2020-2021 Teaching Academy Annual Report
Active Teaching Labs
(Led by John Martin) In collaboration with DoIT Academic Technology, we held 39 Active Teaching Labs, reaching 1477 campus participants. Due to the pandemic, we shifted from holding them face-to-face to moving them online. As many in the campus community were eager for help moving to remote teaching, our number greatly increased (up from 976 participants during 2019-2020).
Affiliates
(Led by Sue Wenker and Jamie Henke) The affiliate program is a means to encourage and provide a gateway into the Teaching Academy. Information about becoming an affiliate is found on the Teaching Academy webpage. in a number of ways. From March 2020-March 2021 seven people have been recognized as affiliates of the Teaching Academy. Additionally, we have a matching clinical affiliate in the health sciences program which is co-sponsored by the Interprofessional Continuing Education Partnership. One person was recognized as a clinical affiliate in 2020.
Assessment
(Led by Jenn Kowalkowski) The Teaching Academy began to delve into what information we should be collecting at events.
Communications/Newsletter
(Led by John Martin and Dan Pell): The teachingacademy.wisc.edu website was continually updated with more archived materials being added throughout the year. In May 2021, we suffered an unexpected loss of the data during a major redesign. Ten Teaching Academy Newsletters were created and shared with the campus community (Teaching Academy Members and other opt-ins).
Feedback on Teaching
(Led by Mo Bischof, Jamie Henke, Julie Johnson, Beth Martin, John Martin, Andrew McWard, Megan Schmid) Working with the Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, we developed a Canvas site for resources and a Google Form to collect volunteer information.
Learning Environments and Pedagogics (LEaP)
(Led by Jamie Henke) Our usual fall LEaP workshops were canceled due to the pandemic. We were encouraged by the administration to offer an online version of the program in January. The team put together a combination of synchronous sessions and asynchronous materials and activities and presented an online version of LEaP to 60+ participants in January. We had already been planning to add a session in teaching online at what became the cancelled August sessions, so we were very pleased to include Karen Skibba and Karin Spader in our LEaP team during our January workshop. We continue to receive very positive reviews, the workshop still fills within hours and always has a wait list as well. We are currently planning to offer both I-LEaP and TA-LEaP in our traditional in person during the week of August 23, 2021.
Member Events
(Led by Adrian Treves and Catalina Toma) We held two Member events — both online: Constructive Criticism of Teaching: How to give it; How to take it (Dec 10, 2020) and Silver Linings of Teaching During the Pandemic (May 14, 2021)
Spring and Fall Retreats
Led by Dan Pell and John Martin) Two Retreats were held this year: A More Inclusive and Empowering Campus (Oct 02, 2020) and Retreat Recap: Inclusive Teaching – Gender Inclusivity (Jan 31, 2020)
Undergraduate Chat Learn and Share Space (U-CLaSS)
(Led by Jamie Henke) We currently have three U-CLaSS sessions pending, two of which were put on hold due to the pandemic, and one new session that is currently in the beginning development stages. The two sessions that have already gone through the preliminary planning stages are a session with Posse students, and a session with student athletes. We hope to be able to schedule the session with Posse students some time next fall. The instructional specialists in the athletic department had initially suggested we may want to meet with student athletes when they arrive in August. We plan to check with the athletic department in early June to discuss whether a summer meeting 2021 would be feasible. The newest U-CLaSS event on our pending list is a session on Linguistic Discrimination.
We were able to hold two very useful U-CLaSS sessions in 2020, despite the pandemic, one with career advisors here on campus, followed up by a session with the general advising staff. Both groups provided very valuable information to share with instructors, and the overlap between what we were told by the general advisors and what we’ve been told in our U-CLaSS sessions with students was pretty amazing. The most valuable thing we learned from our meeting with career advisors is how important it is for us to share the bumps in the road of our own career paths with our students.