Center For Teaching Excellence University Of Utah

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Nov 1, 2025, 4:54 PM

center for teaching excellence university of utah

Sept 11th: American Classroom Management: Strategies for International Instructors Sept 23rd: Digital Course Accessibility: What Is Required, and How Do I Do It Oct 14th: Teaching Non-Traditional Students Oct 22nd: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing: Collaborative Learning for Multiple Modalities Nov 3rd: Teaching Students to Use AI Responsibly Anticipating that first higher ed course you’ll teach but not sure where to start?

Or maybe you’ve taught a course or two but can’t manage to keep your students awake? This course will help you develop the basic pedagogical knowledge and skills necessary to succeed as an instructor in a higher education setting. You will learn how to design and develop a course, and we will model several types of instruction including discussion, lecture, collaborative work, and active learning. We will adopt a learner-centered approach to teaching and learning in which instructor and students alike will be responsible for bringing material, issues, and ideas to the group. We will all benefit from the variety of departments represented by the group and the unique approaches and perspectives that variety brings. Through interactive activities and discussion, you will be encouraged to cultivate your own individual approach to teaching.

Have you taken an online class - recently? What was your experience? Did you love it, hate it, feel isolated? Online teaching and learning can no longer be an isolating process for students or instructors if it is to survive as a viable teaching and learning environment. The shift from a face-to-face classroom to an online classroom does take time and effort on the part of both the instructor and the students. Online teaching does not require a different course design process; however it does require a different way of thinking about content organization and presentation, and the interface between teacher, student and technology.

This asynchronous online 3-credit course explores principles of online learning; instructional technology best practices, and provides participants with the opportunity to experiment with designing their own online strategies, techniques and approaches. CTLE 6510/651 is an online 3-credit course open to all instructors (graduate students and faculty) at the U. Prerequisite: Graduate Student or Faculty standing. (2 CR) This course is a 2-credit, half-semester course. It provides an opportunity to develop advanced online teaching and course design skills.

This course introduces enhanced online teaching/learning tools, resources, concepts, and challenges. Students will revise and upgrade a preexisting online courses, investigate relevant online learning topics and issues, and develop strategies for assessing online courses and student learning. This activity can be adjusted to fit your class needs. It can be used to assess if students have retained knowledge from prerequisite classes (“Write down a quick proof of the quadratic equation.”) or as an assessment of the lesson you just delivered. Simply carve out 1-2 minutes during class where students can answer a targeted question. Give them the prompt, and then float throughout the room to provide assistance as needed.

These can be anonymous or for credit, and can even be used to take roll. Another way to involve students in a consistent self-assessment is to have a rotating “class scribe” job. Every class begins with a student spending 30 seconds to 1 minute recapping the last class period and going over the main points from their notes. This rotates throughout the class and can be done for credit or just as a warm-up. You’ll be able to see if students have absorbed the material and directly connect it to your lecture, or begin a discussion with the class (e.g., What would you like to add? How does x apply to today’s reading?).

Students are expected to pay attention to their peers, but it helps to occasionally test their skills. After one student gives an in-depth answer to an open-ended question, ask another student to rephrase the first student’s answer. Then, have the second student respond. Mixing active listening into your discussion sessions will keep students on their toes and encourage them to really absorb what their peers are saying. For a think-pair-share activity, decide on an open-ended topic or question that applies to your learning objectives. Then, have them “think” (or write) about it for a couple minutes, giving them time to process the information on their own.

Pair the class off and give them time to discuss; follow that up with a brief presentation to the class (no need for poster boards or slideshows). This is a great way to get students moving around the classroom and interacting with each other. Students will become experts on one particular topic and then teach that topic to their peers. Begin by deciding what handouts or articles you want students to learn. They will begin in a “home” group where everyone works on the same article and discusses it together. Once the time has elapsed, the groups will split, and new groups will be formed with one representative from the original “home” groups acting as experts on their topic.

You can then have the groups present in front of the class or simply exchange ideas on their data. Collaborating with instructors to inspire and support learning experiences at the U. One source for faculty teaching resources The Faculty Center represents the services and support of both UIT's Digital Learning Technologies and the Martha Bradley Evans Center for Teaching Excellence (formerly CTLE). Whether you need technical support, help with student-centered course design, or the latest pedagogical best practices, we have you covered. Meet with a CTE consultant to incorporate best practices, review curriculum or course materials, or plan a departmental workshop.

