Our Philosophy
Design
We view teaching as a design activity, requiring creativity, iteration, openness to failure, and playful experimentation. Similarly, we approach the creation of these workshops with the unique characteristics of the faculty, students, and their institutional context in mind. We also invite attendees into the workshop as co-designers, embracing a spirit of creativity and encouraging iteration and intentional feedback from us to attendees and from attendees to us.
Activity
In our workshops, we hope to model the very practices we’re encouraging faculty to use in their classrooms. We not only incorporate lots of interaction and activity, but also attempt to maintain pedagogical transparency, explaining how and why we’ve designed certain activities. This way, not only are faculty staying engaged but they are also observing techniques that they can apply in their own classrooms. As a part of all of these activities, we make sure to provide breaks and opportunities for people to reflect on what they are learning.
Coaching
All faculty bring a lot of insight and experience to these workshops. Our goal is to create a space that leverages that prior knowledge to expand their understanding and perspective and at the same time, helps foster creativity. Therefore, our approach is to take on the role of coach and facilitator, rather than purely as an instructor delivering content.
Community
We recognize that it isn’t every day that so many faculty get to slow down, visit, and learn with and from each other. Therefore, we encourage inter- and cross-disciplinary participation in the workshops, often including a variety of individual and small-group work, leading to group-wide discussions across diverse disciplinary and educational experiences. While our disciplinary homes and faculty appointments are in engineering, we are happy to engage faculty from all disciplines.
Vulnerability
Some of the topics that come up in these workshops can be uncomfortable. But to grow, we have to have a safe space to wrestle with those concepts. We are intentional about crafting a workshop space where we hope people feel safe being vulnerable and open to growth.
Theoretically Grounded
While we all bring our perspectives and instructional experiences to the workshop, we seek to situate our work in the context of educational theories and student-centered practices supported by our or other scholars’ research. We find that these theories help us and workshop attendees to make sense of patterns we see in our classrooms and identify potential opportunities to better design for and with our students.