2026 Program

Welcome & Introductions

Applied Workshop: Meeting Your Students for the First Time

The first day of class is an opportunity to spark curiosity, build community, set expectations, and commence learning. In this opening session, you'll experience and reflect on strategies that can help students feel welcomed and engaged from day one—by being the students yourselves!

Applied Workshop: Knowing Yourself as a Teacher

This session will give you a head start on recognizing your strengths in the classroom to make choices that support your wellbeing and students’ learning.

Conversation: Appreciating UVA’s Amazing Students

This session will introduce you to UVA students, from a high-level overview of some of their characteristics, to an opportunity to engage with some of those students directly about their UVA experiences.

Lunch

Presentation: Engaging Your Students with Help from the 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 longstanding connections between faculty and students both inside and outside of the classroom. This brief presentation will introduce you to some of the opportunities and resources the Mead Endowment offers to support student-faculty engagement activities for both new and seasoned faculty.

Applied Workshop: Fostering Learning, Motivation, and Belonging

In this session, you'll be introduced you to a few key principles from the science of learning and consider how they connect to student motivation and belonging. You'll reflect on how small choices in course design and classroom practice can shape students’ engagement with the material and with one another.

Applied Workshop: Centering Inclusivity When Addressing 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. 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 context and the specific challenges you face. You'll also explore practical applications of these frameworks to make learning-centered choices, benefiting both instructors’ and students’ wellbeing.

Day 1 Wrap-up

Applied Workshop: Meeting Your Students for the Second Time

Welcome back to the second day of “class”! This session offers an opportunity to continue building on the curiosity, community, expectations, and learning we established together on Day 1. You'll consider how to use subsequent class meetings to reinforce these elements and reflect on how to create continuity from the first day through the rest of the semester.

Applied 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 schedules that set the tone for the semester, support students’ learning and sense of belonging, and foster positive relationships between you and your students. You’ll also explore how to engage students in revisiting the course syllabus to create continuity and sustain their learning throughout the semester.

Applied Workshop: Assessing Your Students’ Learning & Grading Their Work

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 brainstorm formative assessments with colleagues that you can easily adapt to support your students' learning. You’ll also learn how to develop grading practices that support meaningful assessment, transparency, student growth, and improved instructor-student communication.

Lunch

UVA Acts: Exploring Compassionate Teaching

Using Catherine Denial’s "pedagogy of kindness" as a framework, and drawing from current insights about both instructors’ and students’ wellbeing in higher education, we'll explore various effective inclusive teaching strategies educators can implement to make their classrooms, course materials, and Canvas pages more welcoming and engaging from day one. Short scenes of theater allow participants to recognize and openly discuss not only possible shifts in teaching methods and student reception of those changes, but also how to make choices that foster holistic flourishing for both teachers and learners.

Applied Workshop: Knowing What’s Working

How will you know what's working to support your students’ learning? In this closing session, we'll identify ways to learn from your students and from your own teaching experiences throughout the semester and showcase how the Center for Teaching Excellence can serve as a partner in your ongoing development as an instructor.

Day 2 Wrap-up