November Teaching Initiative Convening

The November convening focused on reviewing feedback from units across the campus to the draft institute proposal. There was significant participation from units across the campus, with significant interest, thoughts, and opinions about where and how teaching resources should improve across the University. A key point of discussion is about the array of teaching and learning related centers, programs, and resources. Do we need a whole new institute or should we be enhancing the centers/offices we already have? How would any institute be able to integrate these other activities? How can we make teaching and learning resources more visible and accessible? There were a number of questions around how the institute might define or support evidence-based metrics of successful teaching and learning?

Key units on campus engaged in supporting teaching and learning presented the work they do to support the university’s faculty. Several presenters provided presentation materials for sharing, included below:

University Center for the Advancement of Teaching

Office of Distance Education and eLearning

Center for Higher Education Enterprise

Center for Life Sciences Education

Department of Engineering Education

School of Teaching and Learning

This was followed by a discussion of the potential organizational structure of the institute, with small groups brainstorming how the institute could be organized. Debating whether it should be a virtual or physical institute and how the institute might be governed. There was a strong interest in having a proactive institute open to everyone, serving as a clearinghouse for teaching and learning resources. There was interest in a non-traditional institute structure, where leadership could rotate, be delivered in a distributed model, and/or integrate services across the institution.

 The last activity was to consider which of the many commonly suggested activities of the potential institute would be most important to pursue in the first year of the institute. A key initiative would be to communicate the identity of the institute. While the institute is still in the formative stage, it will be essential to have a clear identity for the institute. For example, in the area of faculty support there was strong interest in creating an “open classroom” program where master teachers invite others to drop in and observe, creating a showcase for innovative and effective teaching. Under inquiry and scholarship, there is strong support for creating a teaching and learning grants clearinghouse. In policy development there was strong interest, but also concern around how we create more substantive evaluation of teaching performance in the annual review process.

The results of the convening will support continued revisions to the proposal in advance of the advisory council’s next meeting on January 15th.