Teaching Day 2026

Quick Talks: Creating Structures for Student Engagement

Room 307

Talks will be presented in sequence with Q&A to follow

• Where Science Meets Art: Designing a Multidisciplinary Course

  • Azar Panah, SEAS
  • Meredith Rizzo, CCAS

This Quick Talk explores the design and co-teaching of a multidisciplinary course that connects engineering, art, and visual storytelling through fluid dynamics, photography, and cooking. The session will share practical strategies for developing and implementing such courses, including navigating institutional structures, building cross-disciplinary collaborations, and creating meaningful experiential learning opportunities. Participants will gain insights into overcoming common challenges and advocating for more flexible approaches to true multidisciplinary teaching across traditionally separate fields of study.

• Curiouser and Curiouser: Sparking Engagement through Prediction, Pacing, and Puzzles

Sarah-Kay Hurst, CCAS

How can we sustain attention and spark curiosity in an era of distraction and cognitive overload? This session explores how prediction, pacing, and puzzles can increase engagement, deepen retention, and support meaningful learning across disciplines and contexts. You will leave with adaptable strategies for incorporating layered discovery and predictive activities into your teaching to draw students into the learning experience!

• Student Response to “Digital Free” Policy for First-Year UHP Seminars

Bethany Cobb Kung, CCAS

Concerned about overuse of digital devices and wanting our students to have the best opportunity to learn and grow, the University Honors Program piloted a program-wide “digital free” policy for all first-year UHP courses in Fall 2024. This talk describes the positive outcome of this pilot and provides a model for how other programs or departments might implement similar initiatives.

Teaching Necessary Tech Without Sacrificing Learning

Room 310

Sarah Burnett, CCAS

In an intro course, students show up with wildly different tech backgrounds, and the tools we ask them to use can take over time we meant to spend on the actual learning. In my Data Science for All course, the objective is the coding and methods, not the tool, so I've built ways to lower the tech barrier and get every student on the same page at the start. In this session, I'll walk through how I use JupyterHub to remove the tool from early lessons so students can focus on the coding itself, and how "Week 0" videos level-set the whole class on the elementary tech they'd otherwise stall on, cutting down the repeat questions and freeing me to actually help students troubleshoot. The same startup problem shows up in any course built around a tool, whether it's a stats package, a lab instrument, or a design program, so we'll have time to talk through how these ideas might fit your own discipline. 

The Inclusive Classroom: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Student Success

Room 311

• Dwayne Wright, GSHED
• André Culbreath, CCAS
• Jordan Shelby West, Associate Vice Provost for Community, Culture, and Inclusion
• Lakeisha Harrison, ESIA
• Adriana Glenn, SON

This panel explores the interdisciplinary necessity of inclusive excellence in fostering optimal learning environments. By examining how Inclusive Excellence directly enhances student learning  and achievement across diverse disciplines (from STEM to the humanities), educators will discover actionable strategies to cultivate belonging, elevate cross-disciplinary pedagogy, and drive transformative learning university-wide. 

Doctoral Education Beyond Traditional Coursework: Teaching, Leadership, and Professional Skill‑Building

Room 307

• Heather Young, GWSPH
• Alan Greenberg, GWSPH
• Richard Riegelman, GWSPH
• Joseph Schmitthenner, GWSPH
• Joya Bhattacharyya, GWSPH, PhD student
• Annie Chen, GWSPH, PhD student
• Summer Harvey, GWSPH, PhD student

Doctoral education increasingly requires intentional learning beyond traditional coursework. This panel highlights a professional skills seminar and mentored teaching fellowship that support doctoral students’ career development, leadership, and pedagogical growth. Doctoral students, program leaders, and faculty will discuss design, outcomes, and lessons learned in preparing PhD students for diverse academic and professional pathways.

Beyond Written Words: Leveraging VoiceThread for Authentic Summative Assessment

Room 310

• Matt Garber, SMHS
• Laurie Lyons, SMHS

How do we assess complex critical thinking skills in students? This interactive session introduces multimodal student narration as a solution and a human centered approach to AI-aware assessments. Presenters from SMHS will share case studies of authentic VoiceThread assessments within Blackboard, highlighting how voice, video, and digital annotations reveal complex reasoning and ensure academic integrity. Participants will brainstorm ideas for tailoring VoiceThread to their own courses.

Beyond Points and Percentages: Exploring Alternative Grading

Room 311

• Megan Davis, CCAS
• Jay Daigle, CCAS
• Wade Fletcher, CCAS

This panel brings together three instructors who have experimented with alternative grading to rethink assessment and support student learning. Participants will explore key principles, consider benefits and challenges, and engage concrete course examples. The session will highlight practical strategies for integrating alternative grading approaches into a range of disciplines and teaching contexts.

