TILT Master Teacher Initiative
The Master Teacher Initiative (MTI) is a university-wide program to enhance the quality of teaching within CSU’s colleges and libraries.
Visit TILT’s collection of Teaching Tips and the CNS collection of Teaching Tips
November 21, 2024
We have nearly finished week 14 and next week is fall break! My students and colleagues definitely are ready for a brief reprieve before the final dash to the semester finish. This week I have a job opportunity announcement from a former CSU Biochemistry PhD student, Courtney Springer, and a tip from Jen Todd and Tonya Buchan in TILT. With annual review season coming up soon, this tip seems quite timely.
Chemistry Adjuncts Instructor Positions – Laramie County Community College, Cheyenne, WY
They are looking for someone to take on a couple of lab sections for non-majors chemistry and/or GenChem I. Since it is a bit of a commute from Fort Collins, they will schedule the instructor to teach two labs on the same day so they would only need to come up once a week (likely Thursday or Friday). Each lab section meets for 3 hours and is worth 2.25 credit hours, so at $850/credit hr x 2.25 = $1912.50 per lab section (i.e. a total of $3825 for the semester if instructor teaches two labs). The labs themselves are already designed, and the lab materials will be prepared for the adjunct, so these labs are essentially “turn-key” and would simply require the adjunct to oversee the students during the lab period and grade pre- and post-lab reports. They need someone starting in the fall of 2025, but we could potentially use someone as early as this coming spring. Here is the link to the job posting: https://part-timeemployment-lccc.icims.com/jobs/3395/adjunct-instructor%2c-chemistry/job
Collecting Evidence for Annual Review
By Jennifer Todd and Tonya Buchan, TILT
With annual review right around the corner, consider using the TILT Teaching Effectiveness Framework to demonstrate your teaching effectiveness in annual review. Even if you didn’t set a teaching goal for 2024, TILT’s Recommended Process for Annual Review of Teaching provides resources that will help you document your teaching efforts.
Highlighting Your Teaching in 2024
Did you use the TEF to set a teaching goal?
- Use the TEF to reflect and report on your teaching effectiveness.
- Review the TEF domain in which you set your goal and highlight the evidence-based teaching practices you integrated into your teaching.
- Write about how students responded to these practices: were they more engaged? How do you know? Did they ask better questions? Perform better on an assessment? Did attendance improve? The Teaching Effectiveness initiative (TEI) page provides some examples of excellent reflections on teaching effectiveness.
- Refer to the TEF domain Self-Assessment Rubric that aligns with the selected domain. Do you see growth on the Self-Assessment Rubric? Use the language in the rubric to help you describe your growth in this domain.
Did you use something else to set your teaching goal?
- As best you can, align your goal with a domain of the TEF.
- Follow the recommendations in #s 1 – 4 above.
Didn’t set a teaching goal yet?
- Reflect on your teaching accomplishments as an instructor in 2024.
- List the accomplishments and look for a theme that aligns with one domain of the TEF.
- Follow the recommendations in #s 1 – 4 above.
Looking Ahead to 2025
TILT recommends setting one goal in one domain of the Teaching Effectiveness Framework per year. Our recommended process is outlined in four steps below and explained in detail on the TILT’s Recommended Process for Annual Review of Teaching.
Step 1) Choose one domain from the TEF
Step 2) Set one teaching goal in your chosen domain
Step 3) Attend professional development that aligns with the domain (Note: All TILT professional development is aligned with TEF domains)
Step 4) Create a folder to store artifacts created after reflecting on professional development experiences:
- Brief written reflections on your teaching: an excellent class, student reactions to activities, assignments from TILT Best Practices in Teaching courses, Teaching Squares observation forms, etc.
- Workshops attended
- Impact on students based on making changes in teaching
- Feedback from students: surveys, emails, exit tickets, etc.
- Changes in grades between semesters on key course outcomes: quiz scores, assignment improvements, etc.
- Notable changes in attendance in class or office hours. Are more students coming to office hours to ask questions?
- Changes in quality or quantity of questions: Do you receive more/less/same number of emails on challenging content? Are students asking the same types of questions? Are the questions more/less sophisticated than before.
