New Faculty Programs
The Center for Teaching Excellence places a particular emphasis on supporting faculty in their first years at Boston College. In addition to hosting programs created specifically for new faculty, the CTE welcomes new instructors in all of its faculty-specific and campus-wide programs.
New Faculty Orientation
In partnership with the Provost’s Office, the CTE hosts an afternoon of teaching-focused conversations as part of New Faculty Orientation each August. This year, the CTE hosted its teaching orientation on Wednesday, August 16 from 12:00 - 4:00 in 245 Beacon Street. Box lunches were available starting at 11:30, and participants were welcomed to eat outside if they preferred.
Schedule Overview
11:30 - 12:00: (Optional) Box lunches available
12:00 - 12:15: Teaching Support at BC: An Overview
12:15 - 1:15: Opening Discussion: Cultivating Inclusive Classrooms
1:30 - 2:30: Concurrent workshops
2:45 - 4:00: Faculty Panel (also livestreamed via Zoom)
Opening Discussion: Cultivating Inclusive Classrooms
Boston College is committed to ensuring that all students have the opportunity to learn and thrive in their studies, so we began the afternoon with a discussion of inclusive teaching strategies that can support you in that work. Informed by scholarship out of disability studies and Universal Design for Learning, this discussion focused on small adjustments to your teaching that can lower barriers to student success in your courses.
Concurrent Workshops
Setting the Stage for Student Belonging
Research indicates that designing learning environments that support students’ sense of belonging is fundamental to student learning and that students from underrepresented groups disproportionately encounter barriers to belonging. In this session, we considered barriers different students might face to belonging and exchanged ideas about concrete, contextual strategies you can use to support student belonging in upcoming courses, with a focus on the first few weeks of the semester.
ChatGPT and Generative AI
Ever since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, faculty have responded with a variety of ethical and pedagogical concerns about the technology. In this session, we demonstrated how ChatGPT 3.5 works and its limitations. We addressed how you can prepare yourselves and your students for its use in class. The session included a significant Q&A period.
Planning for the First Day
Although it’s easy to think of the first day as a “throw away” class, that first encounter with your students can provide an important opportunity to set the stage for the rest of the semester. In this session, we discussed ideas for how to use that first class meeting to set expectations for the semester, get to know your students, see how they engage with course content, and create a positive learning environment.
Faculty Panel (also livestreamed via Zoom)
We concluded the day with a panel of three Boston College faculty sharing the advice they wish they had gotten in their first year. They talked about what they’ve learned about teaching Boston College students, how they’ve balanced the various demands on their time, and possible pitfalls to avoid in your first year. Featured panelists were:
- Gerardo Blanco, Associate Professor of Higher Education; Academic Director of the Center for International Higher Education
- David Burgess, Professor of Biology
- Cherie McGill, Associate Professor of the Practice, Philosophy
Accommodations Requests
The Center for Teaching Excellence is committed to providing equal access to its events and programs. Individuals with disabilities who anticipate needing accommodations or who have questions about physical access may contact centerforteaching@bc.edu.
New Faculty Seminars
New Faculty Seminars on Teaching are gatherings where faculty in their early years at BC can get to know each other across disciplines and discuss the fundamentals of teaching with colleagues. We gather at noon for lunch and informal conversation, followed by a seminar on a topic based on input from this year’s new faculty. These seminars are hybrid; please indicate when you register if you would like to participate in person or on Zoom.
Click the links below to register for the following Seminars:
Facilitating Discussions
Thursday, September 14th, 12:00 - 1:30
Whether you’re faced with a sea of silent students or trying to get a runaway conversation back on topic, leading class discussion can be one of the most challenging — and enjoyable — parts of your work as an instructor. In this seminar, we’ll talk about the components of a successful discussion and consider concrete strategies for getting a conversation started and keeping it on track. Join us for a chance to share ideas with colleagues about how to engage students in meaningful class discussions.
[Register for New Faculty Seminar on Teaching: Facilitating Discussions]
Exploring Innovative Approaches to Grading
Wednesday, October 11th, 12:00 - 1:30
For many faculty, grading can be the most challenging and fraught part of teaching. Pressure over grades can fuel student anxiety and stifle intellectual risk-taking, and poorly-designed grading systems are more likely to assess what students came into a class knowing rather than what they're newly learning in a class. Join us for an introduction to some innovative grading practices that can support learning for all students across disciplines and to hear how your colleagues are approaching this question in their own teaching.
