Join a Current Teaching Circle

Shaun Foster, CTL Faculty Fellow, Academic Affairs; School of Design, CAD

This synchronous online teaching circle will explore how AI tools can streamline administrative tasks, personalize learning experiences, and enhance instructional quality and engagement. In our explorations we will:

• Investigate adaptive learning technologies that tailor educational content to individual student needs and learning styles
• Utilize AI to create interactive and immersive learning experiences that keep students engaged
• Leverage AI tools to aid in the creation of educational materials, such as lecture notes, presentations, and multimedia content
• Streamline administrative tasks such as scheduling, student tracking, and communication using AI
• Use AI to analyze student performance data and provide insights to enhance teaching methods and course design
• Incorporate AI into curriculum design to ensure that courses are up to date with current technological advancements and industry needs

Each meeting will involve a mixture of group activities, including:

• Virtual “hands-on workshops” for participants to explore AI tools and share their experiences
• Discussions of a specific subtopic, starting with a short introduction to seed the conversation
• Opportunities for participants to provide examples from their own teaching practices and share resources

We will meet via Zoom from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. on seven Fridays--September 6 and 20, October 4 and 18, November 1 and 15, and December 6--during the Fall semester. If you are interested in joining this circle, email Shaun Foster.

Colin Mathers, Department of Philosophy, CLA

Grades alone rarely foster enduring enthusiasm for learning, so this teaching circle presents an opportunity to think about student motivation beyond grades. Potential topics for exploration include setting meaningful learning goals, fostering intrinsic motivation, creating a supportive teaching environment, engaging instructional activities, and addressing barriers to motivation. We will meet on-campus and in-person once monthly with a schedule to be determined by polling. If you are interested in joining this circle, email Colin Mathers.
 

Jessamy Comer, CTL Faculty Fellow, Academic Affairs; Department of Psychology, CLA

In this teaching circle, we will meet via Zoom to discuss techniques to help faculty with their grading process. Specifically, we will discuss strategies to make the grading process quicker and more efficient, as well as ideas for improving the quality of feedback on student work. We will schedule the meeting times/days via a scheduling poll. If there is sufficient interest, we will continue through Spring semester 2025. If you are interested in joining this circle, email Jessamy Comer.

Yewande Abraham, Civil Engineering Technology Environmental Management and Safety, CET

With the growing emphasis on sustainability across various disciplines, it is crucial for educators to effectively integrate sustainability concepts into the curriculum. This teaching circle aims to provide a platform for faculty to explore innovative teaching strategies, share resources, and develop actionable plans to incorporate sustainability into their courses. By fostering a collaborative environment, we will enhance our collective understanding of sustainability and its application in diverse educational contexts.  

Our objectives are to: 1) explore various approaches for embedding sustainability principles in curricula, 2) share case studies and practical examples of sustainability integration, 3) develop interdisciplinary collaborations that promote sustainability across different fields of study, 4) create a repository of resources and teaching materials focused on sustainability education, and 5) introduce the Engineering for One Planet (EOP) framework as a tool for this integration.

The teaching circle will meet every other Friday from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. The first meeting will be held on September 6. Meetings will be held in person. If you are interested in joining this circle, email Yewande Abraham.

Michelle Chabot, CTL Faculty Fellow, Academic Affairs; School of Physics and Astronomy, COS

Building connections with peers is often challenging for busy and overwhelmed newer faculty. Let's make it easier! This group is open to faculty of all ranks and lengths of service at RIT. More seasoned faculty who want to get to know the new(er) faculty from across the university are more than welcome. Our primary focus is to help newer faculty adjust, share teaching tips and tricks, and develop resources and ideas to support future newcomers. Often, a faculty job at a university becomes a lifetime career. Let's work together to make our careers—and each other—amazing. We will meet in person, biweekly, and you will be polled for availability. If you are interested in joining this circle, email Michelle Chabot.

Mary Golden, Interior Design Program, CAD

If you are teaching a project-based undergraduate capstone course you are not alone! This year-long teaching circle is for all faculty engaged in facilitating senior-level capstone projects in Technology, Art, and/or Design. We will discuss course formats, research expectations, project execution, and share resources within and outside our group.

