VI. Analyzing and Improving Your Teaching

Attending Workshops

Ishmail Conway leading the workshop "Making it Work for Everyone."

You may well find attending interactive workshops to be the most efficient, engaging way to discover new approaches to teaching and to reconsider your own teaching. Teaching Resource Center workshops are frequently interdisciplinary: faculty consistently find that they learn new ideas from colleagues in other disciplines. But workshops for a specific department or for TAs in a particular course also provoke enlightening exchanges and inspired teaching. To request a workshop on a particular topic, contact the Teaching Resource Center; to receive regular e-mail announcements of upcoming events related to teaching, ask to be on the TRC list of interested teachers. Attending workshops and applying the ideas you discover there not only makes you a stronger teacher but expands your personal connections at U.Va.

Conversations with colleagues in disciplines different from my own have prompted me to reconsider the very meaning of "teaching philosophy." I now regard my own teaching principles as developing guidelines rather than fixed and normative rules. I see them as both informing and being informed by everyday teaching practice.

—Cristina Della Coletta, Italian