Teaching Support
Units may request private group sessions of any of these workshops for faculty after they have launched in the 2022-2023 academic year by emailing Dr. M. Geneva Murray (geneva.murray@ou.edu), unless otherwise noted. All OU faculty and Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) are welcome to attend any workshop unless the workshop is advertised as for faculty only.
The following workshops are organized thematically within CFE’s Professional Development Plan for Teaching.
These workshop offerings provide you with the essential teaching strategies to create your curriculum, syllabi, engage students in the course material, incorporate writing throughout your curriculum, and improve your grading productivity.
(Re)Designing Your Course: Course Design Using Backward Design
(Re)Design your course in a supportive, structured, and communal environment. Using a backward design approach, this workshop provides opportunity for you to work on your course (re)design by engaging in reflective activities to consider what, when, and how the course will be taught, as well as how the course objectives are achieved. This session will include a cursory introduction to Universal Design for Learning (UDL).
Duration: 1.5 hours
Frequency: This workshop is offered twice annually: once during CFE’s Teaching Preparedness Week (August) and once in January (the week before classes begin).
Curriculum Plan: Core Teaching Skills 101
Motivate Your Students from Day One: Syllabus Design
Motivational and transparent syllabi can both increase student motivation in your course and decrease the number of questions you’re asked throughout the semester. This workshop builds upon our online syllabus templates and provides suggested activities to get students to read your syllabus. Bring syllabi or a draft syllabus with you, in whatever stage it is in, to share and discuss with others during hands-on activities.
Duration: 1 hour
Frequency: This workshop is offered twice annually: once during CFE’s Teaching Preparedness Week (August) and once in January (the week before classes begin).
Curriculum Plan: Core Teaching Skills 102
You Belong Here: Building Rapport with Students to Improve Academic Outcomes
A key component to student success is a sense of belonging in the classroom and at the university. This workshop provides participants with strategies to build rapport with students so that they feel more connected with you and their peers. Participants are encouraged to bring their own ideas, while also learning about Student Background and Experience surveys, icebreakers, establishing community expectations, and motivational language.
Duration: 1.5 hours
Frequency: This workshop is offered twice annually: once during CFE’s Teaching Preparedness Week (August) and once in January. A workshop on this topic for those teaching online, asynchronous courses is also available.
Curriculum Plan: Core Teaching Skills 103
The Five-Minute Writing Workshop
You can teach the fundamental skills of writing in your discipline without detracting from content instruction or making more grading work. In this workshop, Robert Scafe will introduce you to a “5-minute writing workshop” model developed by the nationally recognized Writing Enriched Curriculum program at the University of Minnesota. Participants will learn how to create quick, low-stakes writing prompts that assist students in achieving course outcomes. By the end of this workshop, you will have developed an engaging low-stakes writing prompt.
Duration: 1 hour
Frequency: This workshop is offered twice annually: once during CFE’s Teaching Preparedness Week (August) and once in February. Units may also request this workshop, as well as other consultations related to the Writing Enriched Curriculum program, by emailing Dr. Robert Scafe (rscafe@ou.edu).
Curriculum Plan: Core Teaching Skills 104
Increase Your Grading Productivity: Feedback, Grading, and Rubrics
If you want to assign writing but are wary of the grading work, this workshop is for you. We will learn how to make feedback more efficient and meaningful by clarifying expectations, distinguishing commenting from grading, and training student writers (and their peers) to evaluate their own work. You will learn to give specific, productive feedback instead of wasting time proofreading and micro-grading student work. And you will learn to use Canvas tools such as SpeedGrader, rubric templates, and peer review to create a feedback environment appropriate to your teaching style.
Duration: 1 hour
Frequency: This workshop is offered twice annually: once in September and again in April.
Curriculum Plan: Core Teaching Skills 105
These workshop offerings are focused on effective active learning techniques to foster academic achievement among your students.
Engaging Teaching Tools
Join us for a session on teaching with instructional technologies that will make teaching easier and more engaging for students: Gradescope (grading and submission of work made easier), TopHat (teaching and learning all in one place, student response system), Jamboard (visually organize and represent thoughts), Mentimeter (create word clouds, polls, and open-ended responses for student engagement), and Hypothesis (digital annotation for online readings).
Duration: 1.5 hours
Frequency: This workshop is offered annually during CFE’s Teaching Preparedness Week.