[Register for New Faculty Seminar on Teaching: Exploring Innovative Approaches to Grading]
Transparent Assignment Design
Tuesday, January 30th, 12:00 - 1:30
Assignments serve as the building blocks of our courses. Ranging from low-stakes activities completed during class to complex semester-long projects, assignments provide students opportunities to practice what they’re learning at the same time they give instructors a window into students’ understanding. For this seminar, we’ll talk about how a focus on transparency in assignment design can help you develop more meaningful and effective assignments. You’ll have a chance to workshop an assignment of your own and share ideas for more creative assignment approaches with colleagues.
[Register for New Faculty Seminars on Teaching: Transparent Assignment Design]
Teaching for Transfer: Helping students apply knowledge across contexts
Wednesday, March 13th, 12:00 - 1:30
Instructors across disciplines share the common challenge of “teaching for transfer”: helping students translate what they’ve learned into novel contexts. However familiar concepts or skills may be, students can struggle when asked to apply them in unfamiliar settings, whether that’s putting theory into practice or applying principles from one context to another. This seminar will explore insights from learning sciences which explain this difficulty, as well as strategies to help students overcome it, and will also include time to share ideas with colleagues about helping students develop the depth of knowledge which supports transfer.
[Register for New Faculty Seminars on Teaching: Teaching for Transfer]
Past Conversations
Equitable Grading
Wednesday, February 8, 2023, 12:00 - 1:30 (O'Neill 250 or via Zoom)
Grading is the most tedious and painful part of teaching for many faculty members, and the specter of grades can hang over an entire learning environment, fueling anxiety and training students to avoid intellectual risk-taking. Grading can also clarify the stakes of inequities in higher education: Do our grading practices implicitly replicate existing social stratification? Join us for an introduction to some grading practices that can promote equity across disciplines and to hear how your colleagues are approaching this concern in their own teaching.
Using Tech Purposefully
Tuesday, March 28, 2023, 12:00 - 1:30 (O'Neill 250 or via Zoom)
If technology has been a growing part of teaching and learning for many years, and the early days of the pandemic saw us adopting it by necessity at least as much as design, our current moment seems like a good one for reflecting on the purpose we want to bring to it. What affordances do our tools offer to enhance learning, and what do we want them to do for us? How are our students -- and how are we as teachers -- shaped in turn by the tools we use? This session will review researched practices and points to consider, and offer a chance to share insights and questions with colleagues.
Active Learning: Strength in Structure
Tuesday, October 11, lunch 12:00-12:30; seminar 12:30 - 1:30
“Active learning” is regarded in many teaching cultures as an essential practice, but it is also the broadest of concepts. This session considers ways to operationalize it in a variety of settings, identifying what we want students to gain and developing activities that will encourage their success. In particular, we’ll explore how a clear structure making visible the purpose and expectations of activities, can be vital to student success. Join us to review concepts and strategies from educational research, and share ideas with colleagues about what works well and works-in-progress.
Register for Active Learning: Strength in Structure
Transparent Assignment Design
Thursday, November 10, lunch 12:00-12:30; seminar 12:30 - 1:30
Assignments serve as the building blocks of our courses. Ranging from low-stakes activities completed during class to complex semester-long projects, assignments provide students opportunities to practice what they’re learning at the same time they give instructors a window into students’ understanding. We’ll discuss strategies for designing more impactful assignments and communicating them effectively to students. You’ll have a chance to workshop an assignment of your own and share ideas for more creative assignment approaches with colleagues.
We Learn What We Do: Strategies for Active Learning
Wednesday, January 26th, 1:00 pm
“Active learning” is regarded in many teaching cultures as an essential practice, but it is also the broadest of concepts. This session explores ways to operationalize it, identifying what we want students to gain and developing activities that will encourage their success, in a variety of settings. Join us to review concepts and strategies from educational research, and share ideas with colleagues about what works well and works-in-progress.
