Course Syllabus
The Aspirational Teaching Institute brings faculty to the Center for Transformative Teaching for a semester-long program designed to help them tackle a major teaching challenge. The institute is designed as if it were a course, with bi-weekly synchronous sessions, instructional materials, and targeted support and feedback. Topics may vary from semester to semester. Our second offering, for the Fall 2022 semester, is “Striving for Inclusive Excellent in Education.”
Why Participate?
This program will not revolutionize your life nor your teaching. It will not rescue your students from debt, despair, or inequity. But if we do our job well and you do yours well, it might still be among the most impactful faculty development programming you participate in. This is because we are aiming straight at a big problem. We might miss the center of the target, but we strive to make our teaching more equitable. You, we, and the rest of the institution care about teaching and learning. You, we, and the rest of the institution care about diversity and inclusion. Why, then, do we often see DFW rates of 25% or greater in certain courses? Why are underrepresented students over-represented in those DFW figures? Most important, and most relevant to the programming we have in store, how can you design your course in a way that takes steps to close equity gaps and helps as many students succeed as possible?
If you want to answer that question, then we invite you to join us. Please read on. If you are uninterested in that question, or if anything in the above paragraph does not work for you, then do not feel any obligation to continue in this program.
Detailed Program Overview
The unifying questions we will tackle in the “Striving for Inclusive Excellence in Education” program are:
- How can student background impact engagement and performance in college courses?
- What can you do to help? More specifically, how can you design your course in a way that helps as many students succeed as possible?
The program facilitators from the CTT, with help from relevant campus leaders, will take a lead on answering the first question. Your primary job as a participant of this program will be to develop answers to the second question. We will offer ideas and guidance to get you started with this – but, ultimately, teaching is a personal endeavor, and the right ways of addressing these problems will need to be highly individualized. What works well for one instructor, or for one course, may work less well for another. You will need to consider which ideas make sense to you, which seem to fit with your own personality and style of teaching, and which seem to fit with the course you are teaching and the specific challenges you and your students are experiencing. While designing your distinct approaches, you will have robust help along the way from fellow participants and the CTT.
The first of our seven instructional sessions will feature CTT Director Nick Monk and the two program facilitators laying out the details of the program. All subsequent sessions will involve an asynchronous guest lecture (posted to Canvas the week before the group meeting) by a campus leader whose work is relevant to the topic of the week. At group meetings, representatives from the CTT will follow up on the campus leader’s presentation by providing initial thoughts on how participants might incorporate the ideas presented into their own courses. Following that, there will be an opportunity for questions and an open discussion.
After each session, you will have an opportunity to prepare – and, if you like, share with other participants – a reflection, in which you:
- provide observations about how the given challenge plays out in your own course;
- summarize what steps (if any) you already take to try addressing the challenge; and
- identify steps you would like to consider taking in the future.
Time will be reserved at the beginning of the following session for debriefing: you may want to share any observations you made in your class(es) since the previous session or reflect on things from the previous session that remain on your mind.
As a final deliverable for this program, we invite you to prepare detailed plans for each of the changes or interventions you identify as being worthwhile. We encourage you, as you design these plans, to take abundant advantage of opportunities to consult with peers in the program, with the program facilitators, with your students, and/or with the instructional designer who supports your college or department.
Your Facilitators
Amy and Steven are both senior instructional designers with the Center for Transformative Teaching. Amy supports the colleges of Journalism & Mass Communications, Fine & Performing Arts, and Architecture. Steven supports the colleges of Agricultural Sciences & Natural Resources, and Business. Below is more information about them and their backgrounds.
Amy Ort - Instructional Designer
Amy is a University of Nebraska-Lincoln graduate who spent several years teaching at different small liberal arts colleges before joining the CTT Instructional Design team in 2019. She specializes in Inclusive Pedagogy and has developed resources for instructors on topics like cultivating classroom equity and anti-racist teaching. She also works on projects related to curriculum development & assessment.
Steven Cain - Senior Instructional Designer
Steven joined the Instructional Design team in 2016. Previously, Steven worked as a page designer for Lee Enterprises and taught visual literacy courses for the College of Journalism. Steven earned his bachelor's degree in news-editorial and broadcast journalism in 2011 and his master's in teaching, learning, and teacher education in 2014, both from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Professional areas of interest include feedback culture, alternative grading, and inclusive teaching practices.
