Showing that you are an effective teacher is crucial to your success as a faculty member, especially if you are preparing for tenure review. A teaching portfolio gives you the chance to showcase your teaching, to explain why you do what you do in the classroom, and to demonstrate why your methods work. This workshop will give you tips for collecting and displaying materials that will help you articulate your philosophy of teaching and demonstrate your strengths as a teacher.
Please note: This session will focus on teaching portfolios as they are used for tenure/promotion packages. A session on teaching portfolios for future faculty/graduate students, which will focus on using a teaching portfolio as part of an academic job search, will be offered on October 13.

Whether you have a “performer” personality or not, or whether you lecture a lot or a little, it’s useful from time to time to re-visit “best practices” for making your lectures engaging, interesting, effective learning tools for students. How can you  ensure that (a) the lecture’s content and delivery serve the purpose you intended it to, and (b) that the context and set-up for each lecture lead to maximum impact on student learning? In this “lecture-lecture” (or “demo-workshop”) participants will experience a variety of techniques for engaging students via lecture format, and reflect upon ways that their current lectures can be tweaked, supplemented, contextualized or revised for heightened effect.

One of the frustrations of teaching undergraduate classes is dealing with students who are ill-prepared for college-level reading and writing assignments. The good news is that there are ways to move beyond that frustration and enhance students’ skills. This workshop will give you some ways to think about the development of reading and writing skills, and we will demonstrate some strategies for improving reading and writing skills without sacrificing course content. We will also help you consider how you might use these techniques in your own classes.

Reservations are required. Enrollment in this one-day seminar is limited. Breakfast and lunch will be served.
This is a rare opportunity for UAlbany faculty to spend a day with the pre-eminent authority on course design for university professors. Dr. Fink has been the most influential voice on effective university teaching for the past 20 years, culminating in the book, Creating Significant Learning Experiences, that has influenced thousands of teachers at over a hundred universities worldwide. A provocative, engaging and entertaining workshop facilitator, Dr. Fink works with faculty participants to examine the role of course design in the overall act of teaching, and then leads participants through a new way of designing courses for maximum impact on student learning and motivation.

Seminar objectives: Participants will
• Observe the significance of course design within the array of tasks involved in teaching,
• Identify their own “Dreams” for student learning,
• Introduce the overall model of Integrated Course Design,
• Work on understanding and taking the initial steps toward applying the key components, and
• See what happens when these ideas are used effectively, by examining some actual case studies.
• Design a hypothetical course, and then compare this design with those of colleagues

We make judgments about the world around us based on our basic assumptions about how the world works. When we are faced with diversity, these same assumptions can create clashes and break down communication. Participants in the game experience firsthand the shock of realizing that despite their good intentions and the many similarities amongst themselves, people interpret things differently from one another and often in profound ways. While this workshop is designed for instructors preparing their students for situations where they will be working with diverse populations such as study abroad or internships, anyone who would like to take part in this simulation is welcome.