Improving Class Engagement Using Active Learning Strategies

Room 307

• Samantha Weiss, LAI
• Pia Cooper, CCAS and Corcoran '27 
• Marianna Perez, GWSB '28
• Danica Williams, CCAS '28
• Aaron Weiner, CCAS '27

Are attendance and participation important in your courses? Join us for an engaging panel discussion with undergraduate peer educators about active learning and how it can support your course goals. As both students and educators, peer educators have a unique perspective on what makes students attend, engage, and succeed! Gain valuable insights into how students experience and can participate in your classrooms. 

Curiosity, Connection, and Creating Value: A Human-Centered Approach to Teaching in the Age of AI

Room 310

• Ekundayo Shittu, SEAS
• Jason Zara, SEAS

As AI can now generate answers in seconds, what keeps students curious, connected to real problems, and centered as learners rather than sidelined by the technology? This session offers a practical answer to that question. Drawing on implementation experience in optimization modeling and energy systems courses, the presenters share an applied teaching framework built on the Entrepreneurial Mindset “3Cs”: Curiosity, Connections, and Creating Value, to help instructors across disciplines redesign learning activities for the AI era without losing the human at the center. Participants will see how curiosity-driven learning, stakeholder-centered projects, and structured scaffolding support diverse learners while strengthening research confidence and career readiness. The centerpiece of the session is a guided, hands-on activity in which participants redesign one of their own traditional assignments using the 3Cs framework and AI-aware teaching principles. The participants will leave with a concrete, adaptable tool they can bring directly back to their own classrooms.

Building Students' Ability to Have Productive Dialogue Across Difference: Small Steps to Take in Any Class

Room 311

• Karen Singer-Freeman, Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning Excellence, LAI
• Elizabeth Chacko, CCAS

In today’s polarized climate, fostering constructive classroom dialogue is both critical and challenging. This interactive session offers practical strategies to help students engage in productive discussions across differences. We will explore actionable techniques that integrate seamlessly into a broad range of classes and may be things you are already doing for other purposes. From co-creating communication norms to introducing structured reflection, you will learn how to build students' questioning skills, active listening, and critical thinking.

Quick Talks: Creating Structures for Student Engagement

Room 307

Talks will be presented in sequence with Q&A to follow:

• Lights, Camera, Epidemiology: Teaching Methods and Scientific Literacy Through PHilm

  • Heather Young, GWSPH
  • Manya Magnus, GWSPH

This session will explore how the use of popular film and a companion film club in public health and epidemiology are being used to teach advanced topical concepts, critical thinking, and scientific literacy. Presenters will demonstrate how structured film analysis enhances student engagement and application of methods that can be used broadly across disciplines. Attendees will leave with adaptable strategies to integrate media-based learning across disciplines and classroom settings.

• The Value of "Why" in the Age of AI

  • Scott Quinlan, GWSPH
  • Andrew Wiss, GWSPH
  • Christina Heminger, GWSPH

The availability of generative AI (GAI) tools have presented unique pedagogical opportunities and challenges for all disciplines. This session will briefly introduce the value of transparency in course and assignment policies related to GAI use. Examples will be presented from undergraduate and graduate public health courses. Attendees will leave with ideas for how to update their own syllabi or assignments to be more transparent regarding GAI use.

• Build Your Own Open-Access AI for Education

Alexa Alice Joubin, CCAS

In higher education, AI is happening to us rather than with us, leading to participatory inequalities. Prof. Joubin’s open-access teachanything.ai is one solution which enables professors to create their own multilingual AI applications that help students scaffold critical thinking. Faculty choose from several open-source LLMs, upload course files, write system prompts, and adjust the AI’s “temperature” of creativity. This community-oriented platform avoids common challenges with commercial models. Faculty are not passive consumers but active designers.

Connections to Museum Learning in the Classroom

Room 310

• Lotte Lent, GSEHD
• Museum Education Program students: Hayden Collingham, Gillian Emerick, Caroline Lovell, Katherine Mackenzie, and Caitlin Murphy

Engage in a collaborative exploration of artifacts and objects to uncover their teaching potential in any discipline. This session invites participants to experiment with integrating museum resources into their courses while reflecting on how encounters with objects can spark curiosity, deepen engagement, and motivate learners. Led by graduate students in museum education, the session blends practice, discussion, and imaginative inquiry.

More than Mere Citation: Positioning Students as Confident, Connected Knowledge Producers

Room 311

• Phyllis Ryder, CCAS
• Kylie Quave, CCAS
• Jameta Barlow, CCAS

Faculty often teach citation as a matter of avoiding plagiarism and giving credit. Does this capture why we, as scholars, use sources? We posit that engaging with sources and their authors is relational. We’ll review an interactive, online module for teaching relational citation habits and discuss shared challenges and opportunities for teaching citation as collaborative knowledge-making.