Register for We Learn What We Do: Strategies for Active Learning
Gathering and Interpreting Student Feedback on Your Teaching
Thursday, February 17th, 10:00 am
Too often faculty don’t receive any feedback on their teaching until the end of the semester when it’s not possible to make any changes to the course. And even when you have access to student evaluation data, it’s often difficult to hone in on important information or identify meaningful changes in what can feel like a random laundry list of recommendations. Join us for an overview of options for collecting actionable feedback on your teaching earlier in the term, an opportunity to interpret sample feedback data, and a chance to exchange questions and ideas with colleagues.
Register for Gathering and Interpreting Student Feedback on Your Teaching
Better Assignment Design
Wednesday, March 23rd, 10:00 am
Assignments serve as the building blocks of our courses. Ranging from low-stakes activities completed during class to complex semester-long projects, assignments provide students opportunities to practice what they’re learning at the same time they give instructors a window into students’ understanding. For our March seminar, we’ll discuss strategies for designing more impactful assignments and communicating them effectively to students. You’ll have a chance to workshop an assignment of your own and share ideas for more creative assignment approaches with colleagues.
Register for Better Assignment Design
Using Tech Purposefully
Tuesday, April 12th, 2:00 pm
If technology has been a growing part of teaching and learning for many years, and the early days of the pandemic saw us adopting it by necessity at least as much as design, our current moment seems like a good one for reflecting on the purpose we want to bring to it. What affordances do our tools offer to enhance learning, and what do we want them to do for us? How are our students -- and how are we as teachers -- shaped in turn by the tools we use? This session will review researched practices and points to consider, and offer a chance to share insights and questions with colleagues.
Effective Lecturing
Thursday, September 9, 2:00-3:00 | O'Neill 250 (Innovation Lab)
Whether our classes involve significant amounts of lecturing or rely more on other formats, presenting content tends to be a central task in university teaching. Our first meeting of the year will explore ways to make delivery engaging and effective, and to further enliven a strong lecture by interweaving it with other types of instructional activities. We’ll draw on learning sciences and other research, share ideas and questions, and learn from each other’s experiences of lecturing and presenting.
Register for New Faculty Seminars on Teaching: Effective Lecturing
Fostering Student Belonging
Wednesday, October 6, 10:00-11:00 | O'Neill 250 (Innovation Lab)
Research indicates that fostering students’ sense of belonging — the feeling that their presence in the classroom is anticipated and that they can be themselves — is fundamental to supporting student learning. These questions of belonging are even more pressing for students from historically marginalized groups, because our larger social and cultural systems are more likely to denigrate and dismiss those students and their place in higher education. Join us for a recap of relevant research on fostering belonging before exchanging questions and ideas from your own practice with colleagues.
Register for New Faculty Seminars on Teaching: Fostering Student Belonging
Designing Better Discussions
Tuesday, October 26, 2:00-3:00 | O'Neill 250 (Innovation Lab)
When classroom conversations go well they can be kinetic, exploratory, enabling everyone involved to consolidate and apply their learning and to come into a better understanding of the world. But discussions don’t always reach those heights, either because they never gain momentum or because they get derailed early. Whether you’re teaching seminars or looking to integrate discussion opportunities into a lecture or project-based course, join us for an overview on troubleshooting discussions. We’ll explore how that troubleshooting can inform future planning and you’ll have the chance to hear what’s worked—and what hasn’t—for your colleagues.
Register for New Faculty Seminars on Teaching: Designing Better Discussions
Equitable Grading
Wednesday, November 17, 10:00-11:00 | O'Neill 250 (Innovation Lab)
Grading is the most tedious and painful part of teaching for many faculty members, and the specter of grades can hang over an entire learning environment, fueling anxiety and training students to avoid intellectual risk-taking. Grading can also clarify the stakes of inequities in higher education: Do our grading practices implicitly replicate existing social stratification? Join us for a review of grading practices that can promote equity across disciplines and to hear how your colleagues are approaching this concern in their own teaching.
Register for New Faculty Seminars on Teaching: Equitable Grading
Managing the Workload
Thursday, February 18, 3:30-4:30 | via Zoom
The pandemic has only amplified what faculty have long known: good teaching takes time. Preparing engaging class sessions, providing meaningful feedback, meeting with students to talk through questions — it can feel overwhelming trying to meet the needs of our students at the same time we’re trying to meet our other professional and personal obligations. For this month’s Junior Faculty Conversation, we’ll share ideas for making the best use of the time we devote to teaching and discuss strategies for keeping workloads in check.
