2025 Program

Welcome & Introductions

Workshop: You as a Teacher

One of the most important and inescapable things you bring to your teaching is you. How does your unique perspective show up in the classroom? And how can you intentionally align your teaching strategies to your unique perspective, for both expected and unexpected situations? This session will invite you to explore how to bring your strengths and values into your teaching to support student learning and your own wellbeing.

Presentation: Brief Overview of Student Demographics and Support Services

Table Conversations with Students: Getting to Know UVA Students

Lunch & Faculty Panel: Relationship-rich Experiences

Presentation: Mead Endowment

Inspired by longtime UVA Professor Ernest "Boots" Mead and his unwavering dedication to teaching and student engagement, the Mead Endowment seeks to create long standing connections between faculty and students both inside and outside of the classroom. The Mead Endowment supports student-faculty engagement initiatives for both new and seasoned faculty. This brief presentation will introduce you to some of the opportunities and resources the Meade Endowment offers to support student-faculty engagement activities for both new and seasoned faculty.

UVA Acts Performance: Good Luck with That: Exploring Compassionate Teaching

led by artistic director Karen M. Dabney, Ph.D.

Using Catherine Denial’s "pedagogy of kindness" as a framework, we'll explore various effective inclusive teaching strategies educators can implement to make their classrooms, course materials, and Canvas pages more welcoming and engaging to students from day one. Short scenes of theater allow participants to recognize and openly discuss the various challenges that go into shifting not only teaching methods, but also student reception of those changes.

Day 1 Wrap-up

Workshop: Inclusive Approaches to Common Teaching Challenges

Inclusive teaching involves awareness of context and intentional action to ensure that all students have access to learning and feel supported in the classroom. Inclusive teaching is also more easily said than done, so what does it mean in everyday practice? This workshop will introduce you to frameworks for thinking about inclusive teaching and provide you with practical strategies that you can adapt to your particular teaching context. You'll also have the opportunity to explore practical applications of these frameworks to develop inclusive teaching strategies to address common teaching challenges.

Workshop: Leveraging the Science of Learning for Effective Teaching

Building on the evidence of how learning works, this interactive session will help you anchor instructional choices in how humans learn. You'll learn about the intertwined nature of cognitive and affective learning through principles and strategies that can foster effective student learning and enrich your teaching. You'll depart with ideas for integrating learning science into your course design and teaching practice.

Lunch

Workshop: Principles of Effective Assessment

Assessment, when done well, not only evaluates students’ learning, but also drives it. In this session, you'll explore different types of assessments and practice scaffolding and aligning assessments with your learning objectives to support student success. Together, we'll also consider the evolving role of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in assessment and its potential to support and challenge our current practices.

Workshop: Promoting Learning and Belonging in Your Syllabus

Your syllabus is your course’s first impression. It's your first opportunity to excite students about what they’ll learn and to transparently provide key information they will need to succeed in the course. In this session, you’ll learn how to craft syllabus elements such as course descriptions, assignment descriptions, and course policies that set the tone for the semester, support students’ learning and sense of belonging, and foster positive relationships between you and your students.

Day 2 Wrap-up