The 2025 Virtual Gathering site is ready! Click the button that says "Leading With Our Values" for this year's gathering details.
All times listed in Eastern.
Please note that Zoom links to individual sessions will be shared with all registered attendees about 24 hours in advance.
Workshops will take place concurrently in different Zoom meetings. Select one:
Facilitator: Emily Pitts Donahoe
This session has been cancelled.
Facilitator: Constanza Bartholomae
Key Takeaways
Discuss current barriers that neurodivergent colleagues are facing.
Review anecdotes of anonymized neurodivergent colleague experiences.
Articulate suggestions that could reduce these barriers and struggles.
Interact with other folks who care deeply about the wellbeing and inclusion of neurodivergent colleagues.
Planned Activities
This session will, in part, include sharing some of my research on what neurodivergent staff and faculty wish their colleagues knew. There will also be time for folks in the session to use the chat function to discuss prompts I provide, review anonymized quotes from neurodivergent colleagues about barriers they are facing in the workplace, and work collectively to brainstorm some way that we might alleviate these barriers.
Facilitator: Ligia Pamfilie
Key Takeaways
Design strategies to initiate and sustain productive educational development partnerships with faculty members across disciplines.
Develop approaches to foster faculty growth, reflective practice, and openness to instructional innovation through constructive feedback and guidance.
Evaluate evidence-based consultative methods for redesigning courses, assessments, and implementing high-impact educational practices.
Identify opportunities to advocate for educational development resources and promote their visibility as valued partners in institutional teaching and learning initiatives.
Planned Activities
In today's rapidly evolving higher education landscape, strategic partnerships between educational developers and faculty are essential for fostering growth and innovation. This interactive session explores how to cultivate collaborative relationships that drive continuous improvement in teaching, learning, and academic programs. You will learn strategies for leveraging educational development expertise to support faculty growth, implement evidence-based instructional practices, and advance institutional initiatives. This session will empower educational developers to position themselves as valued partners who can collaboratively guide faculty toward continuous growth while driving positive change in teaching and learning outcomes across the institution.
We will work in small groups on four main campus scenarios. Each small group will be built intentionally based on the main role participants have at their institution: instructor, educational developer, and administrator. We will strive to include at least one instructor, educational developer, and administrator in each small group. Participants will work together to think through best practices for supporting educators in each one of the four scenarios, and be change agents in higher education reform.
The scenarios will focus on:
Diversity of instructor profiles: we will covers a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and teaching contexts that participants are likely to encounter at their own institutions.
Distinct challenges/needs.
Multiple perspectives: having mixed groups of instructors, educational developers, and administrators will allow rich dialogue from various vantage points.
The four scenarios will be:
Scenario 1: new faculty, no teaching experience, but subject matter in their field; highly motivated to support their students and help them be successful.
Scenario 2: graduate teaching assistant, international background, new to teaching in the United States, no prior teaching experience; determined to be a role model for their students and support their educational journey.
Scenario 3: highly experience full professor with extensive tenure in higher education administration, demonstrating a trajectory of advancement through various leadership positions over numerous years.
Scenario 4: part-time instructor, accomplished practitioner in their field, asked to teach a fully online special topics course on short-notice, two weeks before the start of the semester; some course design experience, but this course needs to be built from scratch.
Small groups will have time to think through their assigned scenario first individually, then as a group, and we will conclude with a report-out to the whole group.
Workshops will take place concurrently in different Zoom meetings. Select one:
Facilitators: Hannah Rogers, Ashley Smith, and Jess Dewey
Key Takeaways
This session will offer three main takeaways aligned with the conference themes:
By sharing the successes of our organization’s DEIA group, we will provide an example of how faculty developers can lead from our positions
By demonstrating how to build community through burden sharing, we will discuss how we can collectively maintain well-being
By defining challenges to the audience, we will ask for others’ experiences and feedback to brainstorm together how to continue working in flawed systems.
Planned Activities
To begin, we will give a short talk discussing our experience leading and participating in our organization’s DEIA action group. We will then focus on one challenge we’ve faced as part of this group and use that to engage our audience. We will use the polling tool WooClap to guide 15-minutes of large group discussions focused on the theme of burden sharing to work together within flawed systems. This will allow audience members to share their ideas either verbally or anonymously through writing, and allow the community to brainstorm quickly.
Facilitators: Josephine Guan and Ariel Harlap
Key Takeaways
Share our process of testing out a HyFlex set-up at our CTL.
Share successes and challenges of implementing HyFlex.
Share our key findings from applying an IEH lens to hosting HyFlex events.
Planned Activities
We will begin with a 10-minute talk about Intentionally Equitable Hospitality, including our research process & findings. We will then do a 10-minute live demo of the HyFlex set-up we use in our CTL, and conclude with 10 minutes for any questions or discussion.
Lightning talks will take place back-to-back in the same Zoom meeting.
Presenter: Thomas J. Tobin
Key Takeaways
You'll learn two things to do—and two things to avoid—when you want to advocate for cultural change, especially when your role isn't yet part of the existing power or political structures of an organization.
