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: A Snapshot of UVA Students

Who are your students, really? This short, interactive session offers a data-informed glimpse into UVA students and their academic lives—how often they go beyond what’s required, how many had a professor who learned their name, and how much of the reading they actually completed. Gain a clearer picture of who’s in your classroom and what they’re experiencing.

Table Conversations: Getting to Know UVA Students

Learning about UVA students through data is one thing, hearing their stories is another. Over lunch, you’ll have the chance to talk with one or more undergraduates about moments that shaped their learning: a time they felt inspired, or when a teacher made a lasting impact. These conversations offer a window into your students’ perspectives, and a chance to reflect on the kind of impact you want to have in your own teaching.

Lunch & Faculty Panel: Relationship-rich Experiences

Continuing the theme of the morning sessions, this panel features three UVA faculty members who will share what’s possible in the classroom. Through stories and strategies, they’ll offer insights on creating engaging, relationship-rich learning experiences while also sustaining your own wellbeing.

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 is 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.

Day 2 Wrap-up