CTE Workshops

Active and Engaging Lectures f2f and Online

This workshop consists of research-based strategies to enhance lecture effectiveness. You will learn about types of lectures, planning for lectures, methods for enhancing lectures, using mini-lectures with active learning strategies, and evaluating their effectiveness.

Active Teaching in the Compressed Class

As our campus moves to teach longer classes that meet less often, maintaining the interest of students while ensuring that learning is robust is critical to teaching success. This workshop will demonstrate, by example, how to foster active learning in your 2.5 hour long class.

Aligning Online Teaching Activities to Course Objectives

Using Dee Fink’s Model of Multidimensional Learning, this workshop will focus on choosing online teaching tools based on desired learning outcomes. We will explore functionality in Blackboard and alternative online options for learning objectives within each of Fink’s six dimensions of significant learning. All activities enable faculty to develop more robust and integrated strategies for learning through active and experiential approaches.

Academic Integrity and Alternative Assessments

Alternative assessments are important ways to ensure academic integrity. They can reflect learning as multidimensional, integrated, and revealed in performance over time. This workshop will offer ways to build assessments that reflect the multiple ways that students learn. We will begin with a definition of assessment, a rationale for using alternative assessments including examples of tools and methods that capture the complex learning process and an overview of the ways that faculty can encourage academic integrity.

Backward Design: Results, Evidence and Experience

Teachers are designers. An essential part of our profession is creating learning experiences to meet specific outcomes. Based on the work of Wiggins and McTighe, this workshop will explore an approach to design- curriculum, assessment and instruction- that is focused on developing and deepening the understanding of important ideas.

Course Refresh

Want to make your existing course stronger and more effective?

In three highly interactive morning sessions, you learn some fundamentals of engaging and effective course design. Afternoons will be reserved for optional small work groups. You’ll leave with a spruced up new syllabus and plenty of new ideas for teaching whether you plan to teach in summer or are already planning for fall.

Creating Community in Online Settings

Creating a welcoming space and fostering a social presence among students is crucial to the success of your class. This workshop will offer you a rationale for fostering community along with strategies you can do at the beginning of your online class and throughout to maintain a strong vibrant learning community.

Creating Rubrics for Online and f2f Course Assessment

Rubrics are effective ways of saving grading time, conveying effective feedback and promoting improved student learning. Based on the work of Stevens & Levi, this workshop will introduce the principles, purposes and development of rubric assessments.

Advanced Rubrics Workshop

This workshop builds on the Introduction to Rubrics workshop,but newcomers are welcome! We will review the theoretical case for utilizing rubrics for course assessment and create a rubric for use for a specific assignment.

Creative Teaching Strategies

This interactive workshop will provide a process for discerning the most appropriate teaching strategy based on the desired student learning outcomes. An overview of young adult learning principles will be discussed, and a wide variety of techniques, covering all the learning styles, will be explored and utilized.

Culturally Responsive Pedagogies

Culturally responsive teaching and assessment acknowledges the immense, diverse intellectual potential of all ethnically diverse students. It unleashes the higher education potential by cultivating the cognitive, sociocultural, and psychosocial aptitudes and skills of learners.  This workshop will introduce you to the theories, research and practice of culturally responsive pedagogies.

Effective & Engaging Discussion in the f2f and Online Classroom

Effective and well-organized discussions can lead to improved student learning when compared to just lectures alone. Even the quietest students respond well to online discussions when strategies that support core conversation skills and equitable engagement are used.

Equitable and Inclusive Classrooms: Strategies for Engaging all Students

Teaching strategies that emphasize structured, active learning can create more equitable classrooms and improve learning for all students. In this workshop, participants will reflect on inequities and diversity in their classrooms through interactive, hands-on activities. After providing a framework for inclusive design, participants will learn active learning exercises and case studies that explore inclusive techniques.

The Flipped Hybrid Class

The Flipped classroom is one in which the professor arranges materials and activities for student engagement before the class meeting. Class meetings in real time are designed to move learning beyond initial information to sites of problem-solving, analysis and the application of concepts. This workshop will offer a framework for flipped learning along with techniques that encourage students to read and prepare for their class meetings.