Presenter: Cait S. Kirby
Key Takeaways
Consider the importance of providing legally-protected disability accommodations to students.
Reflect on the impact of language on instructor attitudes.
Consider the impact of faculty lack of experience with disability accommodations on their willingness to provide accommodations.
Presenters: Annescia Dillard and Amanda Estacio
Description
Our session is to share our Presenter's Guide which was developed for folks who provide professional development at our institution through our Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE). We recognized the need to have guidelines for giving accessible presentations as accessibility work at our institution is often done in silos. Because our CTL interacts with different departments and divisions, our goal for the guidelines is to bridge any accessibility gaps and perhaps be adopted college-wide. We want to take this opportunity to share with you what we have done so far.
Presenter: Adam Smith
Key Takeaways
Participants will consider the role of uncertainty in evidence-based practice, articulate competing values in their work, and identify limits they can embrace in their work and scholarship.
Workshops will take place concurrently in different Zoom meetings. Select one:
Facilitators: Liz Norell and Megan Robertson
Key Takeaways
Understanding what To Improve the Academy (TIA) (and similar journals) publish in the scholarship of educational development.
Developing relationships with potential authors, reviewers, and future editorial team members.
Identifying challenges for new/minoritized educational developers to publish scholarship and collaboratively suggesting ideas to mitigate those challenges.
Planned Activities
This will be a live podcast recording session with a dialogue between two of TIA's editorial team members and at least two educational developers working on scholarship. After about 30 minutes of dialogue around how TIA is making space for diverse voices and ways of knowing in our journal, we will invite the audience into a Q&A with editors and authors/peer reviewers. This session will be recorded for editing and distribution on the Centering Centers podcast.
Facilitators: Stefanie Baier, Hima Rawal, and Samara Chamoun
Key Takeaways
Participants will discuss the challenges educators and students are facing in a fast-paced world where empathy and compassion are often lacking. They will engage in mindfulness practices that cultivate Care, Appreciation, Kindness, and Empathy (CAKE) to foster true connection and wellbeing. They will process together how they can create an engaging, equitable, effective and holistic environment for self-care and care for one another.
Planned Activities
We will structure the session into four parts:
First we will share research on the current development around empathy, isolation, and the pressures of evaluative environments.
We will give our participants opportunities to share the ways they perceive their work environments and the needs they have identified within their contexts.
The main focus of our session will be practicing mindful CAKE strategies for implementation in their personal and work lives.
Lastly, we will encourage everyone to share their practices and collect these to distribute among the group to build a wellbeing toolkit.
Facilitators: Melissa Ko and Tara Mason
Key Takeaways
Define or revisit the goals for faculty engagement, experiences, and learning of your educational development team (and its services/programs/workshops) and interrogate where and how equity factors into these goals.
Identify or revisit evidence of achieving these specific goals/outcomes and interrogate how you can demonstrate equity in participant engagement, experience, and/or learning.
Build your educational development team’s evaluation plan by mapping goals and evidence to the activities and practices of your team.
Planned Activities
This is an active working session where participants are encouraged to bring data/reflections from previous programs or projects to analyze within the session activities. Participants will consider the efficacy/impact of their CTL programs in this academic year using guiding equity prompts and also brainstorm questions/needs for next year.
As a group, presenters will share some tools and frameworks that can help with evaluation planning within a CTL that participants will engage with during the session. Presenters will draw from a case study of evaluating their own faculty development program for inclusive teaching.
Using PollEverywhere, participants will share their goals for faculty engagement, experiences, and learning via the faculty development programs that they offer. Presenters will invite folks to interrogate if and where “equity and inclusion” is a goal of our work, and how we might define or measure it.
In small breakout groups, participants will discuss goals for inclusivity within faculty development programs (e.g. what does it mean, what would it look like). Each group will then report out on their discussion for what inclusivity looks like in a faculty development program and how it can be measured.
Presenters will share and compare strategies to promote inclusivity for instructors in faculty development programs, including universal design for learning, differentiated instruction, and strength-based approaches, based on examples from our own CTL.
In small groups, participants will brainstorm strategies to increase inclusivity and equity in faculty experience when faculty are learners in our faculty development programs. Using PollEverywhere, participants will share brainstormed approaches to improve the inclusivity of our programs and services.
As a group, participants will reflect on how to reach and assess inclusion as a program goal in their own CTL during the coming academic year.
At the end of each day during the virtual gathering, we invite you to join us for a capstone session that will be guided by one of the conference volunteers. Attendees will have the opportunity to reflect on the day’s talks and workshops alongside their colleagues. We will use the community note taking documents from each session as a starting point for the conversation. Participants can expect these capstone sessions to include:
Time for silent reflection on ideas and questions from the day’s presentations
The chance to share their thoughts either in writing or verbally with the group
Brainstorming as a community about emerging topics and questions
Synthesizing primary takeaways from the day
Discussions about possible next steps
The goal of these capstone sessions is that everyone can come away with one or two specific actions they could take to implement what they’ve learned during the gathering in their professional and personal lives. We hope you’ll join us!
Ready to join us?