Pittsburgh Program Details

Kristi Verbeke, Shaun Longstreet, Carolyn Ives, Paul Martin

This interactive workshop orients new educational developers to the field. Participants will consider educational development research, foundational frameworks, and will identify priorities for their contexts. Participants will build core skills with an equity and inclusive lens: consulting with individuals and groups; developing or re-imagining effective programming; and assessing work at the individual and program/center level. Participants will leave the session with a big-picture view of educational development, enhanced skills, resources, and a support network to help them achieve their goals. NOTE: This session is not tailored for experienced developers nor those seeking strategies to found a center.

Includes Thursday morning breakfast and a published book

Michele DiPietro, Marie Norman, Marsha Lovett, Michael Bridges

One of the most important contributions educational developers can offer instructors is to help them understand how learning works. After all, learning is the litmus test of any pedagogy. This interactive workshop synthesizes 60+ years of research on learning from the cognitive, motivational, developmental, and DEI perspectives into eight integrated principles. It is based on the second edition of the presenters’ book, with a deeper focus on diversity, inclusion and equity. Emphasis will be placed on experiencing and unpacking activities that illuminate each principle. Participants will leave with a toolbox of activities they can reuse in their own work.

Barbara Bird, Beate Brunow, Shawn Simonson, Eric Kyle

Teaching effectiveness frameworks, which an increasing number of institutions are adopting, are grounded in evidence-based teaching practices and design principles. These frameworks can serve as means to deepen teaching excellence with the support of teaching centers and to establish equitable criteria for the assessment of teaching for tenure and promotion. In this workshop, participants will:

1. Review 5–10 teaching effectiveness frameworks;
2. Consider which aspects might be most relevant for their own institutional context, drafting the framework categories best for their institution; and
3. Identify strategies for next steps for implementing their own institutional framework.

Bryan Dewsbury, Mays Imad, Stephanie Foote, Joshua Caulkins, Brad Wuetherick

In this session, we will invite participants to engage in envisioning models that center humanity in our educational development curriculum, facilitate faculty in developing their own models of thriving, and cultivate personal mechanisms for self thriving necessary for effective educational development. Our goal is to move from the existing reactive stances toward a more human-centered, sustainable, and inclusive approach to educational development. Participants will leave the session with concrete ideas for transforming their educational development practice, along with guidelines for how ideas discussed might be adaptable for their own institutional contexts.

Mark Pleiss, Nick Proctor

Tired of the same new faculty orientation ice breakers and panels? Learn The University Game! The University Game is part of Reacting to the Past, an active learning pedagogy of role-playing games in which players are assigned character roles and must communicate, collaborate, and compete to win. In this workshop, you will play the game, learn how to run it at your campus, and demonstrate how will introduce your new faculty to important campus personnel, teach them basic procedures of faculty governance, and show them how to see the university from a perspective outside their own.

Carolyn Hoessler, Donna Ellis, Bob Bayles

For leaders seeking to enhance your Center for Teaching and Learning’s (CTL’s) resilience and agility, this half-day workshop empowers you with theory-based strategies to advance priorities, support staff’s wellbeing, and prepare for further higher education changes. Together we will dive into four practical aspects of enhanced human resources (HR) leadership that affect CTLs: organizational structure, direction-setting, capacity-building, and accountability. This session will engage leaders with informed strategies, individualized reflection, gap identification, and discussions to assist you in making HR-related plans for a challenging yet critically important part of your role that is rarely addressed at educational development conferences.

Taimi Olsen, Tazin Daniels, Larry Hurtubise, Ferlin McGaskey, JuliA Metzker, Matthew Trevett-Smith

Are you looking for advice from a cohort of like-minded professionals? This session offers colleagues in their early years as educational developers with time and space for consultation, reflection, and relationship-building. Using a pre-survey, participants will be placed into groups by their selected interest in areas of job functions, professional development, career advancement, and networking, with particular attention to issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and wellbeing. Experienced educational developers and peers will unpack identified topics and co-facilitate discussion. After this dialogue and near-peer mentoring, participants leave with an action plan and opportunities to reconnect with their group in the future.

Timothy Berry, Beth Beschorner, Brooke Burk

Institutions of Higher Educations can advance racial equity and social justice. Yet, providing relevant professional development for faculty and staff at these institutions is necessary. This session highlights one such program, Racial Equity Advocates, that provides support for faculty to actively interrupt inequities using the Courageous Conversations about Race Protocol (Singleton, 2021), role play, and mindful inquiry to address a problem of practice within their own context. The session will explain the program, provide opportunities for practice with the approaches used, and ask participants to consider what would be necessary to enact a similar program on their campuses.

