Preconference Workshops

Carolyn Ives, Paul Martin, Kristi Verbeke, Jackson Bartlett, Lisa Jong, Cassandra Volpe Horii, Kevin Gannon

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.

Participants will receive a copy of the 1st Edition of Faculty Development in the Age of Evidence: Current Practices, Future Imperatives By Andrea L. Beach, Mary Deane Sorcinelli, Ann E. Austin, and Jaclyn K. Rivard

Laura Pipe, Jennifer Stephens

Decolonization requires us to interrogate and disrupt the “rules of the game” that shape and govern the academy. This session introduces the TALLS (Toward a Liberated Learning Spirit) Model for developing critical consciousness that moves learning through colonized ideals of knowledge toward a liberated learning space. Sharing examples and data on the model’s application, participants will imagine new approaches to decolonizing their own practice. TALLS utilizes existing best practices in culturally-responsive teaching blended with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Six Steps for Nonviolent Social Change, Indigenous pedagogy, and cultural wealth approaches to create a framework for supporting curiosity for change.

Elizabeth Norell

In this workshop, participants will gain deeper self-understanding through a series of reflection and discussion activities. Our goal will be to develop greater presence with students/colleagues in ways that feel authentic and psychologically safe, leading to stronger relationships. Research and theory suggest that implementing inclusive pedagogies is more effective when those pedagogies are grounded in our identities. If we want to create spaces where students have the confidence, comfort, and psychological safety to learn and grow, we have to create spaces where we do, too. This workshop aims to equip participants with the tools to do exactly that.

Leslie Alvarez, Rebecca Campbell, Gypsy Denzine

Career pathways in educational development are often serendipitous and reliant on critical incidents including key mentoring relationships. This workshop will provide an intense career development opportunity and invite participants to intentionally consider the next step in their educational development career. Participants will be asked to reflect on the relationships needed and competencies to build for future selves as educational developers including developing their web of relationships to advance their career goals. Participants will critically assess their current knowledge, skills, and experiences through robust small and large group discussions about their career goals and options for enhancing their marketability.

Christina Ujj, Michele DiPietro

As developers, we plan a multitude of events, from workshops to receptions, staff meetings, new faculty orientation, and much more. This workshop is an invitation to treat our events not merely as a vehicle for content but as intentional structures for relationships and meaning. This workshop presents a process to ensure our event planning is purposeful, adapted from the 7 principles of Priya Parker’s “The Art of Gathering.” Participants will have the opportunity to take one of their events through the process. After a variety of activities, they will leave with a redesigned event and further resources.

Autumm Caines

This workshop examines the dance between generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and trust in education, guided by Felten et al.’s (2023) Trust Moves framework and enriched by Caulfield and Wineburg’s (2023) SIFT model for critical web literacy. With GenAI’s rise, concerns about academic integrity, misinformation, privacy, bias, and the erosion of student-teacher relationships have surfaced. By integrating strategies for critically evaluating GenAI generated content and sources, alongside trust-building practices, participants will explore scenarios impacting trust dynamics. This session offers a blend of actionable insights for fostering a critical approach to navigating the evolving interplay of algorithms and trust in higher education.

Melissa Berry-Woods, Roben Torosyan

This workshop is for those who want to build confidence in difficult dialogue and consistently reflect on their accountability. We showcase ways to get beyond mere training by building meaningful relationships between diverse facilitators and participants. In small communities of faculty, staff, and students, we work to co-create psychological safety and belonging, regardless of status, and to learn what it means to dive deep into antiracist practice. Take away a sample curriculum with activities and resources, tools to assess evidence of outcomes such as learning gains and well-being, and practices to apply in your own context.

Susan Robison

The interpersonal aspects of academic leadership, e.g., annual reviews, performance evaluations, or other difficult conversations with faculty, can be challenging to both inexperienced and experienced leaders. In this interactive workshop, you will practice several powerful brain-based coaching skills drawn from Improv games and coaching to increase skills and confidence for leadership that matters: transformational coaching conversations that build institutional collegiality, civility, and engagement. Participants will apply a conversation structure (ASK – assess client motivation, set agenda, keep success continuous) in dyad practice and then in a facilitator/volunteer demonstration. Application will be made about offering similar training for your academic leaders.

Saundra McGuire

Many students struggle in college not because of lack of ability, but because they have not been taught the critical thinking skills required for success. These skills can be increased rapidly and substantially by teaching students metacognitive learning strategies. This session will discuss definitions of metacognition and metacognitive equity and present causes for the metacognitive equity gap seen on many college campuses. Participants will engage in activities to demonstrate strategies that transform students’ attitudes about the meaning of learning. This leads to improved critical thinking skills, greater confidence, and increased motivation.

Abigail Best, Joshua Caulkins, Aimee Fleming, Tyrone Groh, Mahalia Phillips-Bryant, Thomas Sly, William Wallace

Students as Partners (SaP) programs show significant promise in moving the needle on student engagement, retention, and reducing mental health issues for our campus communities. This workshop, co-facilitated by undergraduate student partners, aims to demonstrate that intentional, well-designed relationship structures that focus on trust and vulnerability can take SaP programs to the next level. Participants will explore new approaches to partner matching and roles, techniques for establishing nurturing relationships between pedagogical partners, and creating supportive partnership learning communities. Participants will leave with a partnership model they can use to create or adapt aSaPprogram within their own university contexts.

