow best practices and we are both pretty confident that we are effective in what we do,” Dolan said while summing up their current efforts to promote the best learning opportunities at CCRI.
“It’s also just fun to be working with someone that was a classmate of yours when it all began back in school in Woonsocket,” Henry said.