
Workshops

About Our Workshops
The TLC offers 90-minute to two-hour workshops for any instructional group on campus, such as faculty members at department meetings and graduate student instructor and teaching assistant groups. All TLC workshops are interactive and applicable to any discipline and draw from the teaching experience and expertise of the participants.
For your planning purposes, please note the following: We make it a practice to meet with a representative of the requesting instructor group in order to learn more about the audience and needs, and to tailor each workshop. We recommend reaching out in the academic quarter before you would like to offer the workshop. At a minimum, we request a month’s notice in order to plan and tailor the workshop appropriately. If we are not able to offer the workshop on your proposed timeline, we may request to work together with you to find an alternative time.
Browse our current workshop offerings below.

Browse Our Workshops
Equity-Minded Teaching
Antiracist Teaching
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.
Addressing Critical Current Events in the Classroom
This workshop builds on TLC’s guide for addressing critical current events in the classroom — that is, events that happen in our local community, or on broader national or global scales, that evoke feelings of fear, uncertainty, and harm. Through practice with classroom scenarios, we’ll discuss strategies for establishing and sustaining an inclusive learning community and recalibrating the classroom toward critical discourse. Participants will explore and apply strategies and resources for supporting students to prepare for and engage in dialogue, and for themselves to engage in facilitation. Informed by scholarship in social justice education, antiracist teaching, and trauma-aware and wellness-oriented pedagogies, the workshop seeks to support the wellbeing of students, instructors, and TAs alike while navigating difficult social and political climates.
Setting & Maintaining Supportive Boundaries in the Classroom
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 the Office of Student Conduct and Conflict Education to launch a this workshop 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.
Designing Courses & Assignments
Syllabus Review: The Syllabus as Equity Tool
This workshop draws from research about the impact of the syllabus (tone, messaging, and policies) on student experience, help-seeking, and motivation, particularly for historically marginalized students like students of color, first-gen students, and students with disabilities. Participants engage by reviewing sample syllabi, reflecting on the potential impact of language and design choices on students, and discussing strategies for revising syllabus statements, policies, and rhetoric in order to promote accessibility and equity in student outcomes.
Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence)
This interactive workshop is designed to help you make sense of generative AI in teaching and learning environments. Depending on the needs of your department, the workshop can focus on any of the following topics: what generative AI tools can and cannot do; pedagogical frameworks for integrating or limiting generative AI use; ethical, racial, and environmental impacts of generative AI; AI syllabus policies; practical uses of AI for teaching and learning; and implications for academic integrity.
Educational Technology
Developing a Department-Level Strategy for Online Learning
How should online courses fit into your department’s curricular plans? This workshop will give you an overview of the possibilities and practicalities of online courses and programs and an opportunity to discuss different online strategies that align with your department’s goals and needs. You’ll also see examples of what online courses do best from across the campus.
Topics in Educational Technology
This workshop centers the needs of your department with regard to educational technologies used at UC Santa Cruz. When you select this workshop, let us know the specific needs and interests of your department, and the TLC’s team of Instructional Designers and Education Specialists will develop a customized interactive workshop for you. Some possible topics: Canvas, Hypothesis, Ed Discussions, and other educational technologies, using technology to increase student engagement, grading student work, fostering supportive peer review or group work, and creating more accessible course materials.
Mentoring
Mentoring Graduate Students (Paused)
Drawing from evidence-based practices and research on mentorship, our interactive workshops on mentoring invite 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).
**Please note: Our workshops on mentoring graduate students are on pause as we revise our curricula based on current research. Please refer to our resource pages on Mentoring for approaches and practices.
Teaching Teams
Developing Effective Teaching Teams
(For Faculty and Graduate Students)
In courses that employ Teaching Assistants (TAs), developing a cohesive teaching team is critical to creating the conditions for equitable and meaningful student learning. In this workshop, faculty and graduate student TAs work together to reflect on and clarify the distinctive roles of instructors and TAs in a teaching team setting in their particular teaching contexts, and share strategies for effective communication across multiple members of an instructional team.
Documenting Teaching
Documenting Teaching for the Academic Personnel Review Process
(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.