Development Teams

CIRTL's early work was created by teams of faculty, staff and graduate students, each of which developed one aspect of the program while collaborating on the project's overall advancement. Descriptions of the teams are below.

College Classroom
Diversity
Evaluation & Research
Informal Education
Instructional Materials Development
Internship
Learning Community
Teaching with Technology

College Classroom
CIRTL provides opportunities for graduates-through-faculty to develop knowledge, skills, and attitudes to teach undergraduate STEM students. Anchored in the concept of teaching-as-research, the objective of the College Classroom course is to provide students with the knowledge and skills to continuously inquire into their teaching and thereby enhance their students’ learning. Participants explore a wide range of learning theories, teaching practices, and assessment techniques, and come to view their classrooms as sites for teaching-as-research in which they adjust their teaching to maximize their students’ learning.

Diversity
The diversity component is based on a single proposition: Excellence and diversity are intertwined. This proposition rests on known principles: learning and success of students is enhanced when classes, laboratories, and discussion sections foster interaction and engagement of students irrespective of race, gender, or socio-demographic background. In this context, successful models (no single model is applicable for all learning situations) of teaching and learning address multiple audiences at multiple levels to the benefit of all students, faculty, and future faculty.

Three key principles guide our efforts to create more equitable teaching and learning environments: (1) Promote community of scholars that provides opportunities for students to interact with their peers and with the instructor; (2) Develop inclusive climate for all students; (3) Create equitable teaching environments through deliberate effort of administrators and instructors.

Evaluation & Research
The CIRTL Evaluation and Research Team (ERT) is charged with evaluating and understanding the impact of the CIRTL Professional Development Program on participating graduates-through-faculty and on institutions.  The Evaluation and Research Team will be involved in all CIRTL activities, gaining important knowledge about changing graduate-through-faculty practices and beliefs toward learning through teaching. The graduates-through-faculty will be key informants as they study their own teaching. Equally important, the Evaluation and Research Team will be able to inform and guide CIRTL development and transfer activities.  Ultimately the evaluation data will provide the foundation for demonstrating the successes and challenges of the Delta Program for other research universities.

Informal Education
The importance of STEM informal education to the development of a scientifically literate nation cannot be overestimated. The Informal Science Education Team seeks to encourage STEM graduates-through-faculty to develop and practice skilled interaction with various publics regarding science and technology, and to do so through the lens of teaching-as-research. Our overarching description of informal science education is “enhancing learning about science and technology in venues outside the formal classroom.”

The core objective of the informal education program is to familiarize participants with the skills needed to enhance public understanding of what STEM researchers are doing, why they are doing it, and what they are learning. To achieve this, course participants conceive, create, implement, and evaluate a product related to their research for public education.

Instructional Materials Development
The creation of inquiry-based instructional materials is central to modern STEM higher education. Broadly defined, instructional materials might include hands-on labs, web-based tutorials, case studies, computer labs, take-home assignments, and more.  Developing high-quality instructional materials for an undergraduate science course involves the same thoughtfulness and attention to detail that accompanies the design of research. To develop such materials requires a sense of what scientists consider to be understanding in the content area; a commitment to finding out what students bring to the instruction in terms of prior knowledge (including alternate conceptions) and experiences (with science, science instruction, and more general cultural ones); an ability to design assessments that provide insight into what students have learned; and a willingness to treat the results of those assessments as research data to be used to revise the instructional materials.

Internship
The CIRTL internship program provides STEM graduate students and postdoctoral researchers with opportunities to implement "teaching-as-research" in various venues. Typically, these internships occur after preparation in related CIRTL activities. The internships in higher education will take place at a set of local colleges and universities that provides an array of institutional types.  Students at UW have interned at Madison Area Technical College (MATC) and UW-Milwaukee through the Delta Internship Program.

Learning Community
Structuring CIRTL as a learning community focused on teaching and learning is central to our program design. CIRTL seeks to develop coherent communities of STEM graduates-through-faculty committed to advancing STEM learning in higher education. The CIRTL Learning Community will (1) provide a physical and intellectual home where graduates-through-faculty can develop their teaching practice; (2) be a welcoming environment for those beginning to explore changes in their approach to teaching and learning; (3) serve as the home for all CIRTL activities; (4) furnish mentoring and leadership opportunities; and (5) be an ongoing source of support for those who have participated in CIRTL programs and now are applying teaching-as-research in their classrooms.

Teaching with Technology
CIRTL provides opportunities for graduates-through-faculty to develop knowledge, skills, and attitudes about emerging technology. The Teaching with Technology team has developed a course, Effective Teaching with Technology, that incorporates teaching-as-research, learning communities, and learning-through-diversity.  The vision of the Effective Teaching with Technology course is to provide participants with an opportunity to explore the connections between learning objectives and the appropriate use of technology to meet those objectives. A key element of the course is the expectation that all students will design a discipline-specific module of instruction, develop an appropriate evaluation design for the module, and evaluate a peer’s module.

CIRTL
1025 W. Johnson St.
Madison, WI 53706
ph.: 608.263.0630
fax: 608.265.0538