Faculty Lead Expectations

Each faculty lead or departmental lead pair will develop goals for the academic year related to student needs and their pedagogical interests (see Goal examples below). These goals will serve as the basis for developing events (see Event examples below) and disseminating these ideas to the broader teaching community (see Dissemination examples below).

Leads are expected to spend ~10 hours/month on STEM-TLC work and will be compensated $2,000/year for engaging in this work, either as summer salary or research fund. Details about compensation options will be provided.

Faculty Lead Goals

Each faculty lead or pair of leads will develop goals for the academic year by answering the following questions:

What are your areas of pedagogical interest and/or experience?

What do you want to contribute to the STEM education conversation at UVA this year?

How might you translate that into learning opportunities for your colleagues and the broader STEM education community across the academic year?

These goals will form the basis for the faculty lead’s plans to develop an evidence-based STEM event and disseminate what they learn (e.g., for/from the event or their ongoing classroom research). Some examples of goals and plans are below:

Example 1

Goal: I’ve been thinking a lot about metacognition and doing exam wrappers to support students’ metacognition, and I want to help other faculty integrate pedagogical strategies that support student’s metacognitive development.

Plan: My plan for this year would be to develop and run a workshop for faculty around metacognition (event) in the fall, refine and rerun in the spring. I would also develop a Teaching Hub collection and present at the Pedagogy Summit in the spring (dissemination).

Example 2

Goal: I have a lot of survey data from my class about their perceptions of a new alternative grading approach I am using and want help analyzing the data and maybe sharing what I learned to the broader community.

Plan: My plan for the year is to run 1 works in progress meeting in the fall to get ideas for analyzing my data, (event) then work with Lindsay (program lead) to run a workshop in the spring (event). I would work on submitting a peer reviewed publication (dissemination).

Example 3

Goal: I want to try out a new pedagogical approach to exam review/group project/active learning etc in my class and want to learn more about how to do it or understand if it’s working for my students.

Plan: I will run a monthly reading group in the fall (event) and design a SoTL project for the spring when implementing the new approach (dissemination). I will also develop a Teaching Hub collection (dissemination) in the spring around what we learned in the reading group.

STEM Events

Each faculty lead will (co)-develop and (co)-facilitate at least one event over the academic year as it aligns with their annual goal and would be of interest to other STEM faculty. Some examples of events include:

Workshop on pedagogical process/skill/strategy
Workshop on using evidence to support pedagogical improvement or SoTL skill
Reading group on a pedagogical book, article, podcast
SoTL Works in Progress (WiP) seeking feedback from colleagues
Writing about Teaching meetups for grant proposals, journal/conference selection, etc.

Disseminating STEM pedagogy

Each faculty lead will work toward disseminating ideas related to their goals in any of the following ways:

Teaching Hub collection (example)
Department meeting presentations
Pedagogy Summit presentation
Pedagogy/disciplinary conference
Peer reviewed article

If you feel you need to collect additional data/evidence before disseminating, a SoTL-type project would be an additional option.