Curriculum Plan: Active Learning 201
Facilitating Group Discussion
Many discussion-based classrooms quickly devolve into a dynamic of instructor-student Q and A, with a small percentage of students accounting for most of the participation. It doesn’t have to be this way. Drawing on Stephen Brookfield’s Discussion as a Way of Teaching, this workshop will show you how to coach student-to-student interactions, set expectations for participation from day one, and anticipate “flare ups” with proactive discussion guidelines. We will also learn how to leverage the discussion dynamic to model academic skills such as citation, collaboration, and problem solving.
Duration: 1 hour
Frequency: This workshop is offered annually during CFE’s Teaching Preparedness Week.
Curriculum Plan: Active Learning 202
Interactive Lectures in Large Classes
There are effective and dynamic ways to lecture that will keep your students engaged throughout your course. This panel discussion brings together faculty who teach large enrollment courses to discuss tools and strategies that can be utilized across all disciplines and in any class size. This session provides additional insight beyond CFE’s online effective lecturing resource. You are also encouraged to bring your strategies to share with other session participants.
Duration: 1 hour
Frequency: This panel occurs annually in March. A recording of a past panel may be requested, but this session will not be able to be recreated for individual units upon request.
Curriculum Plan: Active Learning 320
Creating and Assessing Group Work
Want to assign group work because it’s a necessary skill for students to learn, but remember hating group work yourself? Or not sure how to assess group work fairly, or set students up for success? Group performance is often translated into individual grades, which raises issues of fairness, equity, and motivation. This workshop will discuss multiple ways to assess group work effectively and how to help students establish group guidelines.
Duration: 1 hour
Frequency: This workshop is offered annually in February.
Curriculum Plan: Active Learning 321
Learning by Doing: Project- & Problem-Based Learning
Through a discussion on learning by doing using project-based and problem-based, you’ll be invited to consider using one of these frameworks to engage and assess student learning, intentionally connecting students with how your course objectives can help them to develop transferrable skills and applied knowledge. These frameworks promote higher-order thinking and assess not just what students have learned, but how they can transfer their knowledge to other scenarios.
Duration: 1 hour
Frequency: This workshop is offered annually in November.
Curriculum Plan: Active Learning 333.
Covering both assessment of your teaching and your students, these workshops will focus on providing appropriate feedback and assessment strategies to spark growth for everyone in the classroom.
The Power of Their Words: Processing SES Results
Student feedback on their learning in our courses can be affirming, as well as transformative, in supporting our own growth as instructors. However, it can be challenging to hear negative feedback on courses when we’ve dedicated so much time, energy, and intellectual creativity to them, and not all feedback is created equally. Through guided reflection and peer support, we’ll spend time together reviewing our SES feedback. You can choose to read yours privately in advance or use this session to process them for the first time, either on your own or with a peer. We ask that you bring printed copies of your SES results or email them to geneva.murray@ou.edu at least two hours in advance of the session if you need assistance printing, with the subject heading “SES Results.” Additional information is available online about the Student Experience Surveys at OU.
Duration: 1.5 hours
Frequency: This workshop is offered annually in January and May.
Curriculum Plan: Feedback & Assessment 203
Break the Mold on Your Assessments
Reinvigorate your assessment strategies by offering students choices in how they demonstrate what they have learned. This approach aligns with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework to inform how students can demonstrate their learning. We’ll work together to share various assessment strategies and provide tips about using videos, podcasts, role plays, self-assessment, and/or visual displays such as concept maps or infographics.
Duration: 1 hour
Frequency: This panel occurs annually in September. A recording of a past panel may be requested, but this session will not be able to be recreated for individual units upon request.
Curriculum Plan: Feedback & Assessment 210
Assignment Makeover with Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT)
Does it ever feel like students don’t know what you’re asking for on an assignment? Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) is a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) practice which emphasizes the importance of transparency when designing assignments in order to mitigate barriers to success and increase student motivation. This workshop will engage faculty in redesigning a course assignment using the TILT framework.
Duration: 1 hour
Frequency: This workshop occurs annually in September.
Curriculum Plan: Feedback & Assessment 211
Benefiting from a Classroom Observation
Classroom observations allow you to document your teaching successes and hone your skills. This workshop will move beyond CFE’s online classroom observation resources to personalize the experience as both observer and observee. We’ll discuss identifying shared goals and opportunities for growth, understanding the diversity of effective teaching practices, effective feedback through transparent communication, and how to develop an action plan. If you are interested in observing someone’s class, or having your course observed, this is the workshop for you!
Duration: 1 hour
Frequency: This workshop is offered annually in February.
