Purpose of the Award
The Creative Teaching Awards recognize faculty members who have implemented a significant, creative teaching innovation and/or strategy in a course to improve student learning. These awards are presented annually by the Office of Instruction to encourage both instructional excellence and the dissemination of best practices by sharing promising innovations with faculty more broadly.
For 2024-2025, the competition will give priority to creative innovations in two domains:
- promoting active learning across the curriculum
- improving student writing and communication skills
Eligibility
- Must be a full-time faculty member, including tenured, tenure-track, clinical, or non-tenure-track faculty.
- The creative teaching innovation and/or strategy was implemented during the previous academic year or Fall 2024.
Criteria
- Demonstrated effectiveness of the creative teaching innovation and/or strategy. The teaching innovation and/or strategy may include new uses of instructional technology, pedagogy that extends beyond the traditional classroom, new approaches to creative inclusive courses, innovative active learning implementations, new approaches for improving student writing and communication skills, new approaches to student collaboration, new methods for replicating the advantages of a small course in a high-enrollment course setting, or other new teaching strategies that have significantly improved student learning outcomes.
- Demonstrated positive impact of the creative teaching innovation and/or strategy. The nomination should include a description of the impact of the teaching innovation and/or strategy on improving student learning outcomes, such as improving the DF and/or W rates in a course, improving final grades in the next course in the sequence, improvement of student’s course content knowledge or skills, etc.
The Nomination and Selection Process
Nominations and may be submitted online by any faculty member, dean, or department head.
Nominating Process
All Nominations must be submitted via online form by January 17, 2025. The form asks for the following information:
- Nominator’s name, contact info, and relationship to nominee
- Nominee’s name, school / department, and rank
- The course(s) or learning initiative(s) where the creative teaching innovation and/or strategy was implemented, including Course Prefix, Number & Title (or name of initiative if not a course), # of Students, Semester / Year, Instructor / Facilitator
- Any other contributors and list their roles
- A concise description of the creative teaching innovation and/or strategy (400 words maximum). Include in the description both its purpose and context and its learning goals
- A concise description of the evidence demonstrating its contribution to student learning (400 words maximum)
- Unit head letter of support, and (optional) evidence of success detailing the impact of the teaching innovation or strategy (three pages maximum, combined file)
Selection Process
- Nominations will be reviewed by a committee selected from within the Office of Instruction.
Recognition:
- Up to 5 recipients will be recognized during Honors Week March 31-April 4 and through various university marketing efforts.
- Each recipient will receive a cash award that may be used to further their innovative teaching efforts or at their own discretion.
Send any questions to [email protected]