KEYNOTES

Basic Info

We design our keynotes to inspire attendees’ interest in teaching and motivate participants to take actions that improve both teaching and learning experiences.

Our keynotes fit best in a 90-minute timeframe, but we can shorten or lengthen them at your request. We believe in modeling the behaviors we encourage instructors to implement in their courses. All of our keynotes include interactive engagement opportunities for participants.

Keynotes can be adapted into workshops. We offer both in-person and virtual keynotes.

Below are a few keynotes we’re most frequently asked to give. If you have something else in mind, we can work with you to adapt or custom design a keynote to meet your needs.

Six Essentials of Effective Instruction

Talking about teaching is surprisingly difficult. Faculty regularly innovate in their classrooms yet struggle to explain to colleagues, students, and even themselves why their instructional choices matter. Without a shared language for teaching, conversations can devolve into anecdotes, defensiveness, or misunderstandings, leaving effective practices undervalued and instructors isolated. This interactive workshop introduces the Critical Teaching Behaviors (CTB) Framework, a research-informed model that articulates six essential categories of effective instruction and provides a common language for discussing teaching across disciplines and contexts.

Participants will explore how the CTB framework synthesizes decades of research on student success into observable, adaptable teaching behaviors. The session emphasizes that effective teaching does not require implementing every possible strategy. Instead, strong instruction emerges from context-appropriate choices across the six categories. Through guided reflection, structured discussion, and practical application, attendees will learn how to identify critical teaching behaviors in their own courses and use the framework to communicate instructional decisions more clearly and confidently.

Using Critical Teaching Behaviors to Transform Conversations about Teaching

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 success is our goal. While instructors cannot guarantee this outcome, research on teaching and learning offers insight into what we can do to optimize conditions for success. 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 review case studies on teaching and learning from the student perspective. Participants will reflect on their own definitions of student success and compare them with student definitions, consider what students have to say about teaching practices that fostered their success, and identify teaching strategies they can implement to advance the shared goal of student success.

Watch Us Present

Watch Lauren Present

In this clip from New York Institute of Technology’s Faculty Professional Development Day, Lauren talks about the “Include” category of Critical Teaching Behaviors.

Watch Claudia Present

In this clip from New York Institute of Technology’s Faculty Professional Development Day, Claudia talks about the “Engage” category of Critical Teaching Behaviors.

Contact Us

We’d love to hear your questions about or experiences using the CTB materials.

Email
CriticalTeachingBehaviors@gmail.com