Register for Junior Faculty Conversations on Teaching: Managing the Workload
Teaching to Repair Democracy
Wednesday, March 17, 4:00-5:00 | via Zoom
Following the January 6 storming of the capitol, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a number of think pieces interrogating the role universities should play in our democracy. Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, wrote that “Colleges Share the Blame for the Assault on Democracy”; Brian Rosenberg urged that “never has our commitment to understanding the truth been more vital”; and Beth BcMurtie reflected on the challenge of “Teaching in the Age of Disinformation.” This month’s conversation will invite junior faculty to discuss the role they see their classrooms playing in shaping our democracy and preparing students to be informed participants. We’ll address student resistance, concerns about being seen as “too political,” and how to balance curricular needs with the demands of the current moment.
Register for Junior Faculty Conversations on Teaching: Teaching to Repair Democracy
Making Sense of Course Evaluations
Tuesday, April 13, 12:00-1:00 | via Zoom
Course evaluations are meant to be tools to help faculty identify areas for improvement in their teaching. But making sense of what can often feel like contradictory feedback from our students can be a challenge. For this month’s Junior Faculty Conversation on Teaching, we’ll discuss strategies for analyzing the sometimes unclear feedback we get from students and for prioritizing how we choose to respond to it.
Register for Junior Faculty Conversations on Teaching: Making Sense of Course Evaluations
Teaching in an Election Year
Monday, October 19, 12:00-1:00 | via Zoom
While election years can provide opportunities to make connections between our courses and national civic discourse in real-time, they can also challenge us to revisit our pedagogical values, facilitation instincts, and instructional persona. And given our national political discourse, the stakes for political discussions may feel especially high at present. During this Junior Faculty Conversation on Teaching, we’ll share ideas for how to discuss politics in the classroom while balancing a number of values and priorities.
Register for Junior Faculty Conversations on Teaching: Teaching in an Election Year
Building Connections During a Pandemic
Tuesday, November 10, 12:00-1:00 | via Zoom
The new normal of this continuing pandemic is forcing all of us to learn new ways of connecting with our students and cultivating professional networks. For those of us newer to BC, figuring out how to build meaningful relationships with colleagues and students while we’re largely “separate, but together” is especially difficult. For this Junior Faculty Conversation on Teaching, we’ll share ideas for building connections with students and colleagues from BC and beyond, even while we’re keeping our distance.
Register for Junior Faculty Conversations on Teaching: Building Connections During a Pandemic
Tapping Into Student Motivation
Thursday, February 13, 12:00-1:00 | O'Neill 246
Motivation for learning can be a complex mixture of forces, from pursuing extrinsic rewards (like grades) to exploring an interest for its own sake. How can we maximize intrinsic forms of motivation, while being realistic in meeting students where they are? In this session we'll consider factors, some visible and some more hidden, that influence our students' attitudes to their work. We'll share ideas for fostering student ownership of learning, across class levels and course settings.
Register for Junior Faculty Conversations on Teaching: Tapping into Student Motivation
Teaching Intentionally With Technology
Monday, March 23, 12:00-1:00 | via Zoom
In light of the fact that BC will be completing spring 2020 classes remotely due to COVID-19, this conversation will be held via Zoom and redirected toward a discussion about teaching remotely.
Register for Junior Faculty Conversations on Teaching: Teaching Intentionally with Technology
Teaching In An Era Of Gun Violence (Canceled)
Tuesday, April 14, 12:00-1:00 | O'Neill 246
In our current national climate of frequent school shootings, our teaching and learning contexts are increasingly shaped by the threat of gun violence. For instructors, this reality also raises pedagogical questions: How, if at all, do faculty talk with students about safety preparedness? What does it look like to facilitate a fruitful classroom climate given this broader context? How do faculty understand “classroom safety” when their personal schooling histories may also have been shaped by the shadow of gun violence? In this session, instructors will have a chance to share questions, concerns, strategies, and philosophies with one another and will access some outside resources on the subject.
