Hendrickson Completes Reflective Educational Design Program

Melissa Hendrickson, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Agricultural and Research Economics and Coordinator of the Associates Degree Program in Agricultural Business Management, officially completed the Reflective Educational Design |RED| Core Teaching Certification, offered by the Office of Faculty Development.

The RED CTC is designed to provide support and recognition for faculty members at NC State who are dedicated to reflective teaching and learning. The certification helps faculty members advance towards becoming scholarly teachers. Watch the CTC Overview »

Faculty participants seeking Core Teaching Certification:

• Learn research-based methods for improving their instruction
• Gain a deeper understanding of best practices in higher education pedagogy
• Explore a variety of strategies for assessing student learning
• Reflect on their practices as professoriates
• Develop relationships with other faculty members interested in pedagogy
• Earn a certificate that formally represents the time and effort put into improving his/her/their instruction

Melissa explained why the program was valuable to her.

“I’ve participated in a lot of training sessions. I usually go in with the thought that if I find one or two things that are useful in any of my courses, then the class was worth it. This program was different. It required me to choose one course to focus on during the entire program. Since I am now teaching ARE 201A, I thought I’d use that class as the basis for this program as it is my least well developed course. It was also different from the typical training session in this way. You couldn’t just listen to the lecture and answer the questions and call it done. You had to actually create the elements in your course that the lesson related to and they had to be sufficiently well developed to earn completion for each of the individual components. The net result by the end of the program should be a well developed, pedagogically sound course.”

Melissa earned her M.S. in Agricultural Economics from New Mexico State University and her doctorate in Agricultural and Extension Education from North Carolina State University.  She has extensive project management experience planning and implementing international agribusiness management study abroad programs and developing educational materials through the National Council for Agricultural Education. She also has over 30 years of farm management experience in the NC blueberry industry. Her teaching specialty areas are agribusiness management and value-added and niche marketing.

We congratulate Melissa on her most recent achievement.