Meeting Ongoing and Emerging Needs
CTE staff understand and respond to needs that emerge from the higher education landscape in our work with groups and individuals.
The survey we used in 2023 to identify instructor needs was based on a needs survey we developed in 2017 for our External Review and Self-Study.
Meeting Ongoing and Emerging Needs: Responding to Instructor Input
In Spring 2023, CTE surveyed instructors about their teaching development needs. The following were among the priority areas that instructors identified: Student and Instructor Engagement; Meeting Students’ Needs; Reading Research and Other Resources on Teaching and Learning; and Artificial Intelligence.
Our staff acted quickly to address these challenges. For example, regarding the priority area of Student Needs, and in light of the violent attack that occurred on campus in June 2023, we prioritized trauma-informed pedagogies in our programming, offering sessions such as Trauma-Informed Care as Instructional Innovation; Teaching in a Time of Climate Change; and Cultivating Culturally Safe Encounters.
We also focused our 2024 annual conference on the theme of engagement of both students and instructors. The survey and additional ongoing data we collect helped us to focus our services on what Waterloo instructors need.
CTE's newsletter—In the Loop—is sent out to 2400 instructors and staff every month, keeping them informed about upcoming events and workshops, teaching awards, funding opportunities, new teaching resources, and more.
The theme of the 2024 University of Waterloo Teaching and Learning Conference was "Sparking and Sustaining Engagement."
Meeting Ongoing and Emerging Needs: Instructor Burnout
Sparking and sustaining student engagement was the theme of our 2024 UWTL Conference. Leading up to that conference, CTE also offered a series of sessions on a parallel theme: sparking and sustaining instructor engagement.
Many instructors came out of the pandemic feeling detached and burned out, as noted by the authors of a 2021 study: "COVID-19 has brought new, additional pressures not only to teachers, but also to students, families, and administrators"; not surprisingly, the study's authors also concluded that "teacher burnout during pandemic conditions is associated with lower teacher efficacy."
This post-pandemic langour is why CTE developed a series where instructors shared strategies that had helped them re-engage with their roles as educators.
In one session, for example, instructors from the School of Public Health—Diane Williams and Jennifer Yessis—and staff members from the Green House Program at United College—Erin Hogan and Tania del Matto—spoke about how they were reinvigorated by their collaboration on co-designing and co-teaching a new course called Competencies in Health.
Their collaboration also resulted in an exciting learning experience for the students in the new course. As student Paige Petcoff noted, the new course “gave us the opportunity to cultivate new and meaningful relationships, apply relevant skills, and consolidate knowledge acquired throughout our undergraduate degree.”
The book Braiding Sweetgrass was the focus of one custom learning series.
Meeting Ongoing and Emerging Needs: Custom Events
In addition to our slate of established programming that CTE draws from every term, we also develop workshops and retreats in response to specific needs identified by individual Departments and Faculties. In the 2023-24 fiscal year, we offered 101 such custom workshops, which were attended by 1725 participants. This was a significant increase over the previous fiscal year, in which we offered 56 custom workshops attended by 1010 participants.
Examples of our custom workshops include Student Engagement, Assignment Design, Learning How to Learn, Interpreting Your Student Course Perceptions Survey Results, and Trauma-Informed Pedagogy.
Many other custom workshops from the 2023-2024 fiscal year were devoted to Indigenization and Anti-Racism, such as Cultivating Place and Space for Land-Based Learning, Integrating Climate Justice, Two-Row Climate Complexity, Braiding Sweetgrass, Cultivating Culturally Safe Encounters, and Truth and Reconciliation.
Learning How to Learn: One of 101 custom workshops developed by CTE in the 2023-2024 fiscal year.
Thank you so much for making our inaugural Universal Design for Learning Community of Practice session such a success! Folks were engaged, asked honest questions, and responded to each other drawing from their own experiences and understandings. We left the session feeling energized and hopeful!
Universal Design for Learning aims to ensure that students with a wide range of abilities can participate equitably in learning experiences.
Meeting Ongoing and Emerging Needs: Collaborations, Partnerships, and Service
CTE values the strength and steadiness to be found in working with others, and the wisdom to be gleaned from sharing diverse perspectives and areas of expertise. It’s not surprising, then, that in the 2023-24 fiscal year, our staff members sought to meet ongoing and emerging needs by helping lead, facilitate, or support more than 35 campus-wide committees and projects, in areas such as the following:
Sustainability
CTE staff members served on the President's Advisory Committee on Environmental Sustainability, including the review of the Sustainability Action Fund projects, and also served on the Integrating Sustainability into the Curriculum Working Group, which produced the Integrating Sustainability in Undergrad Programs Final Report as well as the Sustainability Framework and Toolkit. Other cross-campus sustainability projects that CTE contributed to are the New Climate Justice Workshop and the Supporting the Climate Pedagogy Symposium.
Educational Technologies
CTE staff members co-chaired the Standing Committee on New Technologies, Pedagogy, and Academic Integrity, which oversaw the development of resources, events, and research, drafted course outline language, created an online learning space for faculty, and consulted on the design of a university-wide course offering. Our staff members also served on the university's Educational Technologies Advisory Committee. Among this committee's many projects, CTE staff assisted in the selection and subsequent implementation of peerScholar as Waterloo's centrally-supported Peer Assessment tool.
Accessibility
With the support of the Teaching Innovation Incubator, CTE staff collaborated with instructors and staff from across campus on the Accessible Education Project, on both the project's leadership team and on two of its working groups: Instructional Programs and Practices, and Learning Tools and Materials.
Student-Led Individually Created Course Project
Members of the cross-campus Student-Led Individually Created Course (SLICC) Project worked with CTE to deliver workshops and help instructors develop, integrate, and assess self-directed learning capacities for their courses. To date, fourteen courses have integrated the SLICC framework to support student learning.
Learning Communities and Communities of Practice
CTE staff members served on the planning group of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) & Wellbeing Community of Practice, an initiative under the university's Wellness Collaborative. Our staff members also co-facilitated sessions for the campus-wide Learning Community for Instructors of First-Year Students on topics such as the preparing for first week of classes, GenAI, assessment design, and grade inflation.
A complete list of CTE's Collaborations, Partnerships, and Service for the 2023-24 fiscal year is provided in the expandable box below:
CTE's collaborations with other units on sustainability projects were complemented by a weekly Green Office Newsletter produced by our co-op students.
CTE is partnering with others at Waterloo to ensure that new technologies, such as Generative AI, are deployed effectively and with integrity.