Register for Junior Faculty Conversations on Teaching: Teaching in an Era of Gun Violence
Taking Ownership Of Teaching Evaluation
Tuesday, September 10, 12:00-1:00, CTE Innovation Lab | O'Neill 250
Even in departments with well-defined teaching evaluation practices, faculty can feel they have little agency in that process. In this month’s Junior Faculty Conversation on Teaching, we’ll discuss these challenges and also share strategies faculty can use to take greater ownership of how their teaching is evaluated. We’ll discuss how faculty can more intentionally respond to end-of-semester course feedback as well as approaches for gathering formative feedback throughout the semester.
Engaging Jesuit Values In The Classroom
Thursday, October 10, 12:00-1:00, CTE Innovation Lab | O'Neill 250
Faculty come to Boston College with widely varying degrees of familiarity with the Jesuit tradition and the values that undergird it. And the ways faculty express that tradition in the classroom are equally varied. In this Junior Faculty Conversation on Teaching, we’ll provide a brief overview of some key tenets of the Jesuit tradition and then shift to an open discussion of how session participants engage Jesuit ideals in their classrooms, if at all. Associate Professor of French Régine Jean-Charles will be joining us for this conversation.
Academic Integrity: Modeling The Ideal, Addressing The Problems
Wednesday, November 6, 12:00-1:00, CTE Innovation Lab | O'Neill 250
Over the past year, the University Council on Teaching has been talking with faculty and others across campus about their experiences with academic dishonesty in the classroom. Those discussions revealed concerns about cheating, plagiarism, and the proliferation of online paper mills. In this session, we’ll discuss how participants have sought to limit students’ opportunities to cheat and plagiarize, as well as approaches meant to target the underlying drivers of academic dishonesty (such as lack of confidence, lack of motivation, and performance anxiety).
Class Discussion And Participation
Tuesday, February 19, 12:00-1:00
One of the most common teaching questions we hear in the CTE is “How can I get more students to participate?” — with faculty defining participation in myriad ways. Whether you’re interested in facilitating more lively class discussions, ensuring students come to class prepared, or seeking to encourage greater student ownership of their own learning, it can be a challenge to motivate broad student participation in and out of class. At this month’s conversation, we’ll talk about the barriers we see to student participation and the strategies we’ve found effective in encouraging greater student engagement.
(What) Are My Students Learning?
Wednesday, March 13, 12:00-1:00
Looking ahead to our Excellence in Teaching Day conversation on “making learning visible,” we in the CTE have been thinking a lot about the formal and informal ways instructors seek to uncover what (and whether) their students are learning. In this month’s Junior Faculty Conversation, participants will have the chance to share their own challenges with gauging students’ learning and discuss strategies for more intentionally surfacing what their students are taking away from the classroom.
Student Well-Being
Monday, April 1, 12:00-1:00
Junior faculty are often the first to know when a student is struggling personally, and faculty can struggle themselves in figuring out how to support their students while still maintaining their own healthy boundaries. This month’s conversation will focus on the particular well-being challenges we see Boston College students facing and the various approaches faculty have found effective in supporting them.
Kids Today: Teaching The Post-Millennial Generation
Wednesday, September 12, 12:00-1:00
Jean Twenge writes that the majority of undergraduates today—“iGens” who spent their adolescence with smartphones always within reach—are entering adulthood more committed to individualism and tolerance than previous generations, but less independent and less happy than their predecessors. In our first Junior Faculty Conversation of the year, we’ll discuss the particular opportunities and challenges we find teaching this new generation and share strategies for reaching them. We’ll also consider the question of how to find the balance between meeting students where they are and maintaining our expectations for academic performance.
The Role Of Civility In The Classroom
Tuesday, October 16, 12:00-1:00
Recent calls for greater civility on the political stage—and rebuttals arguing that such demands serve to silence the powerless—invite us to consider whether and how civility should play a role in our classrooms. Most faculty are invested in creating learning environments in which students can engage in rigorous yet respectful debate, but they can struggle to know how to police the boundaries of “respect.” In our October conversation, we’ll share our own approaches to defining acceptable classroom conduct and discuss ideas for improving the classroom climate for all our students.
