Making the Space to Reimagine Teaching

When you become a teacher, you commit to a life of learning—not just for your students, but for yourself. You can feel totally comfortable and confident in your teaching practices, and then suddenly some new technology or some new group of students comes along and upends everything you think you know about education.

In those moments, instructors often seek out resources and conversations with peers and students to think through how they might adapt their teaching. But actually giving up a beloved teaching technique can provoke a real sense of loss, and adopting a new approach can be scary.

Jordan Troisi, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Colby College, talks with host Jim Lang about one way colleges and universities can support faculty on this journey: course design institutes. Both Colby and Notre Dame are home to such programs, in which faculty gather with colleagues and teaching specialists in an extended process of reimagining their work as educators.

Key Topics Discussed:

• How course design work led Jordan to make a concrete change to his own teaching practices
• Common features of course design institutes, which run for a relatively short amount of time, and ways they can advance instructors’ lifelong efforts to improve as teachers
• Making the time instructors spend in these institutes worth their commitment
• Incorporating your experience in a course design institute as part of the narrative around your CV
• The prevalence of grading as a topic Jordan sees instructors wanting to discuss
• Drawing on relationships among faculty and a broader sense of belonging to motivate more instructors to participate in structured explorations of their teaching
• The questions to ask when planning a course design institute

Guest Bio: Jordan Troisi serves as the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Colby College. He previously spent nine years as a psychology faculty member, first at Widener University and then at Sewanee: The University of the South. His scholarly work includes more than 20 peer-reviewed and invited publications on effective teaching as well as two books: Midcourse Correction for the College Classroom: Putting Small Group Instructional Diagnosis to Work and, most recently, Developing High-Impact Course Design Institutes: A Model for Change.

Resources Mentioned:

• Book: Developing High-Impact Course Design Institutes: A Model for Change (Routledge)
• Colby Center for Teaching and Learning’s Course (re)Design Institutes
• Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center Course Design Academy

Designed for Learning is hosted by Jim Lang, a professor of the practice in Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence and the author of several influential books on teaching. The podcast is produced by Notre Dame Learning’s Office of Digital Learning. For more, visit learning.nd.edu/podcast. You can also follow Notre Dame Learning on LinkedIn.