Rachel Yoho, E. Shelley Reid

How can faculty developers successfully integrate our work with current institutional systems to create sustainable, relevant, scalable programming around anti-racist and inclusive teaching? Beyond relying on “open call” workshops that reach a few enthusiasts or resorting to top-down “diversity education” requirements, there are several feasible pathways toward expanded engagement, but they all depend on planning and alignment. Participants will be guided to use this time individually and in community to explore strategies for defining faculty learning outcomes and matched assessments, aligning faculty learning with institutional initiatives and structures, and adapting programming to local environments.

Gypsy Denzine, Rebecca Campbell

In this pre-conference workshop we will actively engage participants in a “Solutions Clinic” so educational developers can experience a useful model for problem-solving. A Solutions Clinic can also be a useful team process for brainstorming new ideas and strategic planning. Participants will identify an actual problem they are facing, followed by a team approach to creatively suggesting multiple strategies for addressing the problem. Participants will experience how a Solutions Clinic brings equity to the diverse voices in the room. A Solutions Clinic is a useful approach for educational developers to have in their facilitation toolkit.

Marina Smitherman, Denise Domizi, Rod McRae

In this workshop, we explore a powerful model (Symposium) for engaging all stakeholders in campus initiatives and supporting them in taking a more active role during times of change. We have successfully used symposia to broaden faculty participation in change initiatives, connecting this work to what matters most for faculty, and providing avenues for more inclusive collaboration across disciplines and divisions. Much of the workshop will be devoted to helping participants:

1. identify areas where they can lead change on their campuses and
2. develop a draft plan for using symposia to increase engagement in these efforts.

Danielle Lusk

This interactive pre-conference workshop will discuss the root causes of the instructional challenges faced by Generation Z learners as well as provide a space for generating solutions. Together, we will discuss what evidence-based strategies align with these challenges as well as potential solutions that we have not considered. This workshop will include evidence from various disciplines, synthesizing it into themes. Shared strategies will be pulled from the fields of learning science, generational research, and mental health. This synthesis is intended to show the value of collaboratively approaching educational challenges to best help our learners grow and develop.

Caroline Boswell, Marie Brown

Do you need help thinking strategically about how justice, equity, diversity, and inclusivity (JEDI) can be woven into the fabric of your center’s offerings? In this interactive pre-conference workshop, the presenters—two white cisgender female educational developers—will share an emergent framework to help your center advance this work. You will engage in a set of structured activities to help you reflect upon one or more of your center’s existing offerings through a JEDI lens. By the end of the workshop, you will have ideas for actionable change and a plan for how to move forward.

Libby Roderick

Universities should support students to wrestle meaningfully with issues of power, privilege and identity; however, numerous faculty report a tendency to avoid critical, but controversial, topics because they lack the confidence and skills to ensure productive classroom discussions. In this interactive workshop, participants will

1. learn and practice a number of effective dialogue strategies;
2. briefly examine the rights/responsibilities of academic freedom;
3. discuss how engaging difficult dialogues differs in an online context;
4. consider how to apply strategies in their own learning environments;
5. be introduced to a wide range of additional resources to continue the work.

Jackson Christopher Bartlett

Effective teaching centers look a lot like effective classrooms: They know what they believe and have strong values that drive the work. They have clear goals that are aligned with those values. And they are intentional not just about what they want to achieve, but how they go about achieving it. In other words, they have the what, the why, and the how down pat. In this workshop, participants will explore the values they bring to educational development work and practice strategies for aligning values and practices to achieve their goals in sustainable, people-centered ways.

Dr. Erin Furtak, University of Colorado at Boulder

Teaching and service can take over faculty members’ lives, induce feelings of burnout, and leave little to no time for research and writing. In this workshop, we share how to help faculty develop strategies for prioritizing and building momentum for their research and writing on the day-to-day level while maintaining work-life balance along the way.

Sancha Medwinter, Kirsten Helmer

In this interactive workshop, participants will engage in reflective exercises, group discussions, and tasks to understand and challenge persisting colonial power structures that manifest in higher education curricula and pedagogies. Participants will gain an understanding of coloniality, how it infiltrates our learned educational approaches, and how we can undo it in our teaching through reflective exercises, group discussions, and tasks. The goal is to provide a process model and guide participants in developing their own decolonial practice from their own positionality, area of expertise, and their own discovery/self-reflection of how coloniality infiltrates their content and teaching.

