Postdoctoral Associates and Fellows with interest in teaching are invited to participate in the Faculty Teaching Excellence Program (FTEP). All symposia and short courses for Spring 2019 are listed below.
FTEP is led by Dr. Mary Ann Shea and strategically supports CU Boulder faculty and postdoctoral professionals in implementing the most effective, evidence-based classroom practices to facilitate engaged student learning. All Postdoctoral Associates and Fellows looking to maintain their teaching credentials with current best practices are welcome and encouraged to attend. For any questions, please email ftep@colorado.edu.
**All symposia and short courses require registration** Please register by clicking the blue hyperlinks below.Symposia
Active learning & group work in classes of any size
This event is co-sponsored with the Graduate Teacher Program (GTP). Graduate student instructors are welcome to attend this session.
Facilitated by Jenny Knight, Associate Professor, Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. Students benefit from working in groups, and there are many different ways one can organize and implement group work in courses of any size. We will discuss best practices for forming groups, different kinds of group work, accountability, and effective implementation. Bring questions and ideas, and we will work together to help you and your students get the most out of your course. Please note that this event is being held a week earlier than was originally planned. It is now scheduled for January 24th.
Thursday, January 24th, 12:00pm - 1:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Room E422
Hands-on humanities: Pedagogies of doing, moving, and making
Facilitated by Thora Brylowe, Assistant Professor, English. Research suggests that student-led inquiry helps students retain what they have learned. This session offers ideas for project-based learning in the humanities classroom, including a couple of brief demonstrations and some examples of collaborative projects that instructors could adapt to suit their own classroom situations. We will also discuss possible modes of evaluation and assessment for group-based or full-class projects.
Monday, January 28th, 1:00pm – 2:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Room E351
This event is co-sponsored with the Graduate Teacher Program (GTP). Graduate student instructors are welcome to attend this session.
Facilitated by Vanessa Roberts, Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, and William Kuskin, Professor, English & Vice Provost and Associate Vice Chancellor for Strategic Initiatives. The classroom is a dynamic space that fosters personal growth for many students. Much of the time, teachers can plan the trajectory of this growth; sometimes, however, it takes an unexpected detour. When a student speaks inappropriately, fundamentally questions the course’s premise, or undermines the instructor’s authority, even the best of educators can find themselves at a loss for words.
This symposium offers concrete and practical advice for managing difficult moments in the classroom. It discusses the nature of public authority, methods for building a foundation of community, and pragmatic approaches to redirecting potentially hostile situations into productive developmental moments for every person present. Attendees will leave with skills and tools that can be put into immediate use.
Tuesday, January 29th, 2:00pm – 3:30pm, CASE Building Conf. Room E351
Facilitated by Robin Bernstein, Associate Professor, Anthropology. This symposium will combine presentation and open discussion to focus on several key issues for professors teaching large classes. The goal for the session is to give new faculty both some useful and tested practices for handling large classes.
Monday, February 4th, 12:00pm - 1:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Room E351
Designing a syllabus for an effective & flexible course
Facilitated by Sarah Sokhey, Assistant Professor, Political Science. A well-designed syllabus has the potential to set the tone for an entire course and provide a blueprint for dealing with common challenges in the classroom. This FTEP session will address three main goals of syllabus design: 1) effectively communicating why the course is interesting and relevant, 2) designing the course so that it is well-organized, but also flexible, which allows you to adapt the content of the course as you go, and 3) preempting potential complaints and problems by anticipating common issues.
Tuesday, February 5th, 2:00pm - 3:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Room E351
Showcasing student learning and engagement: ePortfolios as a metacognitive high impact practice
This event is co-sponsored with the Graduate Teacher Program (GTP). Graduate student instructors are welcome to attend this session.
Facilitated by Andrea Feldman, Senior Instructor & ESL Coordinator, and Rolf Norgaard, Teaching Professor & Associate Director, Program for Writing and Rhetoric. As CU students prepare for careers, internships, and graduate education, one way to synthesize, highlight, and reflect on their learning is to create an ePortfolio. Data suggest that when ePortfolios are implemented properly, students build a more holistic self-picture, gain agency, and find new ways of understanding themselves as learners. ePortfolios differ from other e-media in that they allow integration and synthesis of students' work, reflection, and intellectual growth. These metacognitive processes are very important in the development of a learner, and promote higher order critical thinking skills. This session will demonstrate student examples of ePortfolios and discuss student comments and feedback. Examples of student projects incorporated into the portfolio will be demonstrated. Handouts will be provided with specific suggestions to foster reflective writing, audience awareness, and assignment suggestions.
