Students are not the only members of UW who have academic resources and opportunities for growth on campus. Faculty members who need help navigating WyoCourses, are new to the university or want to explore teaching methods and research, have means of assistance as well.
Located on the fifth floor of Coe Library is the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning, which is the faculty development and education center.
“Basically, we support anyone in the instructional community – totally free resources available – to anyone who is looking for support with their teaching,” Coordinator of the ECTL Cathy Gorbett said.
ECTL offers special programs for new faculty and graduate teaching assistants who are teaching for the first time.
“We provide resources for faculty to teach,” Instructional Designer Christi Boggs said. “This includes how to actually work within WyoCourses or use technology, all the way to like ‘What is the best way for me to teach this topic online or in the classroom.’”
Faculty learning studios are available Mondays and Thursdays from 1-3 p.m., which provides help relating to teaching and utilizing teaching programs.
“It’s important to say that if they can’t make those times, we’re totally here to support them,” Instructional Designer Jeff Miller said. “Sometimes they think they’re bothering us if they call us, but that’s our job. That’s what we’re here for. They can call us, they can email us and we’re here to help them.”
One way that ECTL tries to connect faculty is by hosting Teaching and Technology Invited Presenter Series throughout the year.
“We feel it’s really important for faculty to hear from other faculty on campus, not just us providing the workshops and seminars,” said Gorbett. “There’s a lot of faculty on this campus doing some amazing work in their classroom and it’s one way to showcase and feature those faculty. We send out a call saying, ‘Hey are you doing something really great in your classroom that you think your colleagues or others would like to hear about.’”
The Ellbogen Center additionally promotes summer institutes and global learning communities, focusing on the idea of integrating the latest teaching methods into classrooms and providing the chance for staff to work out curriculum with the help of teaching developers.
“Typically, what we do every summer is put out a competitive call for applications [for the summer institute],” Instructional Design Coordinator Meg Van Baalen-Wood said.
The summer institutes that UW offers faculty are three to five-day programs that focus on a specific teaching methodology every year.
“Our focus is really sort of two-fold,” Wood said. “We start by trying to give faculty or participates a really strong foundation in whatever aspect of pedagogy that we’re really focusing on and then we give them opportunities to begin building a project, something that they can actually apply in the classroom, whether it’s a lesson, a module or in some cases an entire class.”
ECTL isn’t focusing on assisting just local instructors.
Professor Janelle Seeley, instructional designer and academic professional lecturer, traveled to Uzbekistan to the Tashkent University of Economics to work with their faculty on teaching methodologies.
“I worked with about 30 faculty and graduate students there and it was great, really fun, learned a lot of cool stuff and got to see the country a little bit too,” said Seeley.
Tashkent University and Seeley are interested in continuing the partnership between the two universities and are in the process of creating a global community.
“I thought it might be cool to do a virtual kind of faculty learning community,” Seeley said. “Where faculty here partner with their faculty and GA’s [graduate assistants] there, [do] a project on the scholarship of teaching and learning.”
Seeley explained that the partnership would research teaching and learning pedagogies and try to identify areas of learning that instructors could improve upon.
“Maybe there’s some big questions in your field that students aren’t understanding and they’re like ‘all students in this particular subject always kind of get stuck here and I want to help them get past this stuck point,’” Seeley said. “The faculty here and the faculty there go ‘yeah woah, we both have the same issue, students are really challenged with this particular concept, what can we do to help them get past that.’ So they think about a project they might do together that would help students get past this difficult concept or something. Then they implement this project in their classrooms and then see what kind of results they get.”
The scholarship for teaching and learning is this year’s summer institute project.
“Our center brings faculty together from all over campus who exchange and share ideas,” Gorbett said.
ECTL provides and promotes the latest tools for faculty, TA’s, GA’s and any instructor in or off campus to use and serves as a means for the staff of UW to get the academic assistance they need.
