Collections

This is a collection of UVA Center for Teaching Excellence's peer-reviewed research demonstrating the efficacy and impact of its multi-day, intensive course design institute.

This collection highlights a range of teaching effectiveness frameworks developed for higher education contexts, primarily research-intensive institutions. These frameworks provide analytical approaches to understand the elements of teaching.

Instructors play a critical role in helping students see themselves as capable within disciplinary domains, especially when they don’t see themselves as "a [insert your discipline person]." The resources here start simple and increase in complexity (and comprehensiveness).

Research shows that students who feel they belong in a course or discipline are more likely to persist and can promote learning. This collection provides a set of practical resources for fostering a sense of belonging in your classroom.

These resources explore the practice of collaborative grading, an alternative grading approach in which students and instructors determine grades for a given course in consultation with one another.

The syllabus is a reflection of one's course design and a powerful tool for defining the context of learning in your course. These Universal Design for Learning (UDL) resources help you create a more accessible and inclusive syllabus that reduces learning barriers and welcomes learner variability.

Office hours can be a useful opportunity for students to get the assistance and advice they need to succeed in a course, but students don't always realize that. In this collection, you'll find resources and strategies for framing and structuring office hours to help students make the most of them.

The language you use in the classroom shapes classroom climate and guides students in the hard work of learning. These resources introduce non-content "instructor talk" and instructional moves that help students guide their reasoning, engage with each other intellectually, and feel connected.

As ubiquitous as it is, published research does not show that "active learning is more effective than lecturing." Research consistently demonstrates the very real and consistent finding that combining just about any form of active learning with an exposition lecture improves learning.

Video is an excellent teaching tool and a particularly effective medium for online and flipped learning environments. This collection will help you think through the different components of video to identify the right fit for your teaching context.

Teaching during times of conflict and crisis isn't easy. This collection provides resources and strategies for supporting students and keeping your course on track when events in the world intrude on events in the classroom.

This collection presents guidelines, frameworks, and concrete examples of Open Pedagogy assignments to get you started.

The UVA community is active in Open Education engagement. This collection highlights the initiatives and resources created by our own faculty and staff.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) seeks to eliminate barriers to learning based on research on how people learn. It's an inclusive approach that recognizes student strengths and provides flexibility in how students access and engage with material and show what they know.

Whether you're writing notes in the margin of a paperback book or collaboratively adding comments to a digital document, annotation can be a powerful tool for learning—and thus also for teaching.

Students as Partners is a framework that aims to reposition students as equal contributors to the pedagogical process. The resources we've collected here can help inspire you to more meaningfully involve your students in your teaching and research practices.

This collection includes resources about clear and effective ways to assign reading. These resources will help you consider how to motivate student engagement in reading tasks, while being attentive to the various skills and competencies required for students to be critical readers.

Meeting the needs of neurodivergent students—those with ADHD or autism or other ways of processing information that aren't typical—requires thoughtful attention from instructors. The resources in this collection will help you design classes where your students can learn and succeed.

Discipline-based education research (DBER) is the scientific study of teaching and learning via a combination of disciplinary expertise and social sciences methodology. Use this guide for help getting started with DBER. Some resources also cite the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL).

Generative AI (GenAI) is already changing the landscape of writing courses in multiple ways. The following resources collectively advocate for a thoughtful integration of GenAI, ensuring your students are well-equipped to harness its benefits ethically and effectively.