Teaching Resources

 

Design Effective Learning Experiences

Create learner-centered experiences in which course goals, activities, assignments, and assessments are aligned and accessible. Develop activities that are authentic and applicable to real world contexts.

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Academic Integrity Resources for Instructors

This teaching resource supports you in proactively designing for academic integrity, and to share ideas for supporting learners in meeting their learning goals with integrity.

Academic Integrity Resources for Instructors

Active Learning

Active learning is any approach to instruction in which all students are asked to engage in the learning process. Active learning stands in contrast to "traditional" modes of instruction in which students are passive recipients of knowledge from an expert.

Active Learning

Course and Syllabus Design

This resource introduces the 4As Framework (Atmosphere, Aims, Activities, Assessments), a practical, learning-centered approach to course and syllabus design. Grounded in backward design principles, it offers strategies to align goals, assessments, and activities while fostering inclusive, engaging learning environments.

Course and Syllabus Design

Online Teaching and Design

Support for online teaching and design can be found on the Teaching Support website. This site includes resources from CEI as well as other units across the University that support online teaching and design.

Online Teaching and Design

Team Projects

Are you considering using a team project in your course? Have you used them before but feel that there’s room for improvement? Wondering how to address a challenge you or your students face? 

This resource provides effective, research-based practices and resources to help you create, support, and assess team projects in your class, whether it’s online, face to face, or hybrid.

Faculty Guide to Team Projects

Teaching in an Active Learning Classroom (ALC)

Active learning classrooms (ALCs) are student-centered, technology-rich classrooms. They are easily identified with their large student tables and moveable seating designed to facilitate and promote active learning.

Teaching in an Active Learning Classroom

Leveraging Learning Sciences Research for Teaching

This resource synthesizes common themes from the pedagogical literature about student learning that have a solid foundation of research behind them.  The five principles highlighted here can help guide your teaching approach. For each of these principles we list concrete strategies that you can use or adapt in your teaching.

Leveraging the Learning Sciences

Create Inclusive Learning Environments

Foster a climate of belonging by creating learning environments that support a broad range of learners and represent a diversity of scholars and perspectives. Consider the accessibility of all aspects of your course.

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Anti-Racism Resources for Higher Ed

Anti-racism positions racial equity work as an active and on-going process of identifying, describing, and dismantling racist systems, policies, and practices. These activities and resources aim to support academics across disciplines and identities who are engaged in addressing racism in higher education. 

Anti-Racism Resources for Higher Ed

Inclusive Teaching at a Predominantly White Institution

This guide introduces a basic framework for “Inclusive Teaching at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI).” You will find definitions, key ideas, PWI assumptions, core concepts, suggested teaching practices, and references so that you can develop your capacity for inclusive teaching in ways that fit your teaching contexts.

Inclusive Teaching at a PWI

Strategies to Support Challenging Conversations in the Classroom

This resource offers strategies for navigating and facilitating challenging conversations in educational settings. Drawing on diverse scholarly and practical perspectives, it provides adaptable frameworks for both new and experienced educators to effectively engage with complex topics. Regular updates and personalized consultations ensure relevance and customization to specific teaching contexts.

Strategies to Support Challenging Conversations in the Classroom

Teaching with Access and Inclusion

When embraced fully, accessible and inclusive teaching is a paradigm shift that fundamentally alters thinking about curriculum, course design, the classroom and campus culture. This resource provides foundational information for teaching with access and inclusion. 

Teaching with Access and Inclusion

Teaching Globally Diverse Classes

UMN’s systemwide Global Programs and Strategy Alliance offers a number of events focused on internationalizing the curriculum and campus, supporting the integration of international and domestic students, and internationalizing teaching and learning. They also offer a certificate for Teaching Globally Diverse Classes. 

Workshops and Events

Trauma-Informed Teaching and Learning

Trauma-informed teaching strategies incorporate calmness through clarity and flexibility, and integrate principles of Universal Design for Learning in course format and content delivery, assessment formats an grading, and instructor characteristics and practices. 

Trauma-Informed Teaching and Learning

Assess Student Learning

Use varied formative and summative assessments that provide opportunities to learn and promote the achievement of stated learning outcomes. Ensure transparency, consistency, and fairness.

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Create Assessments that Promote Learning For All Students

This resource offers concrete suggestions for instructors, examples of applications of suggested strategies by UMN instructors, and links to additional resources and references. The content and approaches address different teaching formats so as to be useful whether you teach online, face-to-face, or in a hybrid format.

Assessments

Online Assessments

Online assessments may be used to support instructional goals, even if your primary course format isn’t fully online. They may be incorporated into any learning environment: online, blended, or in-person. 

Create Online Assessments

Generative AI in Teaching and Learning

Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) has exploded across the world and throughout the educational landscape, and with it come both opportunities and challenges. Here are a few key resources from across the University of Minnesota on how to best incorporate generative AI into your teaching practices.

Generative AI in Teaching and Learning

Reflect on, Evaluate, and Improve Teaching

Develop a process for intentionally reflecting on your course and pedagogy that includes using your own experience, feedback, and student data to make improvements.

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Gathering Feedback and Documenting Professional Growth in Teaching

Collect feedback from students, colleagues, yourself, and University instructional consultants to support your teaching goals and development.

Gathering Feedback and Documenting Professional Growth in Teaching

Early Term Feedback on Teaching

An early term assessment of teaching/learning (between Weeks 3 and 8) is one of the most recommended formative approaches to improve the educational environment for your students. Get recommendations on how to collect, interpret, and respond to your students' feedback.

Early Term Feedback on Teaching

A Guide to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning or SoTL is a systematic investigation of a teaching/learning issue that is shared for review, dissemination and possibly some action that changes what is done in the classroom. Learn more about how engaging in SoTL will help provide evidentiary basis for your teaching practice.

A Guide to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

 

Writing Your Teaching Philosophy

Your teaching philosophy is a self-reflective statement of your beliefs about teaching and learning. This resource helps you get started including the drafting process and provides rubrics and samples.

Writing Your Teaching Philosophy