How Can You Engage with Us?
Keynotes and Workshops
Six Essentials of Effective Instruction
Using Critical Teaching Behaviors to Transform Conversations about Teaching
How can we effectively communicate about and collaborate on teaching with our colleagues and students? In this presentation, we introduce the Critical Teaching Behaviors (CTB) framework, a tool that synthesizes research on effective teaching practices in higher education into six categories of observable behaviors. Definitions and behaviors listed on the CTB framework help faculty develop a shared understanding of good teaching. This foundation prepares faculty to have productive conversations about teaching with colleagues. When we speak a common language, we can claim agency in telling our teaching stories, share and recognize effective teaching practices, and collaborate to develop more equitable measures for evaluating teaching. In this session, we will lay the foundation for these discussions by exploring the framework, using it to reflect on our teaching, and sharing our strengths and strategies with colleagues.
Who Tells Your Story?
Reflection and Agency in Documenting Teaching Effectiveness
When it comes to teaching effectiveness, who tells your story? Often, documentation of teaching privileges student or colleague voices or simply lets materials speak for themselves. Using the Critical Teaching Behaviors (CTB) framework, we discuss a documentation method that promotes instructor agency in shaping teaching narratives while fostering reflective habits that improve teaching. The framework provides guidance to instructors crafting their first teaching narrative and presents more experienced teachers with a new lens to think about their teaching. Participants will begin framing a persuasive, coherent teaching narrative using the CTB and evidence from instructional artifacts easily available to them.
Foundations for Success
Defining Critical Teaching Behaviors for Student Learning
As teachers, student learning is our goal. Research on teaching and learning offers insight into what we can do to support student success; however, staying current on this research is time-consuming and can be overwhelming for instructors delving into a new field. Critical Teaching Behaviors (CTBs) prepare instructors to foster student success by providing foundational knowledge of effective teaching practices. In this session, participants will use the CTB framework to reflect on their current instructional practices and pedagogical areas of interest to identify strategies they can implement to promote student learning while reinvigorating their teaching.
Observing Critical Teaching Behaviors
What Does Good Teaching Look Like?
As campuses look for options to reduce bias in student-feedback-based evaluations of teaching, many institutions are turning to peer observations of teaching. Research tells us that effective peer observations can enhance reflection, boost confidence, and build community related to teaching. Furthermore, peer observations can promote equity in the evaluation of teaching by introducing the objective perspective of a peer. Poorly designed and executed peer observations, however, can have the opposite impact. This workshop introduces the Critical Teaching Behavior (CTB) observation tools and offers training for faculty conducting peer observations to help them maximize the benefits associated with effective practice.
Many tools are available to guide observers, but often prescriptive instruments reduce instructional complexity to manageable, one-size-fits-all checklists that do not account for the individualized, context-dependent nature of teaching. Using the CTB tools, faculty engaged in peer reviews of teaching
give and receive holistic feedback grounded in research-based practices proven to support student success;
collaborate to identify teaching strengths and set clear goals for development;
engage in reflective self-assessment with the purpose of integrating the faculty voice in the observation process.
Ask about our asynchronous training support module!
Asynchronous Book Groups
Our asynchronous, communal reading groups offer faculty an opportunity to read and discuss Critical Teaching Behaviors: Defining, Documenting, and Discussing Good Teaching with the authors! Facilitated through Perusall, a social annotation platform, our reading gruops allow faculty to engage at the time and depth that works best for them. These reading groups are ideal for campuses beginning conversations about how to evaluate teaching. The book provides a common, research-based language in which to define the behaviors associated with good teaching and provides faculty and committees tools they can adapt to collect insights on teaching from students, peers, and teachers themselves. A communal reading of Critical Teaching Behaviors ensures that stakeholders start teaching evaluation conversations from a shared understanding of effective practice.
We recommend a four-week reading timeline. Readings are released on a weekly basis with author-created videos to introduce each content grouping. We engage with participants in real time through annotations and responses posted in Perusall. Together with participants, we create a resource list of websites, tools, articles, and videos related to content in the book. Perusall’s grouping features allows us to accommodate groups of all sizes, large and small. Social-media-like interfaces allow us to maximize participant engagement in this asynchronous environment.
Interested in a CTB event for your campus?
Reach out to us! We look forward to discussing your needs to determine how we can best support them.
What are people saying about our presentations?
Suzanne Tapp
Assistant Vice Provost of Faculty Success & Managing Director Teaching, Learning, & Professional Development Center
Texas Tech University
Anonymous Feedback
“Lauren Barbeau and Claudia Cornejo Happel came to Texas Tech University as keynote speakers for one of our annual teaching conferences. They partner beautifully and build off of each other’s styles and insight. In one day, they helped us move at least a year ahead in our Teaching Evaluation Initiative as they applied their evidence-based framework to our context and facilitated our conversations. I cannot recommend them highly enough!”
Paul Gebb
Director Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning
Oklahoma City University
“Lauren Barbeau's virtual workshop, ‘Who Tells Your Story?: Faculty Reflection and Agency in Documenting Teaching Effectiveness,’ was poignant and timely for our Faculty Colloquium. Faculty are in the process of updating our University's promotion and tenure guidelines. In a time where faculty decide how to describe and measure teaching behaviors/effectiveness this workshop and handouts from the book Critical Teaching Behaviors provides an excellent framework to revise language. This update was needed to reflect the current classroom environment. We found the Critical Teaching Behaviors Framework to be especially useful with columns that differentiate behaviors and how they can be represented with numerous examples. This workshop has impacted our community greatly.”
Tracy Marcella Addy
Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning | Director of the Center for the Integration of Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship
Lafayette College
We enjoyed Dr. Lauren Barbeau's visit to our campus. She was a wonderful workshop facilitator. Our College has a fairly developed formal evaluative classroom observation process, and our faculty and staff members appreciated learning about the Critical Teaching Behaviors Framework that she co-developed. We now will think differently about how to measure and document good teaching.
Faculty Development Day
New York Institute of Technology
I think the [keynote] was facilitated very well by the two speakers! They were both engaging, and convincing in how they provided the information. Also the material that they handed out was well structured and supports the learning process and also the opportunity of having some "hands-on" activities in between help me to comprehend and have some concrete take aways for my teaching!
What are people saying about the reading group?
Participants “will leave the course with numerous actionable strategies that they can implement in the classroom to improve their courses. These strategies were provided both in the book and in the exchange of ideas among group participants. As with most courses, the greatest benefit/return requires active participation. Even if they find that they don't have as much time as they'd like to participate, the book is still an excellent resource to consult after the course ends.”
“This was such a positive and encouraging atmosphere to gain new skills in. Loved this experience!”
“I thought the facilitators did an excellent job of engaging with all participants. I really enjoyed the flexibility that the asynchronous component provided - allowing me to engage around my busy schedule.”
“I would tell them that is is well worth the time to be part of this community. They would gain wonderful insights into how to evaluate and structure their own teaching. I really loved how I was feeling connected with the participants that seemed very engaged. That was really fun!”
“Very engaging, first time using Perusall but found it to be a perfect fit for this professional development experience. Discussions were extremely valuable and I appreciated having time to reflect and dive deeper into topics within the text than what we would have been able to do in in-person meetings.”
“Claudia and Lauren provide priceless insights and tools to improve your teaching that apply to any discipline. I have learned that the process to improve teaching does not need to be a complete overhaul of teaching strategies; beginning with small, manageable and purposeful changes can lead to powerful results! They offer unique guidance from the educational developer perspective which I love.”