Outline of Topics
Below is our outline of topics for the program, centered around a variety of course components and considerations.
9/8 ~ Topic 1: Introduction to Inclusive Teaching
Guiding Questions: What is inclusive teaching? Why is it important? How does it fit with the university’s mission?
- Guest presenter: Nick Monk, Director of the CTT, will lead a discussion exploring the values and importance of inclusive pedagogies.
- CTT presenters: Amy Ort and Steven Cain will present an abbreviated version of their workshop “Striving for Inclusive Excellence.”
In this session, you'll learn some basic principles of how to make your teaching more inclusive to best serve all of your students. We’ll also consider how inclusive teaching fits with the broader university mission of inclusive excellence.
9/22 ~ Topic 2: Knowing Your Students
Guiding Questions: What assumptions do you make about your students when you don’t know them yet? How do you position yourself relative to your students in your policies and language? What strategies can you use to get to know your students better?
In this session, we’ll consider what assumptions instructors often make about students and how that can negatively impact the students in your classroom that come from historically marginalized backgrounds. You will learn specific strategies that can help you get to know your students better so you can better avoid assumptions and stereotyping.
10/6 ~ Topic 3: Inclusive Course Materials
Guiding Questions: What type of students are your course materials and exercises designed for? What strategies do you use to motivate student engagement? How can students to engage with your lessons? How can we provide variety in each of these dimensions to meet the needs of a diverse student body?
In this session, you’ll learn how your course materials and activities might be perceived by different types of students and what impact those differences can have on student learning. You will learn ways that you can motivate student engagement by providing a diverse array of learning experiences for your students.
10/20 ~ Topic 4: Equitable Assessment
Guiding Questions: How can students demonstrate that they’ve accomplished the objectives of each lesson? How do our grading structures advantage or disadvantage different people? What kinds of institutional pressures do we encounter that resist change in this area, and how can we navigate them?
In this session, you’ll learn about how our assessment and grading structures can advantage or disadvantage different people. We'll then discuss how you can ensure that assignments are designed to measure how well students have mastered learning objectives rather than other elements of their background or life experiences.
11/3 ~ Topic 5: Respectful Classroom Discourse
Guiding Questions: How do you respond to micro aggressions in the classroom? How do you prepare students for conversations about sensitive topics?
In this session, you’ll learn specific strategies you can use to respond when microaggressions or other unexpected events happen in your classroom. These can be some of the most difficult moments for instructors, so this session will provide some examples that you can work through to feel more prepared for future incidents.
11/17 ~ Topic 6: Supporting Your Students
Guiding Questions: What support systems are available for students? How do you navigate referring students to them?
There are many services available on campus to help support students, but instructors often don’t know which ones to refer students to in different situations. In this session, you’ll learn about the different support systems available and what you can do as an instructor to help students get the support that they need.
12/1 ~ Topic 7: Making it Work for You
Guiding Questions: How do these strategies relate to your teaching identity/philosophy?
Teaching is incredibly rewarding, but can also be challenging and even overwhelming. In this session, we’ll discuss how to balance your interest in supporting students with the realistic constraints that exist in your life. You’ll learn how to relate the many inclusive teaching strategies that are available with your personal teaching philosophy.
Program Schedule
Throughout the term, we will meet every other week for an instructional session. The intervening weeks will be reserved for open discussion sessions among participants or open office hours with instructional designers, who can help you review new ideas you are considering or persistent challenges you are grappling with.
