Whether you plan to have a career in academia, industry, business, education, public service, or the health professions, UMSL's graduate Certificate in University Teaching (CUT) will be of value to you. This program, jointly sponsored by the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and the Graduate School, is open to all UMSL graduate students (both masters and doctoral candidates), faculty, and graduate students from other campuses.
We have tried to streamline the process, so the CUT program looks different from prior years. Current CUT participants will be able to complete the original program they started (with numbered units).
Faculty Learning Communities are more highly structured than teaching circles but have many similarities to teaching circles in that they center around a common theme and aim to cross disciplines and create spaces to discuss teaching. The group typically consists of 8-12 faculty members and commits to meet for either a semester or an academic year and works towards a tangible output of some kind. That product can take many forms such as a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) project, a shared repository of resources, or another relevant output of the group. If you are interested in pursuing the formation of a faculty learning community around a topic of interest, please email us at ctl@umsl.edu.
This group will launch in January 2025 and build on the Culturally Responsive Teaching Workshops held during Summer 2024.
HyFlex (Hybrid Flexible) is an innovative teaching modality designed to make a class available to students in a variety of formats: in-person, online synchronous (through Zoom), and online asynchronous (through Canvas). UMSL is offering a limited number of these courses each semester. The faculty who teach in HyFlex must complete a set of training through the CTL, in partnership with UMSL Information Technology Services, as well as with Missouri Online.
Reflective Teaching Communities (RTCs) emphasize peer support, collaboration, and reflection, not evaluation, and intend to support teaching as a cooperative project. Grouped with faculty with similar teaching interests from a variety of disciplines, participants engage in class observation and feedback in order to discover new ideas and insights for teaching.
NOTE: TAA historically referred to the CTL’s one-day kickoff event for graduate students in the fall; that event is now called the Graduate Student Professional Development Summit. The Teaching Assistant Academy is a program for graduate teaching assistants and graduate instructors with a current GTA or GI appointment who are interested in learning more about teaching strategies with peers. These meetings include both structured workshops on teaching techniques as well as informal activities designed to build relationships between students across the university.
Pat Hutchings, in her book Making Teaching Community Property, defines a teaching circle as “a small group of faculty who make a commitment to work together over a period of at least a semester to address questions and concerns about the particulars of their teaching and their students' learning.” We currently have one teaching circle that meets regularly over the academic year (see below). If you are interested in forming a teaching circle that centers around a particular topic and would like help making connections and launching it, please contact the CTL at ctl@umsl.edu.
The Part-time Faculty Teaching Circle is an opportunity for part-time (also known as adjunct) faculty to engage with other part-time faculty and tackle those challenging teaching questions pertinent to this group. Our goal is to build a supportive community to help connect you to the campus and campus resources. Topics are selected by our Advisory Group made up of members of the community such as yourself. The Advisory Group meets twice a year to review the success of the previous semester's sessions and set the agenda for the upcoming semester. The agenda of sessions are set at the start of each semester. If you are interested in joining or have any questions, please contact Jen McKanry at mckanryj@umsl.edu.
This group will launch in Fall 2025. THRIVE is a pedagogical development community for early career faculty (those in their first five years of teaching) across all UMSL colleges and appointment types. During monthly Zoom meetings, participants will discuss teaching strategies, try out activities for use in class, and share concerns and ideas.