Curriculum Plan: Feedback & Assessment 301
These series of workshops provide you with strategies for supporting students within your classroom through classroom management, understanding of student experiences, and knowledge of applicable resources.
LGBTQ+ Aspiring Allyship for Faculty
Created in partnership with the Gender + Equality Center, this training program is part of their LGBTQ+ Aspiring Ally series. Following attending their LGBTQ+ Aspiring Ally training (which we recommend you do in Summer or Fall), this session will build on your knowledge by placing it specifically in classroom scenarios (or settings). We’ll discuss responses to students coming out, respecting pronouns and confidentiality in writing letters of recommendation.
Duration: 1 hour
Frequency: This workshop is offered annually in February.
Curriculum Plan: Inclusive Teaching 302
Voices in the Margins: How to Use Conversation and Oral Expression to Humanize Academic Writing.
Do your students see academic writing as a foreign language? Do you struggle to engage traditionally marginalized students in class discussion? This workshop will help you humanize academic writing by using discussion to model the “moves” of scholarly discourse. Participants will learn how to proactively establish the values of language diversity in the classroom and how to leverage conversational moves to teach formal writing. We’ll also explore the web annotation tool hypothes.is, which allows real-time commenting on a shared online “text” to create a more inclusive conversational space for students who find face-to-face discussion problematic
Duration: 1.5 hours
Frequency: This workshop is offered annually in October.
Curriculum Plan: Inclusive Teaching 303
Start By Believing: Responding to Student Self-Disclosures of Interpersonal Violence
According to the AAU Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct (2020), 20.6% of undergraduate students in their fourth year or higher reported nonconsensual sexual contact since starting their educational experience on their campus. As mandatory reporters, faculty are required to report incidents of interpersonal violence, but may have trouble knowing how to respond to a student in the moment they disclose. This workshop supports faculty through learning more about interpersonal violence on college campuses, positive responses to disclosures, mandatory reporting obligations, available resources, and more. By the end of the workshop, faculty will have practiced how to respond to a student who discloses.
Duration: 1.5 hours
Frequency: This workshop is offered annually in September.
Curriculum Plan: Inclusive Teaching 304
How to Support Students Under High Stress
Inspired by trauma informed teaching principles (Dr. Janice Carello), this workshop provides examples of how those principles can be actualized within your course. We’ll discuss policies, email responses, resources, and strategies within the classroom to support students so they can engage more in your course. While applicable to all courses, we’ll provide additional tools for sensitive subjects, while supporting professional development. At the end of this session, faculty will choose 1-2 techniques to begin using in their classrooms and with their students.
Duration: 1.5 hours
Frequency: This workshop is offered annually in January, with additional offerings as needed.
Curriculum Plan: Inclusive Teaching 305
Making Conflict Productive: Managing Difficult Conversations in the Classroom
Conflict can occur within a classroom during disagreements and if students don’t feel a sense of belonging. Conflict can be scary and uncomfortable, but it doesn’t have to be! In this workshop, we’ll discuss preemptive strategies and facilitation approaches to engage students in productive conversations on difficult topics. You’ll leave this session with concrete resources that can help you build community among your students and yourself. You’ll also have opportunity to role play strategies in managing difficult conversations so that you’ll feel more confident in classroom facilitation.
Duration: 1.5 hours
Frequency: This workshop is offered annually in October, with additional offerings as needed.
Curriculum Plan: Inclusive Teaching 306
Diversifying Course Content through Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Practices
All students deserve an equal opportunity to learn and to succeed. Using UDL principles as a framework, this workshop will discuss practical course design and teaching strategies to remove barriers to student learning. Through interactive group discussions, this workshop will support faculty in applying UDL principals to their courses. We will brainstorm ways to implement the principals through diversifying course content, engagement, representation, and action and expression for our students. Participants will take away at least 1-2 practical strategies to implement right away without revamping the whole curriculum. Additional resources are available through the CFFE’s Diversifying Course Content resource.
Duration: 1.5. hours
Frequency: This workshop is offered annually in October.
Curriculum Plan: Inclusive Teaching 308
Transforming Education with Classroom Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs)
CUREs can help you achieve your research goals. CUREs are in-class experiences that engage students in conducting novel research that would enhance, and be of interest, to their field broadly. This workshop will discuss how to use your research interests to create a CURE.
Duration: 1 hour
Frequency: This workshop is offered annually in March.
Curriculum Plan: Research & Teaching 400