The schedule of meetings will be as follows:
- Week 1 – Instructional session: Pedagogy, Part II
- Week 2 – Open discussion session among participants
- Week 3 – Instructional session: Pedagogy, Part III
- Week 4 – Open office hours with instructional designers
- Week 5 – Instructional session: Inequity, Part I
- Week 6 – Open discussion session among participants
- Week 7 – No session (Spring Break)
- Week 8 – Instructional session: Equitable Assessment
- Week 9 – Open office hours with instructional designers
- Week 10 – Instructional session: Respectful Classroom Discourse
- Week 11 – Open discussion session among participants
- Week 12 – Instructional session: Supporting Your Students
- Week 13 – Open office hours with instructional designers
- Week 14 – Instructional session: Making it Work for You
Modes of Participation
If your availability permits, we hope you will commit fully to this program. But we know that level of commitment is not realistic for most people most of the time. If you are still interested but may need to miss out on some (or all) sessions or some of the work, then we offer two other ways of thinking about your participation. Unless you are part of the Reflective Practitioner Program (more on this below), these categories are generally fluid. We asked you to express your intent during initial registration, but we understand that your availability may change along the way. You are not locked into that choice – it was just for information gathering. Modify your participation as needed, and chat with us if you need us to consider making any adjustments to accommodate your individual situation.
Committed Engagement: Institute
Institute participants will attend all seven topics (or coordinate an alternate type of engagement with the program facilitators should scheduling conflicts arise) and complete the final deliverable. Those who complete these activities will be issued a certificate of completion for the Aspirational Teaching Institute.
Curious Lurking: Workshops
If you are interested in some or all of the topics but do not have the time to commit to fully completing this as a program, you are welcome to join us as a "lurker" and attend individual topics that you are interested in without taking on an obligation to complete reflections or attend every session. You will still be added to the Canvas site, included in relevant updates, and welcome to submit reflections and to join office hours or open discussions.
Interested but Unavailable: Asynchronous Materials
If the Thursdays at 1:30 time does not work in your schedule, but you are interested in these topics, then we do not want you to be left out entirely. We will add you to the Canvas site so you can browse the resources from this institute entirely at your own convenience. Feel free to submit reflections, contribute to asynchronous discussions, or participate in any other way that makes sense to you. We will do our best to make sure that the synchronous sessions are only one part of this institute.
Program Expectations
Please view the program expectations in this section as a default. We want you to modify these expectations in any way that works for you. This is your program, so we want it to suit your needs. And what we certainly want to avoid is a situation in which you cannot see yourself completing these expectations, so you cut off your participation and do nothing. With this in mind, please figure out what type and level of work would be best in your situation – viewing the below as a starting point for your consideration. If you can take on more than this and want to go further – perhaps redesigning your course from scratch – great! We are happy to support that effort in whatever way would help. If you are extremely busy and cannot accomplish everything spelled out below but can do some fraction of it – good for you for going that far! If you find a reflection prompt uninspiring, then answer the question we should have asked. And so on. In all of these ways and others, modify your participation as needed.
Here is what we generally expect your participation in this program to look like:
- Watch guest speaker video. For each of our sessions/topics, we will begin by hearing from a campus leader whose work is relevant to that topic. In a recorded video (typically 10-15 minutes), they will offer insights into the student success challenge that will be our focus for the upcoming session. We will release the video about two weeks before the scheduled session on that topic.
- Begin observing your own class(es). With the guest speaker’s insights in hand, begin looking to see what you find in your own course(s). If they summarized a challenge that students face, can you find evidence of your students struggling with this challenge? If they made recommendations for how to approach the challenge, begin thinking about what you currently do and don’t currently do to address this challenge.
- Attend synchronous session. Every other Thursday at 1:30pm, we will meet over Zoom to discuss the challenge of that week. One or more instructional designers from the CTT will join us to recommend a few concrete strategies and to help guide our discussion. Join the session ready to ask clarifying questions or contribute your own ideas.
- Reflect on which changes you would like to be making. After the session, we ask that you take time to reflect on what was discussed and to try identifying any steps you would personally like to take. Are there any changes (large or small) that you would like to try making? How might you begin implementing those? We ask that you complete a reflection after each session. In our Canvas site, you will find prompts and a place to submit your reflection after each session. The program facilitators, and perhaps other participants (if you share your reflections), will offer whatever helpful thoughts they might have on your reflection.
- Develop concrete plans. Before the end of the program, decide which ideas, among all of those you have considered during this program, you want to act on – and when and how you will do that. We encourage you to develop the most specific plans possible, and we will be available to provide guidance as needed. We will provide more details about how to approach this final deliverable later during the program.