Topics will include, but are not limited to, learning outcomes, teaching effectiveness, course coordination, approaches to grading, and the student experience. Additional topics will be added based on participant feedback. Polling will be used to organize a monthly meeting date and format (in-person and/or Zoom) based on group interest and availability. If you are interested in joining this circle, email Mary Golden.

Phil Shaw, CTL Faculty Fellow, Academic Affairs; University Writing Program, SOIS

In their first four semesters, students experience critical transitions between ways of knowing and being. During this time, they may cross disciplinary thresholds, get caught in conceptual bottlenecks, and pass through the gateways necessary to gain expertise as students and future professionals.

The purpose of this year-long teaching circle is for participants to share, explore, and develop best practices for engaging first- and second-year students. Along the way we will hear from important guest speakers and discuss some key readings, ranging from first-person accounts to national research studies to a recent survey of RIT faculty who teach gateway courses.

This teaching circle is also intended to be highly integrative and action-oriented: What can we do in our classroom, department, college, and institution to better welcome our students to learn? Between our heavy courseloads and the vast differences in student preparation and competencies, so much is asked of faculty who teach introductory gateway courses. And we are asking a lot from our students, too. Which is why we need to meet as a group to clarify our strategies for sharing that work and identifying the explicit changes we can make individually and/or help bring about institutionally.

This teaching circle will meet on-campus and in-person throughout the Fall and Spring semesters at a time and frequency to be determined by poll. If you are interested in joining this circle, email Phil Shaw.

Ashish Agrawal and Jeff Stransky, both in the Dean's Office, CET

If you are like many instructors, you spend a significant amount of time and effort to improve your teaching to help students better learn the course materials. Naturally, you would like to know whether all this time and effect has resulted in the intended learning. Some of us rely on course grades to confirm improvements in student learning. But are grades a reliable measure of learning? If not, who or what can we rely upon?

This teaching circle aims to introduce participants to the goals and methods employed in systematic educational research on teaching and learning. Regardless of your academic discipline and prior experience in education/social-science research, this circle will acquaint participants with the considerations and strategies needed to transition from conducting research in a technical discipline to a social-science one. We will bring in guest speakers from the Center for Advancing Scholarship to Transform Learning (CASTLE) to explain and model their research practices.

Our circle is intended for RIT faculty, teaching staff, postdocs, GTAs, and other instructors of record who are interested in conducting educational research but who do not yet have a sufficient methodological background. An educational-research reading will be assigned before each meeting, which will be devoted to discussing and applying the respective reading to a relevant research problem. This circle may be useful, for example, for faculty who aim to write a NSF CAREER or a Provost’s Learning Innovation Grants proposal, as these grants require an educational-research component.

Our circle will meet in-person and on-campus approximately twice a month during Fall semester, with dates determined by poll. If you are interested in joining this circle, email Ashish Agrawal.

Walter Bubie, Department of Information and Computing Studies, NTID; Catherine Clark, Communication Studies and Services, NTID; Jennifer Verbakel, Communication Studies and Services, NTID

Are you curious about implementing strategies that could increase student engagement? Do your students nod off during well-crafted lectures? Do you want to learn an approach regarding student engagement based on brain science? If you answered yes, you may be interested in joining this teaching circle. 

Our teaching circle will 1) explore six brain-friendly and brain-centered teaching principles documented by Sharon Bowman, 2) share actual experiences of using the principles and 3) discuss strategies that each of us may integrate into our courses. These principles inform instructional methods for “chunking” information in specific ways that result in greater student-student interaction, physical movement, self-learning, and problem solving. The objective of applying these methods is to make what is taught “stick” in the student’s head.

Students are diverse, each learns best through different approaches. A huge majority of youth today are strongly attracted to the challenging interactivity of video games. Gamification aside, they really want challenges and engagement even in learning. We invite anyone who is interested in learning more about Bowman’s principles and active learning strategies to join this teaching circle. We are confident participants will gain practical strategies to try out in their classes.

We will meet biweekly in person at NTID and you will be polled for availability If you are interested in joining this circle, email Jennifer Verbakel.