Whether you plan to have a career in academia, industry, business, education, public service, or the health professions, UMSL's graduate Certificate in University Teaching (CUT) will be of value to you. This program, jointly sponsored by the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and the Graduate School, is open to all UMSL graduate students (both Masters and PhD/EdD candidates), faculty, and graduate students from other campuses.
We have tried to streamline the process, so the CUT program looks different from prior years. Current CUT participants will be able to complete the original program they started (with numbered units).
Faculty Learning Communities are more highly structured than teaching circles but have many similarities to teaching circles in that they center around a common theme and aim to cross disciplines and create spaces to discuss teaching. The group typically consists of 8-12 faculty members and commits to meet for either a semester or an academic year and works towards a tangible output of some kind. That product can take many forms such as a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) project, a shared repository of resources, or another relevant output of the group. If you are interested in pursuing the formation of a faculty learning community around a topic of interest, please email us at ctl@umsl.edu.
This group will launch in Spring 2025 and build on the Culturally Responsive Teaching Workshops held during Summer 2024.
This group will launch in Fall 2024 with applications due on April 12, 2024. Reflective Teaching Communities (RTCs) emphasize peer support, collaboration, and reflection, not evaluation, and intend to support teaching as a cooperative project. Grouped with faculty with similar teaching interests from a variety of disciplines, participants engage in class observation and feedback in order to discover new ideas and insights for teaching.
HyFlex (Hybrid Flexible) is an innovative teaching modality designed to make a class available to students in a variety of formats: in-person, online synchronous (through Zoom), and online asynchronous (through Canvas). UMSL is offering a limited number of these courses each semester. The faculty who teach in HyFlex must complete a set of training through the CTL, in partnership with UMSL Information Technology Services, as well as with Missouri Online.
This program is on hiatus until Summer 2025. Offered during early summers, Summer CAMP (Collaborating to Advance Meaningful Partnerships) is an opportunity for you to refine and hone skills in a selected area to support your teaching goals for the upcoming Fall and beyond. Faculty participants agree to provide peer feedback to fellow participants and to share what they learn within their departments/colleges.
This program engages faculty and students in drawing on each other's expertise in teaching and learning. A multidisciplinary community affords members a rich set of opportunities for exploration and growth. The examination of things we have in common as teachers and learners allows us to share ideas and strategies. Reflection on our individual and disciplinary differences helps us learn more about ourselves and reveal best practices for our disciplines.
There is no specific curriculum followed. Rather, this is a supportive community in which we help each other meet our goals for the summer. In this program, you will work with faculty colleagues, student partners, and CTL camp leaders to collaborate in a faculty cohort. You’ll receive student and peer feedback as you focus on specific aspects of your course. The cohort meets weekly as a large group, and also in smaller accountability groups as needed with those with similar goals and more individualized feedback from your student partners.
NOTE: TAA historically referred to the CTL’s one-day kickoff event for graduate students in the fall; that event is now called the Graduate Student Professional Development Summit. The Teaching Assistant Academy is a program for graduate teaching assistants and graduate instructors with a current GTA or GI appointment who are interested in learning more about teaching strategies with peers. These meetings include both structured workshops on teaching techniques as well as informal activities designed to build relationships between students across the university.
This group will launch in Fall 2024. THRIVE is a pedagogical development community for early career faculty (those in their first five years of teaching) across all UMSL colleges and appointment types. During monthly Zoom meetings, participants will discuss teaching strategies, try out activities for use in class, and share concerns and ideas.
Pat Hutchings, in her book Making Teaching Community Property, defines a teaching circle as “a small group of faculty who make a commitment to work together over a period of at least a semester to address questions and concerns about the particulars of their teaching and their students' learning.” We currently have three teaching circles that meet regularly over the academic year (see below). If you are interested in forming a teaching circle that centers around a particular topic and would like help making connections and launching it, please contact the CTL at ctl@umsl.edu.
Through bi-weekly synchronous discussions, this group provides a space for faculty across disciplines to share experiences, find common ground, pursue lifelong learning opportunities, and view race and racism from multiple perspectives. We share events, resources, and other work being done on campus with one another. In the end, we aim to brainstorm anti-racist pedagogical strategies and think about how to apply this knowledge to our courses.
The group meets every two weeks via Zoom on Mondays from 9:00 -10:00 AM. This is a flexible group, not a committee, and has no attendance requirements. We are always happy to have new members join our group. Interested in joining? Contact the CTL at ctl@umsl.edu.
The Part-time Faculty Teaching Circle is an opportunity for part-time faculty to engage with other part-time faculty and tackle those challenging teaching questions pertinent to this group. Our goal is to build a supportive community to help connect you to the campus and campus resources. Topics are selected by our Advisory Group made up of members of the community such as yourself. The Advisory Group meets twice a year to review the success of the previous semester's sessions and set the agenda for the upcoming semester. The agenda of sessions are set at the start of each semester. If you are interested in joining or have any questions, please contact Jen McKanry at mckanryj@umsl.edu.
This group started from a faculty learning community that launched in January 2020. When the FLC completed their work they decided to continue meeting three times per semester and expand the teaching circle beyond the College of Arts and Sciences. This is an interdisciplinary group of faculty members that rotate facilitating a conversation about teaching graduate and undergraduate statistics courses.
The group meets one Monday a month in February, March, and April from 12:00-1:00 p.m. This is a flexible group, not a committee, and has no attendance requirements. We are always happy to have new members join our group. Are you a faculty member who teaches statistics and is interested in joining? Contact the CTL at ctl@umsl.edu.
The University of Missouri System Teaching Scholars Program (UMTS) is designed to support and recognize the contributions of new-to-UM faculty members to student academic success. Focused on fostering a commitment to excellent teaching, this unique program provides participants the opportunity to network across their home institution and across the four UM universities preparing faculty to engage with their teaching in new, creative ways.