Thursday, February 7th, 12:00pm - 1:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Room E351
Aligning course assignments with learning goals
Facilitated by Nichole Barger, Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. In this symposium, we will actively engage in creating learning goals for a course, discuss the importance of communicating those learning goals to students, and demonstrate how to effectively align learning goals with course assignments. Participants will gain experience in setting reasonable assignments to achieve course learning goals.
Monday, February 11th, 12:00pm – 1:30pm, CASE Building Conf. Room E351
What are your students learning?
This event is co-sponsored with the Graduate Teacher Program (GTP). Graduate student instructors are welcome to attend this session.
Facilitated by Stefanie Mollborn, Professor, Sociology and Institute of Behavioral Science. How can you find out if your students are learning what you want them to? Answering this question can better inform your teaching and assessment of students. This workshop teaches you quick and easy ways—including high tech, low tech, and no tech options—to collect information about students’ learning. Many of these strategies, such as minute papers and online discussion posts, can give you information and help your students improve their learning at the same time. We will also discuss how to determine the points in your course—such as specific bottlenecks in student learning and threshold concepts they need to master—when it can be particularly useful to find out what students are learning.
Tuesday, February 12th, 3:00pm – 4:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Room E351
Flipping the class for the skeptic
This event is co-sponsored with the Graduate Teacher Program (GTP). Graduate student instructors are welcome to attend this session.
Facilitated by David Brown, Professor and Chair, Political Science. This segment of the FTEP program addresses common hesitations, misperceptions, and challenges involved with flipping a classroom. The instructor will lead participants through the evolution of a happy lecturer to a strong proponent of active learning. Why flipping the class is not for everyone, how to get your feet wet, and how it can change your perception of research, teaching, and students will also be covered. Different tools and methods which have been successful and not so successful in Brown’s experience will be candidly discussed. New technological tools which facilitate the flipped classroom will be presented along with their advantages and disadvantages.
Thursday, February 14th, 12:00pm – 1:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Room E351
Writing great clicker questions to spark peer discussion
Facilitated by Steven Pollock, Professor, Physics. If you are using, or want to use, clickers in your classroom, but are struggling to write or revise questions that engage students, this workshop is for you. We will focus on questions for facilitating "peer instruction"— a research-tested method of requiring students to discuss challenging questions with one another. This workshop is appropriate for all disciplines, but will focus on questions with one right answer. This workshop discusses pedagogical aspects of using clickers, but not technical components. For technical assistance with clickers, please visit OIT's CUClickers guide.
Monday, February 18th, 12:00pm - 1:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Room E351
Interpreting graphical data: A necessary skill for reading scientific literature
This event is co-sponsored with the Graduate Teacher Program (GTP). Graduate student instructors are welcome to attend this session.
Facilitated by Heidi Day, Senior Instructor, Psychology & Neuroscience. If you ask your students to read primary scientific literature for your class, do they think critically about the data presented? Do they even look at the data, or do they just read the author’s words? This workshop is based on my experience with students in an upper division neuroscience class. It will explore ways that instructors can potentially encourage a deeper understanding of scientific literature, based primarily on helping students interpret the graphical data presented.
Tuesday, February 19th, 2:00pm –3:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Room E351
How LISA can help you assess learning goals
Facilitated by Eric Vance, Associate Professor, Applied Mathematics and Director of LISA, the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis. In this symposium, we will review creating learning goals for a course, discuss the importance of assessing these goals, and learn methods for assessing them. We will also discuss how LISA can help you assess your course learning goals. Participants should arrive with learning goals for their courses and then apply the principles from the first half of this symposium to create their own assessment plan. We will discuss example plans from the participants on how to assess learning goals.
Monday, February 25th, 1:00pm – 2:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Room E351
Facilitated by Jenny Knight, Associate Professor, Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. Students operate in a different reality than we do, and our goals are not always clear to them. Plus, we do not always teach for what we value. Taking the time to write clear learning goals or objectives can help you create a coherent, fair course, and makes it easier to write great assessments. In this workshop you will learn about and get practice writing learning goals. We suggest taking this workshop with another faculty member in your department.
Thursday, February 28th, 12:00pm –1:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Room E351
Doing it all: The first seven years
This event is co-sponsored with the Leadership Education for Advancement and Promotion (LEAP) program.
Facilitated by Myles Osborne, Associate Professor, History. This session with recently tenured professor Myles Osborne is about succeeding in the first seven years at CU. The symposium is presented by a faculty member with an extensive publication record (including three books), but little knowledge about—nor interest in—time management techniques. Professor Osborne discusses how those who dislike work plans and schedules can move forward successfully at CU being productive scholars, teachers, and colleagues, by thinking about the bigger guiding principles, agendas, and strategies that we might use in our work.
