Consultations are an excellent opportunity for you to explore teaching and learning with others who will support you in your teaching goals. Working in partnership with others helps us all learn new perspectives, which benefits our students’ academic achievement, as we examine ways we can improve student motivation, engagement, knowledge and skill transfer, and efficiencies in grading. Regardless of if you’re new to teaching or if you have been teaching for many years, we invite you to engage with us through a consultation.
We’ll be interested to know what your goals are so we can support you. We’ll also ask questions that will help us understand your particular context in the classroom in relation to your goal. For example, if you’re interested in active learning, we’ll ask you what types of learning activities you enjoy doing, how you currently interact with students and have students interact with each other, etc. In this way, we see ourselves as coaches that will consider alongside you what your next steps are.
If you believe that you could benefit from talking with someone about your teaching, we want you to reach out. We are more than happy to work with any OU regular or instructional faculty who want to discuss their teaching. We also frequently consult with faculty on the following topics:
This depends on what your goals are, and we encourage you to reach out at any time to discuss a timeline with you based on your individual needs and our capacity.
For questions where you are seeking a resource, a quick “how-to”, or already have an idea of what you would like to do, we may find that one consultation is all you need, and we strive to accommodate requests as quickly as we can.
If you are hoping to redesign a course, this would require more time and advance planning. Ideally, it would include an initial consultation, a consultation about teaching strategies, as well as reviews of new or former syllabi of the course, a sample assignment, past Student Experience Survey results of the course (if offered previously), and the course Canvas page.
If you are hoping to have us visit your class as part of a peer observation, we'd request a pre-observation and post-observation consultation.
We also always appreciate some lead time in working with you on a syllabi review, as we can provide more focused feedback if we have at least a week to review it, or at least two weeks to review it in our busier times (in the lead-up to the start of each semester).
The Center for Faculty Excellence does keep documentation of consultations; however, these are for internal use only in order to document the reach of services or to privately and discreetly discuss with CFE colleagues so that we can provide the best support to help you in any given situation. Any information shared externally would be aggregated and anonymized. You may use information from our consultations in whatever way will benefit you, such as using a peer observation letter that we write in your dossier; however, this is not required. We will only provide information to others about the specifics of our consultations, peer observation letters, etc., with your express, written permission.
There are limits to confidentiality, which are listed by the Institutional Equity Office, where we would have to report.
We recommend talking about students generally, or providing pseudonyms for your students, but avoiding sharing any student names or grades. As part of the consultation practice, you can share examples of feedback or email communication to students. When doing so, please redact student names from emails and/or assignments. Not only does this request align with FERPA requirements, but it also helps your consultant avoid any conflicts of interest should we know the students involved.