Taimi Olsen, Tazin Daniels, Larry Hurtubise, Ferlin McGaskey, JuliA Metzker, Matthew Trevett-Smith

Are you looking for advice from a cohort of like-minded professionals? This session offers colleagues in their early years as educational developers with time and space for consultation, reflection, and relationship-building. Using a pre-survey, participants will be placed into groups by their selected interest in areas of job functions, professional development, career advancement, and networking, with particular attention to issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and wellbeing. Experienced educational developers and peers will unpack identified topics and co-facilitate discussion. After this dialogue and near-peer mentoring, participants leave with an action plan and opportunities to reconnect with their group in the future.

Kristi Verbeke, Shaun Longstreet

This interactive workshop orients new educational developers to the field. Participants will consider educational development research, foundational frameworks, and will identify priorities for their contexts. Participants will build core skills such as consulting with individuals and groups and developing or re-imagining effective programming, with an equity and inclusive lens. Participants will leave the session with a big-picture view of educational development, enhanced skills, resources, and a support network to help them achieve their goals.

NOTE: This session is not tailored for experienced developers nor those seeking strategies to found a center.

E1: University of Pittsburgh Open Lab

Thursday November 16 | 12:30 pm–3:00 pm
824 Fifth Avenue

Open Lab at the University of Pittsburgh is an innovative makerspace for faculty, students, and staff. With technology and expertise in 3D scanning and printing, extended reality headsets, laser cutting and engraving, and other experiential learning tools, Open Lab helps to fuel teaching and learning at Pitt. Come take a 90-minute tour of the space and meet the team as you learn about the practical applications of a makerspace for enhancing pedagogy and about developing a makerspace on your campus.

Transportation is included for the approximate 25-minute trip each way.

Participation Max: 30

E2: Heinz History Center

Friday November 17 | 10:00 am–12:00 pm
1212 Smallman Street

The Heinz History Center, Pittsburgh’s “people museum,” has six floors of interactive displays that include well known antiques such as the Mister Rogers Neighborhood TV set and the oldest motor vehicle in the world, which tell the history of western Pennsylvania. The Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum is located on the second and third floors of the History Center.

The Heinz History Center is approximately a 6-minute walk from the Westin Hotel and the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. We will assist with accessibility accommodations as requested on your registration form.

E3: August Wilson: The Writer’s Landscape

Friday November 17 | 3:00 pm–5:00 pm
980 Liberty Avenue

The Writer’s Landscape is the first-ever exhibition devoted to the life and works of Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright August Wilson. It is located at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, one of the biggest cultural institutions in the nation that focuses solely on the African American experience and the arts of the African diaspora.

There is no cost for this excursion. However, we encourage participants to consider making a personal donation to the Cultural Center.

The August Wilson African American Cultural Center is less than a 5-minute walk. We will assist with accessibility accommodations as requested on your registration form.

Participation Max: 25

E4: University of Pittsburgh—Nationality Rooms

Saturday November 18 | 9:45 am–12:15 pm
1209 Cathedral of Learning

Join your colleagues in a 60-90 minute tour of  the Nationality & Heritage Rooms at the University of Pittsburgh for a unique educational experience.  Nearly a century ago, the Nationality & Heritage Rooms and Intercultural Exchange Program created the rooms to celebrate and showcase the cultures of the many ethnic communities that immigrated to Allegheny County. On the first and third floors of the Cathedral of Learning, there are 31 Nationality Rooms where you can enjoy the rich heritage of the communities that inspired and supported their creation.

The Nationality Rooms are actual classrooms that offer students (and visitors) the opportunity to explore the historical diversity of the region as depicted via the gifts received from the ethnic groups of Pittsburgh. An added bonus for POD’s tour will be the enjoyment of end-of-year celebrations with traditional takes on well-known holidays.  

Transportation is included for the approximate 25-minute trip each way.

Participation Min: 10, Max: 30

E5: Lee Terbosic in Life and Death of Harry Houdini

Saturday November 18 | 7:30 pm–9:45 pm
Liberty Magic, 811 Liberty Ave.

In this special LIMITED ENGAGEMENT event, Lee Terbosic, an internationally touring magician, comedian, actor, daredevil and entertainer from Pittsburgh, PA, will lead audiences through an exploration of some of Houdini’s most magical moments. The 75-minute performance—part lecture, part Q&A, part demo, and all magic—will leave you wondering if there was something more sinister afoot when a 52-year-old Houdini died on that Halloween night in 1926.

Liberty Magic is about a 4-minute walk. We will assist with accessibility accommodations as requested on your registration form.