Striving for Student Success in Gateway Courses
Program Overview
The Aspirational Teaching Institute will bring faculty to the Center for Transformative Teaching for a semester-long program designed to help tackle major teaching challenges.
The Striving for Student Success in Gateway Courses program will tackle the questions:
- Why do so many students struggle to succeed in their courses?
- What can you do to help? More specifically, how can you design your gateway course in a way that helps as many students succeed as possible?
The program facilitators from the CTT, with help from relevant campus leaders, will take point on answering the first question, and participants will develop answers to the second question. Facilitators will offer ideas and guidance but, ultimately, teaching is a personal endeavor, and the right ways of addressing these problems will need to be highly individualized. What works well for one instructor, or for one course, may not work for another. Participants will need to consider which ideas make sense, which seem to fit with their personal style of teaching, and which seem to fit with the course they are teaching and the specific challenges they and their students are experiencing. While designing their distinct approaches, participants will have help along the way from fellow participants, CTT team members, and even students.
Institute Schedule
The Aspirational Teaching Institute will meet every other Wednesday during the spring semester, starting on January 19th, from 1:30-2:30. All of these instructional sessions will be held remotely.
Options for Participation
While we have designed the program to address specific challenges in gateway courses, most of the issues being discussed have broader applicability. As such, we've designed the program to be as flexible as possible. When registering, we ask you to select one of the following ways of being involved:
Curious Lurking: Workshops
If you're interested in some or all of the topics but don't have the time to commit to fully completing this as a program, you're welcome to register as a "lurker" and attend individual topics that you're interested in without taking on an obligation to complete reflections or attend every session. Please be sure to register for the institute using this option so that we can make sure to include you in relevant updates, such as when new guest presenter videos are available on the Canvas site.
Interested but Conflicted: Scheduling Complications
Scheduling for these types of activites can be very difficult, because everyone has obligations at different times. But we don't want anyone who's interested to be left out entirely. If the Wednesdays at 1:30 time doesn't work in your schedule, but you're interested in these topics, please register with this option. We'll continue to share resources that come from this institute with you and would be happy to include your voice asynchronously where applicable.
Outline of Topics
A complete list of the eight topics that will be discussed throughout the semester, including information on the guest and instructional designer presenters, can be found on the course syllabus page in Canvas.