The Center for Teaching Excellence offers confidential consultation and advice on an as-needed/as-requested basis to Drake faculty of instruction who think their pedagogy would benefit from conversations with experienced teachers or from course observation.
Consultations are focused, short-term interactions that offer advice on specific questions, issues, and questions that will help already successful instructors make meaningful improvements in their approach to teaching and learning.
Consultations on any of the following topics are available:
Facilitating engaged learning in the classroom
Are discussions flagging? Do only the same few students participate in collaborative exchange? Are you tired of relying on the same small-group activities to get students engaged in active learning? Do you hope to build a more mutually committed classroom community? Do you anticipate challenging conversations around sensitive or difficult topics? Whatever the challenges you face in bringing students actively into the conversations in your classes, our Teaching and Learning Consultants are here to help.
Student motivation
Whether it’s a matter of encouraging careful completion of homework, in-class engagement with the material, or resilience and self-efficacy, Teaching and Learning Consultants can offer ideas about how to motivate students to take their learning seriously in your courses.
Course design and architecture
Teaching and Learning Consultants can help you articulate your big ideas for course topics and themes into specific goals and to craft course proposals, syllabi, policies, assignment sequences, and schedules of activities to help you and your students achieve those goals.
Designing and managing projects
If you’ve ever asked students in your class to take on large or complex problems—both within the boundaries of your course and beyond, as in community or global contexts—you know how messy project-management can be. Teaching and Learning Consultants are eager to advise you on managing projects, and equip students to manage their own work, efficiently and effectively.
Grading and assessment
From designing assignments and rubrics to articulating evaluation practices to evaluating and responding to student work, consultants can answer questions and offer perspectives on how to effectively and efficiently measure student performance in your courses.
Using educational technology effectively
What happens when a discussion forum begins to feel like busy-work? Should you think about “flipping” some components of your course? Are you trying to find ways to engage students through digital platforms or interfaces, but don’t know where to begin. Our Teaching and Learning Consultants can share their experiences and insights in using digital technology to advance student
Representing and reflecting on pedagogy
Are you composing a pedagogy statement or teaching philosophy? If so, our consultants can take a look at what you’ve written and offer their impressions of how well it succeeds in presenting a compelling picture of your teacherly identity.
Send your request for a consultation, including a brief description of the problem, issue, challenge, or opportunity you are seeking advice on, to teaching.excellence@drake.edu. You will receive a reply putting you in touch with a peer consultant well positioned to help you address your needs.
You and your consultant will work together to decide on the best way to approach your question together, whether that’s through document sharing, brainstorming sessions, a classroom observation, or something else.
Consultations are confidential and non-evaluative: They do not inform official performance reviews or reappointment, tenure, promotion, or award decisions. They are also purely advisory, meaning that the ultimate decision as to whether and to what extent to put consultants’ feedback into action is entirely a matter for faculty consultees to decide for themselves.
— Craig Owens, Professor of English