Learning Smarter: What The Science Of Learning Teaches Us
Thursday, November 29, 12:00-1:00
As Silvia Bunge reminded us in her 2015 Excellence in Teaching Day keynote, the study habits our students bring from high school—as well as the teaching habits many of us have inherited—are not always effective in helping students meet the learning demands of higher education. Luckily, recent findings from cognitive psychology and other learning sciences suggest that even small adjustments in our pedagogy can lead to learning gains for students. For example, spacing out practice so that students can better test their recall of what they’ve learned, incorporating “desirable difficulties” into the learning process, and helping students self-assess their own mastery have all been shown to improve learning outcomes. In our final conversation of the semester, we’ll briefly review some of these findings and then discuss possible strategies for implementing them in our classrooms.
Making Sense Of Course Evaluations
Wednesday, January 31, 12:00-1:00
Course evaluations are meant to be tools to help faculty identify areas for improvement in their teaching. But making sense of what can often feel like contradictory feedback from our students can be a challenge. In this conversation, we’ll discuss strategies for analyzing the sometimes unclear feedback we get from students and for prioritizing how we choose to respond to it.
Finding The Balance: Teaching, Research, . . . Life?
Thursday, March 15, 12:00-1:00
One consequence of the current push to continuously expand the boundaries of “excellence” in higher education is that faculty find themselves needing to meet higher and higher expectations for research productivity, teaching quality, and service to the institution. This leaves many faculty feeling overwhelmed as they try to meet expectations for tenure or contract renewal, much less maintain personal commitments to their health, well-being, family, and community. This open conversation invites faculty to share their experiences with negotiating these myriad institutional expectations and the strategies they’ve found effective in the (sometimes elusive) quest for balance.
Cancelled: Navigating Free Speech In The Classroom
Monday, April 23, 12:00-1:00
Questions about free speech on college campuses continue to dominate the headlines as institutions struggle to protect open expression while also protecting their students’ safety. The headlines, however, provide little guidance to faculty who may be experiencing new uncertainty about what acceptable limits to free speech (if any) are appropriate in a classroom setting. Our final Junior Faculty Conversation of the semester invites faculty into dialogue about their own approach to free speech in the classroom and whether our changing political climate has impacted their practices in this area.
Teaching After Charlottesville
Tuesday, September 26, 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Following the hatred and bigotry recently on display in Charlottesville, faculty across the country have been questioning whether and how they might address the current racial climate with their students this fall. For our kick-off meeting of this year’s Junior Faculty Conversations on Teaching, we invite faculty in their first years at BC to join us for a conversation about how we’re approaching our classes in the wake of Charlottesville.
If you’d like to do a little reading in advance of the conversation, here are a few suggestions:
- “Professors See Charlottesville as a Starting Point for Discussions on Race” (Chronicle of Higher Education)
- “There Is No Apolitical Classroom: Resources for Teaching in These Times” (NCTE)
- Teaching After Charlottesville (Vanderbilt University)
Managing Digital Distractions
Wednesday, October 18, 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
As studies increasingly point to the negative impact that digital devices in the classroom can have on student learning, more and more faculty are choosing to ban laptops from their classrooms. However, not everyone believes that these kinds of restrictions are in the best interests of our students. For this month’s Junior Faculty Conversation on Teaching, we’ll talk about the pros and cons of classroom technology bans and how best to engage students no matter what technology is present.
Optional readings:
- “The Case for Banning Laptops in the Classroom” (The New Yorker)
- “No, Banning Laptops is Not the Answer” (Chronicle of Higher Education)
Grading Fairly In The Era Of Grade Inflation
Thursday, November 9, 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
One consequence of the rising specter of grade inflation is that faculty face increasing demands from their departments to keep their grade distributions in check. Whether in the form of gentle feedback from a chair or in an explicit departmental policy, faculty can feel pressured to find ways to lower grades, even when they see the majority of their students mastering course content. In our final fall Junior Faculty Conversation on Teaching, we’ll discuss how different departments at BC approach grade norming and how faculty can meet departmental expectations while still supporting their students’ learning.
Optional readings:
- “In Praise of Grading on a Curve” (The Washington Post)
- “Why We Should Stop Grading Students on a Curve” (The New York Times)