Workshops

This workshop focuses on supporting student learning through active teaching techniques. This interactive workshop invites participants to: identify key concepts in how learning happens, in order to understand how to support student learning; learn teaching strategies that actively engage students and encourage them to practice communicating their ideas; experience several activities that put students at the center of the learning process and encourage peer communication and collaboration; and reflect on your experiences in the role of a learner and prepare to apply those insights to your role as an educator. 

In this interactive workshop, we’ll explore key research-based foundations for enacting antiracist teaching as an ongoing, intentional practice of working toward racial justice in higher education. In addition to taking a bigger picture perspective on this important collective and institutional work, we’ll dive into several common teaching areas where you can make important and immediate equity interventions, whether you’re teaching as a TA or instructor. The workshop will include time for individual reflection, small group conversations, and developing action and implementation plans.

No matter what our course content is, we know that issues of race and racism are endemic to teaching and learning. Facilitating discussions that address race and racism can feel challenging or uncomfortable for many instructors, especially when those conversations are unexpected or unexpectedly charged. This interactive workshop will identify key communicative strategies that can assist with facilitating these important conversations and will provide an opportunity for skill-building practice. We’ll work from classroom scenarios that participants provide in advance to authentically address the complex, dynamic interactions of your teaching and learning environments.

This workshop addresses how to support students to be excellent learners in light of the research on trauma-aware teaching. Participants will share, discuss, and acquire strategies that can promote our collective resilience (for both students and teachers alike) in courses of any modality (remote, hybrid, online, and in-person). The goal is to make our classrooms more conducive to long-term learning while acknowledging the effects of trauma and global crises that disproportionately impact already marginalized members of the campus community.

A current challenge for instructors and students alike is the question of boundaries in the classroom. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (featuring the experiences of UCSC instructors and administrators) points to the pandemic as a pivotal moment during which faculty were encouraged to build unprecedented levels of flexibility into their classes. However, the gradual transition to a more structured post-pandemic reality has resulted in differing expectations. While many faculty are eager to reintroduce some of the boundaries they put on hiatus during the pandemic, some students struggle to adjust to new standards.

The Teaching & Learning Center partnered with Student Conduct to launch a new workshop during the Fall 2023 New Faculty Teaching Academy on the challenges of setting and maintaining supportive boundaries in the classroom. Covered topics included the importance of communicating boundaries from the start of the quarter; the role of transparency in securing student buy-in; awareness of the ways faculty positionality may impact students’ perception of certain boundaries as negotiable; and approaches to complex boundary-related issues that may arise within (or beyond) the classroom. A version of this workshop is available to academic departments.

An educational framework that takes a proactive approach to accessibility, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is rooted in a commitment to equitable learning for students with disabilities, and is known to enhance learning for all students because it reminds us that learner variability and difference is the norm. The workshop invites participants to explore the framework in relation to their design of course curricula, assignments, and syllabi, as well as to their delivery of accessible content.

Drawing from evidence-based practices and research on mentorship, this interactive workshop invites department faculty to: consider together the key “skillfulnesses” of mentoring graduate students; examine tools for practicing effective and equity-minded mentorship that can particularly support marginalized students; and surface implicit expectations for graduate student skill development. Our goal is to create space in which we can collectively consider both personal and departmental practices, share ideas for effective mentorship, and identify strategies and resources for strengthening mentoring approaches and relationships. This workshop draws from evidence-based practices promoted by the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) and the Center for Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER).

(For Faculty)

Follow-up workshops on equity-minded mentoring of graduate students are available after department faculty have participated in the “Mentoring Graduate Students” workshop. These follow-up workshops currently include “Creating a Culture of Wellbeing” and “Science Identity & Sense of Belonging” and support faculty participants to go into more depth around topics like:

• Graduate student mental health and wellness
• Practicing critical mentoring,
• Supporting science identity and STEM persistence
• Strategies for supporting racially minoritized graduate students
• Inclusive and intentional communication
• Addressing microaggressions
• and more…

These workshops draw from recent research in equity-minded mentoring practices.

(For Graduate Students)

In this interactive workshop, graduate student peer mentors explore tools and resources for several key competencies of effective mentoring of peers and near-peers, including: articulating clear expectations, creating strong communication pathways, identifying shared values, sustaining conversations about belongingness, attending to positionality and identity, practicing critical mentoring, and addressing impacts related to structural inequity, imposter syndrome, microaggressions, and implicit bias. The workshop can be tailored for graduate student mentors of peers (e.g. advanced graduate students mentoring early-career graduate students) and of undergraduate students. A popular workshop among graduate student-led peer mentoring organizations.

(For Faculty)

This workshop supports faculty to develop their evidence of excellence in teaching to provide a holistic and representative picture of themselves as educators, both for the personnel review process and for formative self-reflection. Acknowledging the research on limitations of Student Experience of Teaching Surveys (SETS) data, the workshop provides guidance both for using SETS data and for developing additional methods of documenting teaching.

(For Graduate Students and Postdocs)

Designed for graduate students and postdocs, this interactive workshop offers tools and tips for writing a teaching statement that effectively demonstrates how you support student learning. We’ll also review how to select teaching portfolio materials that tell a compelling story of who you are as an educator, and address methods for incorporating student experience of teaching (SET) survey data into your documentation.

This presentation covers strategies for effective peer review and peer support of teaching development. All departments regularly engage in “peer review” of teaching through the academic personnel process, yet we have very little support for or collective conversation about how to review our colleagues with consistency and equity, using practices based in research on effective teaching. When done well, peer review allows us not only to “evaluate” each other’s teaching fairly but also to make peer review useful for developing our collective and individual teaching skills. The workshop is based on resources, protocols and reviewer templates created with AAC&U funding at other R1 institutions and covers topics ranging from how to effectively review teaching materials such as syllabi and assessments to best practices for classroom “visits” (in person or remotely).