*ALL WORKSHOPS ARE FROM 2:15-3:30*

Tuesday, May 28

Building A Course Website

Zach Muhlbauer and Laurie Hurson | Room 3305

While preparing a course, instructors must choose a platform to host their course materials online. CUNY offers several options for hosting and distributing teaching materials, including Blackboard, Brightspace, and the CUNY Academic Commons. This workshop will introduce attendees to several ed tech platforms available at CUNY, highlight the affordances of the platforms, and discuss best practices for sharing course materials with students.

Teaching for the First Time: Strategies to be Comfortable with the Discomfort

Ana Badue and Oriana Mejías Martínez | Room 3207

Teaching can be very pleasurable, but it can also trigger all sorts of discomforts in the beginning of a teaching career. This workshop will help participants understand and process the main fears and stressors related to becoming a higher education instructor, and introduce strategies to address them.

Teaching Reading to Teach Writing

Jeff Voss | Room 3308

“You can’t out-write your reading skills!” No matter what discipline you teach, chances are you’re going to be asking your students to do a lot of writing–and reading. This workshop will go over effective and engaging strategies for teaching reading & writing in the college classroom such as annotating, freewriting, resocializing reading, and noticing.

How to Lecture Without Putting Your Students to Sleep

Sule Aksoy and Manju Adikesavan  | Room 3309

This workshop will focus on delivering engaging lectures through balanced multimedia and visual aids and interactive in-class activities. It will draw on basic principles of universal design for learning, visual hierarchy, information architecture, and storytelling techniques. We will discuss practical considerations such as managing time for lecture preparation and public speaking to capture student attention.

Teaching with CUNY TV

Pedro Cabello del Moral and Chandni Tariq | Room 3212

CUNY TV is the City University of New York’s television channel located on the ground floor of the Graduate Center building. Due to its variety of shows broadcasted over 40 years of history, CUNY TV’s vast online archive is a great resource for courses across disciplines. In this workshop, we will present a new website to access the shows’ content, information, and themes and we will introduce examples of teaching guides and assignments instructors can apply to their courses.

Wednesday, May 29

Who Am I When I Teach? Creating a Teaching Persona

Manju Adikesavan and Oriana Mejías Martínez  | Room 3307

Considering who and how you would like to be as an instructor is a critical step in developing your pedagogy. The version of yourself that you bring to class each day–your “teaching persona”– will evolve session to session, and from course to course. In this workshop, we will explore tools and sensibilities by examining the diverse roles of instructors in the classroom, and considering our positionalities, who we want to be, who our students are likely to be, and thinking through how to build rapport to foster with them to help you and your students have deep and meaningful teaching and learning experiences in and out of the classroom.

Critical Approaches to Grading

Jeff Voss and Laurie Hurson | Room 3207

Grading frequently induces anxiety, stress, and confusion for students and instructors alike. Grades are an unavoidable aspect of our labor as graduate student teachers and adjunct instructors at CUNY. Whether we view them as the imposition of standards or a meaningful metric to account for students’ effort, we all understand that grades hold a lot of power as currency in American academia. This workshop will help instructors reflect on their grading practices and discuss a multiplicity of approaches for assessing our students’ diverse ways of learning.

Building Community Through Rituals in the Classroom

Pedro Cabello del Moral | Room 3212

Rituals help create habits for study since they provide strategies for interacting with the course content and for actively participating in class discussions.When we perform rituals together we build a teaching community that moves at the pace of trust and takes charge of every student’s learning process. In this workshop we are going to learn, discuss, and practice rituals for making our courses fun, meaningful, and memorable.

Abolitionist Pedagogy & Ed Tech

Zach Muhlbauer and Chandni Tariq | Room 3308

Educational technologies, ranging from online proctoring to plagiarism detection, are often framed as value-neutral tools for managing assessment and enforcing academic integrity. Yet their application in teaching can also reproduce practices rooted in policing, punishment, and bodily dispossession. In this workshop, we aim to critique these tools using an abolitionist lens that opposes student surveillance and prioritizes trust, care, and community in our courses.

Techniques for Classroom Participation

Ana Badue | Room 3309

When students participate actively and engage with the content of a course, the dynamic environment can help them think more critically. Moreover, it makes teaching more pleasurable. This workshop introduces many techniques to go beyond lecturing, to foster conversations and to guarantee the involvement of students in the learning process.

Office Hours

Institute attendees can meet with TLC staff and fellows to discuss their courses and teaching related questions.

Office hours will be held in room 3317 on Wednesday, May 29th from 3:30-4:30 and Friday, May 31st from 2:15-3:30pm.