Receive feedback on your in-class instruction from a consultant or plan a course or program evaluation from students. Check out the Graduate Student Training opportunities the Center for Teaching Excellence offers for Fall and Summer 2024! The Graduate Teaching Institute is free for all grad students and postdocs at the U. Over 4 days, CTE takes students from course development to delivery, with training in educational technology and working with a wide range of students. This year’s GTI will take place May 6-9. Registration is open, but it is limited.

The graduate certificate in Teaching in Higher Education will start enrolling for Fall 2024 soon. The certificate is a for-credit certificate with 15 credits. 12 of those credits are taken in coursework with CTE, and 3 are electives related to teaching in higher education. The Annual Teaching Symposium is a daylong conference on teaching and ed tech right before the fall semester every year. Registration will open in summer and will be free for all faculty, students, and postdocs. This year’s symposium will be on August 12.

For questions, please reach out to Anne Cook. The Martha Bradley Evans Center for Teaching Excellence (MBE-CTE) supports the University of Utah’s mission and core values of student success and teaching excellence by promoting engaging and transformational student learning experiences. At MBE-CTE, we strive to improve teaching effectiveness through evidence-based pedagogy, while serving the needs of teaching-oriented faculty, instructors, and graduate students. By doing so, we celebrate and strengthen the belonging, sustainability, and success of the University of Utah campus and community. Instructional Systems and Operations Coordinator Higher Education Instructional Consultant

For questions or more information, please contact us at cte@utah.edu. At the U, we recognize the need to evaluate the effectiveness of our teachers. The Martha Bradley Evans Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) is leading a campus-wide initiative to implement a Teaching Effectiveness Framework to define, evaluate, and reward teaching excellence. We are joining our peer institutions in creating a common campus-wide approach to teaching assessment that is disciplinarily adapted and enacted, and centrally supported. For many years we have relied too heavily on limited and partial sources of evidence to assess teaching effectiveness, mainly student feedback. Now, leveraging decades of scholarship, our Teaching Effectiveness Framework uses seven rubric dimensions and multiple sources of evidence to describe and identify effective teaching across all disciplines, levels, and modalities.

Departments are encouraged to adapt the rubric to fit disciplinary expectations and to weight areas most meaningful to the discipline. CTE will provide centralized, multidimensional assessment tools to support the evaluation efforts of our faculty and administrators. Address questions or suggestions to Adam Halstrom, adam.halstrom@utah.edu. The Martha Bradley Evans Center for Teaching Excellence offers a myriad of services for instructors with an emphasis on best pedagogical practices and strategies for teaching in higher education. All CTE services are confidential. You can read the CTE Confidentiality Policy here.

From departmental workshops, curriculum review and mapping to program student focus groups, a CTE consultant will aid your department in ensuring the best teaching approaches. A catalog of courses that prepares individuals with the foundational pedagogical knowledge and skills to fulfill their teaching mission in an institution of higher education. Meet with a CTE consultant to discuss teaching in higher education that does not fall into a specific course or departmental request. The University of Utah and the Utah System of Higher Education (USHE) require instructors to include specific information about the institution and their courses in all published syllabi. The Core Syllabus is an abbreviated document that includes only the required information about the course in a standardized format. At minimum, your Core Syllabus should include:

USHE defines a “mandatory course” as all sections of a course required for graduation, including general education or major requirements, and for which there is no other course that meets the requirement. The requirements to include required or recommended reading assignments and general descriptions of the subject matter for each lecture or discussion do not apply to academic courses that are not mandatory. Learn more about the guidance issued from USHE on state requirements for syllabi and definition of "mandatory course" here. At the most basic level, a course syllabus serves to communicate a road map for a course - both for the instructor and the students. It lays out the trajectory of topics, readings, assignments, activities and assessments for meeting the course objectives. In addition, it sets the tone for the semester, establishes class policies and procedures, and begins the process of establishing a learning community.

Below, we have provided steps for syllabus design that take you one step beyond simple content organization and encourage reflection and investment in the tone you wish to set for your course. We have crafted a Syllabus Checklist based on guidelines for essential and suggested content. The elements in the checklist are not all required, but will give you a sense of what comprises a comprehensive syllabus. In addition, we have developed a Syllabus Template for your use. The template is designed to use in conjunction with the syllabus checklist. The text included within [brackets] should be replaced with your own relevant course content.

Center For Teaching Excellence University Of Utah

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