CTE Annual Report 2023-2024

Supporting Faculty Development: Continuous Instructional Improvement 

CTE’s Certificate in University Teaching (CUT) program was established in 1998 to equip PhD students with theoretical knowledge and practical skills to help them become effective, self-aware, and critically reflective instructors. Since 1998, nearly 630 PhD students have completed the CUT. One of them is Diana Skrzydlo—now Associate Professor, Teaching Stream in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science and also the Math Faculty Teaching Fellow—who undertook the program in 2008.

Looking back from the vantage of sixteen years, Diana affirms that the CUT program was transformative. Of special benefit, she says, were the teaching dossier and research project components. She recalls that her research project was on oral exams, which she subsequently came to use in some of her actuarial science courses.

The CUT program was also pivotal for Diana in that it launched her ongoing commitment to educational development. She’s continued to attend CTE workshops and participates in several teaching-related communities of practice, including Universal Design for Learning and Wellbeing and Blended Learning. She also serves on the EdTech Advisory Committee, has received a LITE grant for research in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and unfailingly attends the annual University of Waterloo Teaching and Learning Conference, where she’s a frequent presenter. Diana is also a recipient of a 2023 Distinguished Teacher Award. 

Diana says her passion for educational development is motivated by "my belief that an instructor’s teaching practice can always get better." But she adds that mentoring new instructors, in her role as a Teaching Fellow, is also an incentive because helping them start off with effective teaching practices means they don’t need to “unlearn” less effective practices later on. Even small tweaks—“low-hanging fruit,” as she calls it—can have a significant and positive impact on student learning.

Supporting Faculty Development: Future Faculty

Like Diana, Jennifer Ellingham also completed the CUT program, albeit much more recently—in 2024. Also like Diana, Jennifer received the CUT Award, granted annually to the graduate student who demonstrates the highest achievement on completion of the CUT program.

CTE's CUT program, Jennifer says, “was awesome because it shaped how I deliver lectures, how I create course materials, how much to present, and how and when and what I assess.”

One of the innovations she introduced to a course was a concept map that her students developed throughout the term, adding nodes and relationships as they encountered new content. The final product was a sophisticated visual representation of all they had learned.

Jennifer has also completed CTE’s New Instructor Foundations Program, the Instructional Skills Workshop, and about 30 other sessions—“CTE,” she says, “has a workshop for everything!” 

She adds that “the CUT program’s teaching dossier component was a tremendous career boost because it gave me a jumpstart. When I sent out my applications for teaching positions, the CUT feedback was a huge help.” Jennifer shared the impact of some of these learning opportunities as a participant in one of CTE's From TA to Course Instructor panels. 

Jennifer intends to continue to pursue opportunities for educational development. “I need to keep learning to keep up with things… I don’t want to just teach the way I was taught!”

Another way that graduate students can work with CTE is as Graduate Educational Developers (GEDs) and Teaching Assistant Workshop Facilitators (TAWFs).

The GED and TAWF positions not only contribute to CTE's programming but also help the graduate students hone their teaching practice, making them more competitive in the job market and setting them on a path of future educational development opportunities.

McLennon Wilson, for example, who worked as a TAWF in 2021 and is now an instructor in the Department of Psychology at Cape Breton University, recently commented that "developing and running workshops as a TAWF allowed me to put my instructional skills to the test.... I can’t imagine engaging in SoTL-related research projects or exploring teaching development opportunities if it weren't for my time at CTE." 

Other graduate students who recently worked as GEDs or TAWFs have found positions at institutions such as the University of Virginia, Bishop's University, Western University, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Université de Hearst, the Dundas Valley School of Art, the University of Alberta, the University of Toronto, and Mount Royal University.

We're confident that wherever our GEDs and TAWFs end up, the skills they developed with CTE will contribute to the culture of teaching and learning at their new institutions! 

Supporting Faculty Development: Indigenous Knowledges and Anti-Racism

CTE’s Indigenous Knowledges and Anti-Racism (IKAR) team were intensively involved in faculty development in the 2023-24 fiscal year, including over 400 consultations related to either anti-racism or Indigenous Knowledges (including 226 focused on both). As well, members of the IKAR team responded to faculty, staff, students, and community members’ needs through 40 custom  circles, retreats, and events.

For example, in Fall 2023 and Winter 2024, the IKAR team worked with faculty members—including 20 Engineering instructors—who wanted to develop their skills in facilitating and adapting Indigenous circle pedagogy in their teaching.

Some of those instructors are now implementing circle pedagogy in their classrooms, while others are taking the lead in facilitating Truth and Reconciliation circles with their colleagues. In the longer term, the goal is to pilot the integration of Indigenous Knowledges into courses in Biomedical Engineering and Systems Design Engineering.

The IKAR team is also working with instructors who want to co-design and co-teach a graduate-level reading course in decolonizing their curriculum, as part of the Provost’s Interdisciplinary Initiative to create a Graduate Diploma in Indigenous Knowledges.

Supporting Faculty Development: Curriculum-Based Design and Renewal

Working with departments as they undertake curriculum review is one of CTE's core services. In fact, in the 2023-24 fiscal year, we facilitated 40 events and held 216 consultations with 52 departments. 

Consultations and events are intended, of course, to assist departments in creating and critiquing their curriculum, but it has the secondary effect of faculty development. As the members of a department reflect on the system of courses that make up their department's overall programming, they inevitably also reflect on whether the learning outcomes, learning activities, and assessments of their own courses align with the program outcomes of their department.

Ellen MacEachen, Director of the School of Public Health Sciences, affirms that this “double benefit” of curriculum review — on both programs and individual courses — was clearly evident when her school worked with CTE in 2023 and 2024:

“CTE provided important curriculum-based support as we sought to introduce Data Science across our programs. During a full-day department retreat as well as two subsequent Data Science retreats, CTE’s staff provided guidance and helpful input — support that was critical to the success of the initiative. CTE has now started to work with individual instructors to help them ensure that meaningful assessments are occurring and how the grading structure of courses might be reorganized.”