Teaching Dialogues and Workshops

Informal sessions where faculty can share tips on successful classroom pedagogy and learning activities with each other during the lunch hour. Additionally, it is an opportunity for faculty to share what they learned from pre-conference workshops or from presenting and attending conferences. It is a great way to build community and learn about what your peers are doing concerning their teaching, scholarship, and service.

As faculty here at UIW, we know you want to get better at what you do, but the steps to getting there often elude you because of your many responsibilities in addition to teaching, scholarship, and service. Many of you tend to keep current and updated in your discipline via professional journals, attend conferences, and perhaps listen to experts in your discipline via Podcasts, TED talks, YouTube, etc. These are great ways to see what is current in your disciplines, but is it enough?

Let’s face it, between class preparation, teaching, grading, committee meetings, advising, mentoring, etc., sometimes you must put learning about updated content in your discipline on the back burner. Our blog will allow us to share resources and reflections that may be of use to you. It will include things such as creative personal pieces, pedagogical ideas, innovative ideas for teaching and learning, experiential pieces, and anything that can help you grow as faculty. Some of the posts will be more informational while others will be inspirational.

A dialogic book circle is a practice that promotes dialogue and fosters a sense of community, connectivity, and respect by focusing on the experiences of educators to inform, guide and enhance academic content and pedagogical practices. By listening and engaging in authentic dialogue with each other, we will start to understand our various perspectives from multiple disciplines and classroom spaces and hopefully collaborate on an interdisciplinary level because of these dialogic book circles. Dialogue is a significant key term for true education.

The goal is to help you (faculty) find ways in which you can do things differently in your classroom after you read and participate in a dialogic book circle and/or collaborate with a colleague in a different discipline on integrating what you learned from the book. You will be asked to share ideas of how the content/topics/focus of the book can be integrated into your courses with each other during your dialogic circles or at the last dialogic circle meeting. You are encouraged (not required) to reflect after each time you participate in this circle (3 times) so that when you plan for your classes, you can always return to your reflection to help you plan activities, assignments, discussions, projects, etc.

We understand that time is precious and finding time to sit with your faculty peers can be a challenge. However, we also understand that meaningful dialogue can uncover unique and shared experiences across our schools. By providing the space and time for faculty to gather and participate in faculty-to-faculty dialogues, we hope to engage in meaningful dialogue to decrease worry, concern, stress, frustration, and other feelings that surface when it comes to teaching. We are here to listen and provide support for your pedagogical needs.

The CTL Events Calendar is continually updated with information for upcoming workshops and other activities each semester. We offer a variety of workshops to help faculty enhance their pedagogy and instructional strategies that lead to engaged learning experiences for your students. Our workshops are designed to help you grow and enhance your teaching and are based on promising practices in higher education as well as evidence-based research.

We know we have rock stars among our faculty. If you would like to do a workshop for us, please let us know and we will put you on the schedule.

CTL offers sessions that focus on using technology tools for teaching. These sessions offer a plethora of ideas on how to use technology in your courses as well as for you to consider implementing into your teaching. Consider attending these sessions as a refresher, whether you are a veteran user of tech tools or a novice to tech tools.

Additionally, check out the Available Software page for Faculty and Staff below to learn all about the various pieces of productive, supportive,and educational software at your disposal.

Available Software for Faculty and Staff