Past Events

Have you tried group work and want to refine your approach? How can you create a classroom environment to support collaborative teams to function and flourish? This two-day session led by Lynn Mandeltort and Lindsay Wheeler offers a deeper dive into the essentials of equitable collaborative learning.

With a focus on enduring groups and/or assignments, participants will engage with different types of collaborative assignments/activities, practice recognizing power imbalances, apply principles of inclusive teaching to collaborative learning, and gain confidence in utilizing collaborative work. Participants will come away with an articulation of their own pedagogical values around equitable collaborative learning and a (re)designed collaborative assignment for their course.

Instructors who have not completed either our Course Design Institute or c3Design program will be admitted on a case-by-case basis.

This event was offered March 7-8, 2023, March 8-9, 2022, and March 10-11, 2020.

In the last few years, we have experienced a range of crisis situations that have required instructors to pivot in an instance. There is no one right way to respond to a crisis, and our choices depend on a range of factors, including our identities, closeness to impacted students and colleagues, comfort level, and the size and nature of our classes and the relationships within them. The purpose of this workshop series is to give you the tools to be decisive in your role as an instructor attending to students in your classes.

This introductory, 90-minute workshop presents an overview of the tenets of trauma-informed teaching, supported by evidence from neurobiology, psychology, and pedagogy. We will also explore the concept of community care and discuss strategies for building networks of social support.

Building on the introductory session, there will be a two-day intensive to offer a space to create your individual plan for teaching during future critical incidents and crises. We will introduce a variety of tools sensitive to a wide range of student needs and help you reflect on how the skills you already possess may be instrumental in developing a critical incident response plan. You will have opportunities to learn from and share ideas with colleagues from across the university, and will leave the workshop with a concrete plan that is manageable, appropriate to your context, and aligned with your values.

This event was offered February 21, February 22, and March 7-8, 2023.

In this two-part series, we'll invite participants to reconsider not only how, but also why we grade. We'll explore the questions: what do grades mean, what do we want them to mean, and what choices are available to us to develop grading schemes that foster significant learning and promote educational equity?

In Part 1, we'll discuss the history of grading schemes and diagnose some of the fundamental philosophical problems with the concept and practice of grading student learning. We’ll explain how grading practices sustain educational inequities (particularly racial ones) and explore a range of alternative grading practices that support an ethic of justice and repair.

Part 2 will introduce participants to a specific alternative grading method called specifications grading, which prioritizes transparency, student choice, and student responsibility to earn the grade they desire. Participants will analyze and discuss models of specifications grading from a variety of disciplines and class types, and assess their readiness to adopt specifications grading in their own teaching contexts. Participants will design specifications grading systems for their courses, articulate specifications for a course assignment, and give and receive feedback on their work.

Participants may attend Day 1 as a standalone workshop. Participation in Day 1 is a prerequisite for Day 2.

For this 2.X event series, priority will be given to our Course Design Institute and c3Design alumni; instructors who have not completed either program will be admitted on a case-by-case basis.

This event was offered December 7 and 14, 2022.

What do grades mean, and what do we want them to mean? Student and faculty perceptions of grading can diverge greatly: students may perceive grades as subjective and arbitrary, or as an external reward, while faculty want grades to reflect students’ learning in a course (whether or not they actually do reflect learning is another matter). Most courses in American universities rely on the traditional method of calculating a weighted average to arrive at a letter grade, but faculty have long experimented with alternative grading methods (including contract grading and pass/fail grading) in order to emphasize learning over grades, clarify the meaning of grades, and reduce the drudgework of the grading process.

This day-long session will introduce participants to an alternative grading method called specifications grading. Specifications grading prioritizes transparency, student choice, and student responsibility to earn the grade they desire. It restores meaning to grading by aligning students’ work, a course’s learning objectives, and the grades students earn.

During the session, participants will analyze and discuss models of specifications grading from a variety of disciplines and class types, and assess their readiness to adopt specifications grading in their own teaching contexts. Participants will design specifications grading systems for their courses, articulate specifications for a course assignment, and give and receive feedback on their work.

This 2.X event is open to former CDI participants and instructors who have tried specifications grading before (whether they have participated in CDI or not).

This event was offered March 9, 2020 and August 7, 2019.