Supporting Pervasive Teaching Excellence

I've long been committed to creating opportunities for IU and its faculty to promote, nurture, and recognize excellence in teaching and learning within and across campuses, schools, and disciplines. This is precisely the vision of IU's Faculty Academy on Excellence in Teaching (FACET). FACET members, since the organization's inception in 1989, have a history of pedagogical innovation, commitment to studying and sharing best practices in teaching and learning, and embracing the notion that we teach and learn in community.

Through the years, FACET has been fortunate to have many collaborators across IU who believe in the pursuit of excellence in teaching and learning. Two more recent outcomes of these important collaborations include the Teaching for Student Success (TSS) self-enrolling course (available through expand.iu.edu) and the Teaching.IU website (teaching.iu.edu). I am proud to say that both resources are built by IU for IU.

TSS, featured in the winter 2020 issue of The Connected Professor, presents an evidence-based approach to teaching and learning. Step-by-step instructions and videos of how faculty apply strategies are central to the approach, and downloadable handouts and worksheets guide others through applying concepts to practice.

Faculty who complete TSS will design an entire course that applies evidence-based practices, while engaging with the modules on their own terms and reviewing pieces of content that are most helpful at a given moment.

TSS is an ongoing collaborative project. Currently, we are revising the course to build on the six teaching foundations modules with two new paths that will contain the same features as the original modules and have their own completion certificates:

• An Active Learning Path that contains four modules: "Helping Students Learn How to Learn," "Active Learning," "High Impact Practices," and "Sustained Collaborative Learning Projects"
• A Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Path with three modules that infuse DEI practices into the development of one's teaching philosophy, extending through classroom practices to establishing a departmental culture that supports IU's Anti-racist Agenda

We expect these paths to go live during the winter session. Faculty can proceed through the modules on their own at their own pace; however, each campus also will have a spring cohort facilitated by a TSS Faculty Fellow.

The original teaching.iu.edu launched in October 2017. President McRobbie in his 2017 State of the University address identified it as "a major step forward in gathering in one place and making readily available IU's many teaching resources." Like TSS, building the site was the result of university-wide collaboration, including UITS, FACET, and various academic stakeholders.

The redesigned site, with an anticipated fall 2021 release, will remain a portal to IU's many teaching resources; however, it will center much more directly on teaching strategies and the ingredients to carry out the strategies with excellence. Instructors and faculty development staff will have profiles and the ability to collect and share the strategies and tools they use to teach and help ensure student success in their courses.

I am excited that instructors and faculty development staff will be able to share their effective strategies with the IU community through teaching.iu.edu. Many of us collect these strategies and look for outlets to share. Submitted strategies will go through a review process, giving faculty another way to document teaching effectiveness, which could prove useful in annual reports and promotion dossiers. The redesigned teaching.iu.edu will make wide sharing of strategies in a customized, easy-to-navigate format.

I invite you to explore TSS and our first version of teaching.iu.edu. Join a TSS cohort or create a TSS discussion group on your campus. Share a teaching strategy for teaching.iu.edu or TSS and help IU attain and sustain the pervasive spread of teaching excellence.