Jennifer Todd, Tonya Buchan

The Teaching Effectiveness Framework (TEF) was created to provide a common language across our institution to talk about evidence-based teaching. The TEF contains seven interdependent domains of teaching with Inclusive Pedagogy at its heart. The TEF grew into the TEF Toolkit, including a goal setting and reflection process for annual review, alignment with our professional development, and the opportunity for faculty to be rewarded for developing their teaching. Participants in this session will engage with the framework, learn its history, development, and how we gained support from upper administration to adopt the TEF as our institutional framework for effective teaching.

William Hardaway, Emily Magruder, Renee Penalver, and Bryan Berrett

Participants will engage in an identity mapping exercise and will explore their own positions within systemic structures, setting the stage for deeper empathy and understanding. A systems mapping activity will visualize the layered webs of institutional inequity. We will then guide participants through a deep dive into their campus’s institutional data, uncovering insights often overlooked by traditional analyses. Finally, the session will culminate in an empathy-seeking and co-creation methodology to foster stronger institutional connections and amplify traditionally

Diane Boyd, Benjamin Haywood

Rejuvenating ourselves and re-centering relationships is vital to both colleague support and our own continued growth. This three-hour workshop features an evidence-based coaching capacities framework tool that demystifies the dispositions and expressions that support psychological safety co-creation. Participants reconnect with their consultation/ facilitation/relationship-building strengths; differentiate coaching from other support; refine signature coaching capacities to invigorate their work; practice capacities-related skills (deep listening, reducing bias); apply signature capacities through sustained authentic practice; draw on mixed methods research capacities development benefits to brainstorm further applications in their work using the facilitation matrix tool; and create action plans for future development.

Angela Rasmussen, Julia Metzker

Directing Centers for Teaching and Learning demands flexibility, strategy, and the ability to tell meaningful stories about the data and information you gather and analyze. Join experienced directors for a session that uses dynamic small group exercises to introduce tools and approaches that will help you unleash your catalytic power as a new or aspiring center director. In the course of our time together, you will brainstorm how to advance your center’s mission in alignment with institutional priorities and develop an evidence-informed narrative.

Michael Palmer, Lindsay Wheeler, Donna Ellis

This session will draw heavily on two evidence-based frameworks to introduce participants to a structured and collaborative CTL external review process that is adaptable to local contexts, including different institutional types, CTL configurations and sizes, and varying purposes (e.g., initiated by policy, a request from leadership, or CTL self-interest). Participants will gain a clearer understanding of the external review process, have an opportunity to test out a self-study approach using the POD-ACE Matrix, and gain insight into reviewers’ work. The session is ideal for anyone contemplating a future external review or in the early stages of one.

Ashley Atkinson, Madeleine Gonin, Ellie Louson, Lizette Muñoz Rojas

In this workshop, we guide participants through the creation and facilitation of interdisciplinary STEM Equity Learning Communities (SELCs). SELCs consist of instructors, undergraduates, and facilitators who apply equity-mindedness and design approaches for engaging instructors and campus leaders in discussions about the equity of their STEM courses and programs.

We will share models, strategies, and resources from the nine institutions that participated in the pilot program. Participants will leave with an action plan for implementing a version of SELC on their campus. This action plan will include approaches to recruitment, facilitating effective conversations, and sharing findings with their broader campus community.

Carolyn Schuyler, Dorothe Bach

We are facing an interconnected environmental and mental health crisis. This session gives educational developers both a personally restorative experience and a model for nature-connected approaches to teaching and center programming. By experimenting with accessible practices, participants will gain an embodied understanding of the researched benefits of using campus green spaces to cultivate belonging, creativity, collaboration, and emotional well-being elements instrumental to student and faculty learning. Through interactive exercises, participants will be prepared to integrate nature connection into educational development programming and to advocate for educational transformation built on shared experiences with the more-than-human world.

Beate Brunow, Barbara Bird, Shawn Simonson, Eric Kyle

Teaching effectiveness frameworks, which an increasing number of institutions are adopting, are grounded in evidence-based teaching practices. These frameworks can guide the work we do across our institutions and expand the assessment of teaching from primarily course evaluation evidence to a robust set of student learning and teaching quality evidence. In this workshop, participants will:

1. examine a variety of teaching effectiveness frameworks, contributing their own institutions’ framework;
2. collectively brainstorm the ways that frameworks connect to evidence of teaching effectiveness;
3. identify relationally rich and equitable faculty development strategies for broad faculty engagement with frameworks at their institution.

Isis Artze-Vega, Peter Felten

Relationships may matter, but it’s not always clear how to turn the aspiration of relationship-rich education into the practice of educational development. This workshop will guide participants in how to operationalize relational practice and to build relational cultures in and through their work. Participants will leave with a strategic, context-, and role-specific plan for contributing to relationship-rich education in their unit or across their institution, including ways to monitor progress toward goals. Participants also will build a network of POD colleagues who can support them as they implement their plans – and pursue relational work – in their own contexts.