Center for Teaching & Learning

The pandemic has dramatically changed the way that faculty work, both in terms of teaching and scholarly or creative work. For many of us, these changes have coincided with increased demands outside of the workplace, financial hardships, and/or increased caretaking responsibilities. Faculty life in a pandemic is anything but normal, and the strategies and routines that served us well pre-pandemic may no longer be sustainable. This workshop creates space for us to gather and explore the ways individual choices might affect how we experience a semester shaped by systemic challenges. In this workshop, we will use the idea of backward design–a powerful outcomes-based approach to course planning–to holistically consider our spring semester. We’ll reflect on what outcomes we hope to achieve, and describe what progress towards those outcomes would look like. We’ll look for activities and routines that will help us reach our desired outcomes. Rather than trying to do everything that we did pre-pandemic, backward design can help us do what matters most, and identify what we can let go. As a bonus: the backward design skills developed in this workshop can also be applied to the development of courses for the semester. But our emphasis in offering this workshop is in creating a supportive structure to consider the hard choices we face. Come prepared to talk with colleagues in a supportive and understanding fashion.

Facilitated by Susanmarie Harrington, Writing in the Disciplines, and Annie Murray-Close, Center for Teaching and Learning

Please reserve this time on your calendar.  You will receive a Microsoft Teams calendar invitation 1-2 days prior to your event explaining how to join and participate in the meeting.  If you click “accept,” it will populate on your Teams calendar for easy access!