Friday, January 14 at 8:30 AM
Topic: Sustaining a Culture of Motivation, Growth and Development
What inspires You? We are faced with daily challenges and decisions that impact our students, as well as each other. Our efforts to innovate and meet the needs of our communities, colleagues, and students can be both exciting and exhausting. Complicating matters can be concerns with enrollment, completion, complaints, and workload creep. As educators, we deploy many strengths. As colleges reassess, refresh, redesign, and in some cases resuscitate strategies for success, sustainability is key. As new possibilities are explored, leveraging the power of positive emotions and developing strategies to sustain motivation can have profound institutional impacts. Motivation starts with you, with the ultimate goal in mind for student growth and development and reminding ourselves to ask – What inspires our Students?
Dr. Smith serves as academic chair and associate professor of psychology, and co-leader of culturally responsive instructional programming at Anne Arundel Community College. Her career in education spans more than 25 years, which includes 11 years in higher education. Previous positions held in education were in the Department of Defense child development program, Prince George’s County Public Schools, Montgomery County Public Schools, and The Catholic University of America. She holds a Maryland advanced professional certification for teaching and is a certified social and emotional intelligence coach. Over the many years in education, she has served in varying capacities leading and mentoring faculty, co-leading equity instructional programming, leading service-learning literacy programming, designing social-emotional programming, and teaching social studies, mathematics, first-year college seminars, and psychology. A graduate of the University of Maryland University College Asian Division, University of Maryland College Park, and Walden University, her doctorate and area of scholarship is in educational psychology. She is a recipient of the League for Innovation in the Community College Excellence award, has presented at numerous conferences locally and nationally, and published several articles focused on teaching and learning, equity, diversity, and inclusion.