Thursday, March 7th, 12:30pm – 1:30pm, CASE Building Conf. Room E351
Facilitated by Aisha Jackson, Associate Director, Academic Technology Applications and Lead Learning Technology Consultant Natalie Sharp. This workshop will be a presentation on the basics of how to use Canvas, such as course navigation, communicating with students, managing course content and using the gradebook. This will be followed by a Q&A session, so please arrive at the event with the one question that you most need to ask about Canvas!
Monday, March 11th, 12:00pm – 1:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Room E351
Bringing Our Research Into the Classroom
Facilitated by Laurialan Reitzammer, Associate Professor, Classics. You’ve heard it before: Budget your time, and don’t allow teaching duties to encroach on your research. Such counsel is ubiquitous, but putting it into practice is not easy. Teaching, many of us find, consumes all the time available, especially for those not expected to be in a lab on a daily basis. One solution is to integrate your research into your teaching. This strategy can benefit students and faculty alike.
Monday, March 18th, 12:00pm – 1:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Room E351
Short Courses
Teaching in a nutshell: Strategies to enhance student learning
Facilitated by Tamara Meneghini-Stalker, Professor, Theatre & Dance. This participatory symposium involves not only observing yourself teaching, but also investigating how your ways of communicating affect student learning. Although watching yourself on videotape can be challenging, what you see in yourself will change you more than anything about teaching that you may learn in the abstract.
In this symposium, the group works together to identify communication strategies that enhance the students’ learning experience. Collaboratively, you support one another over the rough moments of embarrassment and fear, coming to view yourself more objectively as a member of a community where learning is reciprocal to teaching. In the process, you acquire specific techniques for guiding and improving learning; and you perceive how your voice and your body affect how well your students see/hear/grasp what you are saying. Few of us have had the opportunity to focus on these subtle, yet vital dimensions of teaching and learning. For those of you who have taken this
symposium before and wish to refresh yourself on the subject matter, join us again as
a refresher.
This is a two-part course. Faculty commit to participation in both parts.
- Part 1: Wednesday, March 6th, 1:00pm – 3:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Rm E353
- Part 2: Wednesday, March 13th, 1:00pm – 3:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Rm E353
- Part 1: Thursday, April 4th, 9:00am – 11:00am, CASE Building Conf. Rm E353
- Part 2: Thursday, April 11th, 9:00am – 11:00am, CASE Building Conf. Rm E353
Writing for publication: Expressing reasoning in writing
Facilitated by Tim Lyons, Instructor, Program for Writing and Rhetoric. In academic writing, the argument is all. Whatever the discipline, whatever the genre—whether a book, an article, or a proposal for funding—the argument establishes failure or success. This workshop offers strategies for discovering a cogent thesis from among a welter of illusory choices, for stating the thesis unambiguously, for qualifying it intelligently, for defending it vigorously.
Each session of this workshop will meet three times and enroll three participants. Each participant will be expected to submit, in advance, a document that has proved troublesome to write or revise. At the group’s first meeting, these documents will form the basis for discussion. Participants will then revise and meet again for further discussion of their work. The goals of the workshop will be to transform the submissions into publishable documents.
This is a three-part course. Faculty commit to participation in all three parts.
Registration is limited to three participants per session. Additional registrants will be placed on a waitlist. If a registered faculty member cannot attend, we will move to the waitlist for a new participant.
- Part 1: Wednesday, February 6th, 3:00pm – 5:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Rm E353
- Part 2: Wednesday, February 13th, 3:00pm – 5:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Rm E353
- Part 3: Wednesday, February 20th, 3:00pm – 5:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Rm E353
- Part 1: Thursday, March 7th, 3:00pm – 5:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Rm E353
- Part 2: Thursday, March 14th, 3:00pm – 5:00pm CASE Building Conf. Rm E353
- Part 3: Thursday, March 21st, 3:00pm – 5:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Rm E353
- Part 1: Tuesday, April 9th, 1:00pm – 3:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Rm E353
- Part 2: Tuesday, April 16th, 1:00pm – 3:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Rm E353
- Part 3: Tuesday, April 23rd, 1:00pm – 3:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Rm E353
This event is co-sponsored with the Graduate Teacher Program (GTP). Graduate student instructors are welcome to attend this session.
Facilitated by Chip Persons, Associate Professor, Theatre & Dance. This symposium will help instructors create their digital presence for recorded instruction in online courses. Participants will build and strengthen their digital presence by recording and then watching themselves on video, along with the rest of the group, speaking about both themselves and their respective course content.
This is a two-part course. Faculty commit to participation in both parts.
- Part 1: Tuesday, February 26th, 2:00pm – 4:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Rm E351
- Part 2: Tuesday, March 5th, 2:00pm – 4:00pm, CASE Building Conf. Rm E351