Fostering Critical thinking in the f2f and online classroom

This workshop focuses on strategies for developing critical thinking skills in students. We will explore a process for reading difficult texts, making thinking visible, and distinguish between surface accumulations of facts versus a deeper understanding of content.

Intercultural Teaching and Learning

This workshop explores the American educational culture and discussion will be focused on leveraging the strengths of international instructors and/or students as they navigate the historic, Southern, STEM focused context of A&T.

Is this working? Feedback from Beginning to End

This interactive workshop will guide participants through a series of data collection methods that are easy and creative yet provide important just-in-time feedback on how students are engaging in the classroom or in an online environment.

It’s A Wrap

We always start the semester with intentional activities- why not end it that way too? Join us for a 30-minute mini-workshop for creative ways to reflect, celebrate, and wrap up your course!

Managing Small Groups Online

Want to use small groups but haven’t had much success? This interactive workshops will help you use small groups to meet learning objectives. We’ll look at tools for generating and sustaining productive discussions, assigning roles and responsibilities, generating feedback and assessment information and promoting unity among group members.

The Motivational Syllabus 

This workshop begins with the history  and purpose of the syllabus, and then provides the rationale for reimagining your syllabus so that it articulates your vision, motivates students, and fosters optimal learning- all within the parameters of your required departmental syllabus template. Practical guidance on design principles and the use of infographics will be included. We will also provide a first day of class template that integrates your syllabus with activities that promote student engagement while setting up a learning path for the semester. 

Mindfulness: Peace and Simplicity

Mindfulness meditation has been scientifically validated to have health benefits including reducing stress, blood pressure, pain, and anxiety. In this session, Dr. TJ Exford will guide you in practicing various types of mindfulness meditations and will discuss how you can incorporate mindfulness into your daily life. This session will examine what mindfulness is and what benefits arise from the practice. Participants will be introduced to sitting meditation, body scan meditation, mindful eating, self-compassion, and mindful walking.

The Reflective Practitioner 

A reflective practitioner brings theory to practice through critical reflection on their own craft. This one-hour workshop provides the space and structure to address lessons learned during this unusual time. We will reflect on our learning, set priorities and generate strategies that move good intentions forward to enhance teaching practice and self-care. 

Setting Goals and Objectives for Significant Learning

This workshop will offer opportunities for faculty to develop more robust and integrated learning objectives for their courses using six dimensions of student learning including: Foundational Knowledge, Application, Integration, Human Dimension, Caring and Learning How to Learn.

Teaching Ideologies: Constructing your Teaching Philosophy

This workshop is intended to help both novice and experienced faculty to better understand the educational philosophies they are likely to encounter in their everyday experiences as teachers. This workshop also supports the personal development of one’s teaching philosophies.

The Ten Best Online Practices

This 1 hour workshops presents the 10 best practices for online teaching as recommended by Boettcher and Conrad’s book, “The Online Teaching Survival Guide”. Participants will get an overview of all strategies with a focus on particular strategies articulated as specific needs according to departments or group feedback.

Techniques for Student Engagement in the f2f and online environment

This workshop offers a framework for understanding the role of motivation and active learning in fostering student engagement. Participants will learn a conceptual model for student engagement as well as strategies for fostering motivation and promoting active learning.

Teaching to Promote Student Wellness

Nurturing student wellness in the classroom had never been more important than today. This workshop will address the ways in which teaching methods and styles can work to promote the wellness of students. Easy strategies you can employ now to ensure that students are more engaged and less stressed in the classroom will be highlighted.

Who You Are Matters: Authenticity, Intention and Self-Care in Teaching

This workshop will focus on the idea of vocation- the way in which who we are supports the work that we do- since we all pursued a career in education for reasons that were important to us as individuals. This interactive workshop offers activities to articulate our values and to align and support our core strengths with our responsibilities as educators. We will utilize dialogue, reflection, and creative learning strategies aimed at leveraging the unique gifts we bring to the classroom.