CTE Annual Report 2023-2024

Promoting Student Engagment: The Teaching Excellence Academy

In the 2023-24 fiscal year, 15 instructors completed the annual Teaching Excellence Academy, one of CTE’s signature events for almost twenty years.

Over the course of four days, TEA participants gather to intensively redesign one of their courses, focusing especially on creating alignment among learning outcomes, learning activities, and assessments to promote student learning and engagement.

Key to this redesign process is the feedback the instructors receive from each other, from staff in CTE and the Centre for Extended Learning, and from instructors who have previously completed the TEA. Although the TEA requires a significant committment of time, its "graduates" affirm its positive impact on their teaching. 

Toni Serafini, for example, who completed the TEA in 2008, says that the opportunity was pivotal for her in several ways: it helped her connect with a community of like-minded yet diverse instructors, and it helped her see the importance, when designing courses, of "crafting very intentional learning outcomes and aligning them with specific learning activities and assessments." 

Since then, she says, she has gone even further by sharing with her students, on the first day of class, how the learning outcomes for the course connect to both the course content and the assessments. This "pedagogical transparency," as she calls it, helps foster student engagement with the content and learning activities by helping them see and trust the "bigger picture" of the course.

Toni has subsequently partcipated in several follow-up "Mini-TEA" sessions, where she sought to design new courses by again drawing upon the principles of aligning learning outcomes, activities, and assessments. 

Promoting Student Engagement: LITE Grants

Since 2012, CTE’s Learning Innovation and Teaching Enhancement (LITE) grants program, funded by the Office of the AVPA, has supported 172 research projects investigating innovative strategies to enhance teaching and foster deep student learning.

One example of a recent LITE Grant project is the Emergent Encounters Project, led by Craig Fortier, Social Development Studies, and Matt Borland, Systems Design Engineering. Their project provided opportunities for students, instructors, staff, and alumni to connect and build relationships around social justice issues, and to engage in challenging, sensitive, and nuanced conversations on important political topics. 

Central to their project were the alternative approaches to teaching and learning—such as art, storytelling, circle learning—that were employed in five sessions devoted to themes of Deep Listening, Encounter, Relationship, Small Actions, and Repair. 

Craig notes that "the project allowed us to test out the importance of community-based teaching that was rooted in the lived experiences and realities of participants." 

CTE's Indigenous Knowledges and Anti-Racism (IKAR) team assisted with the development of the project by offering guidance on how to facilitate and engage authentically with individuals from diverse backgrounds and knowledge systems. 

Matt and Craig are now in the process of building upon what they learned from the project to develop a cross-listed collaborative course between their two departments.

Promoting Student Engagement: Learning Technologies

CTE supports instructors in using many different learning technologies, such as Akindi, Bongo, Crowdmark, iClickers, PebblePad, peerScholar, Piazza, and more. One of the more widely used learning technologies—Perusall—promotes engagement by making it easy for students to collaboratively read, annotate, and comment on shared online documents, like this:

Suzanne Tyas, School of Public Health Sciences, began using Perusall during the pandemic, but was so impressed with its ability to engage students that she has continued to use it. In one of her large classes—350 students—Suzanne divides the students into groups of 25, with each group using Perusall to collaboratively engage with the readings. In their feedback, Suzanne says that students often comment that using Perusall makes reading the textbook much more fun." 

Like Suzanne, Greta Kroeker, History, worked with CTE staff to incorporate Perusall into a survey course of Early Modern Europe. “Perusall,” Greta says, “helped my students engage more consistently and thoughtfully with one another, with me and my teaching assistants, and with the course content.” She adds that getting students to work together to annotate and discuss online readings also helped them develop their ability to read critically.

A further benefit, Greta adds, is that Perusall reveals how students are engaging with the material outside of class and what aspects of the readings they are finding most challenging. “Perusall definitely helps my students become more engaged with course content and more enthusiastic about discussing it with each other,” Greta affirms.

PebblePad is another widely-adopted learning technology supported by CTE staff members. PebblePad is an ePortfolio app that helps learners engage in critical reflection. CTE's co-op students have long used PebblePad to reflect on their experience in working at CTE, while other students use it during their academic terms to reflect on their course-based learning. Abigaile Beamish, for example, used her PebblePad ePortfolio to help her reflect on the learning and skills she aquired while completing her undergraduate degree in Waterloo's Health Studies program.

Promoting Student Engagement: CTE's Co-op Students

Every term, CTE commits to helping the undergraduate students who work with us to make the most of their work experience by using an ePortfolio. Their ongoing reflections help them consolidate and document their on-the-job learning and set goals for future co-op positions. 

Charley Potter—a major in Honours Psychology—reflected in their ePortfolio on some of the opportunities that working at CTE provided, such as participating in the Fundamentals of University Teaching Program, where they prepared and taught three microteaching sessions, and attending more than ten workshops, including Trauma-Informed Teaching and Reflecting on Diversity in the Classroom. Charley says their work at CTE “honed my organization and time-management skills, boosted my confidence when speaking in front of groups, and increased my passion for inclusive and accessible communication.”

Another former co-op student—Brent McCready-Branch, Health Sciences—reported that his role at CTE helped him develop the usual skills needed in any workplace, such as organization and time management, but also provided an opportunity to participate in an ongoing staff learning circle relating to Settler Colonialism and Indigenous history.

Brent noted that in the “safe and welcoming space” of the learning circle, he was able to see “an emotional and vulnerable side of CTE staff members,” which helped him feel immediately connected with his colleagues and develop both personally and professionally.

In a presentation delivered at the 2023 PebblePad Showcase Event, Brent explains how he used a PebblePad ePortfolio to track and showcase his skills development while on his work term at CTE.