Center for Teaching Excellence Launches New Programs

An initiative to explore the power harnessed by small changes in teaching and learning has inspired a new series of workshops presented by the Center for Teaching Excellence this spring.

The free 30-minute workshops will be offered on Mondays and Tuesdays at noon in Room 607 of the Union. Attendees are encouraged to bring a lunch.

Designed to accommodate busy schedules, these micro-workshops highlight a teaching and learning topic and provide simple but effective related strategies that can be incorporated into a course almost immediately and without much, if any, disruption of the course design.

Steven Hansen, associate director for faculty development, created the workshops as a way to illustrate to faculty how small teaching practices can have big connections to student learning. “We want faculty to experience how learning in a micro-context can have macro-learning implications that faculty can apply and scale up for their own teaching contexts,” Hansen explained.

Topics for the spring semester include transparent assignment design; how emotions motivate learning; micro-aggressions; using nudges to deepen learning; and a student-learning graffiti wall.

The series will begin on Monday, Jan. 23, and Tuesday, Jan. 24, and will continue through late February.

Signs will be posted in the Union throughout the semester with additional details on each session. For more information, visit the Center for Teaching Excellence website.