Professional Teaching Development

Originally published January 2025

The professional teaching development needs of faculty can vary greatly depending on their stage of career. Laurier’s Teaching Excellence and Innovation (TEI) team provides supports for instructors at every stage, through one-on-one consultations, access to curated teaching resources, intensive workshops, and faculty learning communities. We view professional teaching development as a career-long journey best nurtured in a wrap-around teaching community, beginning with the first teaching experience and continuing until retirement. 

As Laurier’s instructors are a key variable in students’ educational experience, academic success and preparation for future employment, we offer programming which aims to build foundational teaching skills and respond to new teaching challenges, like generative AI, new modes of delivery and polarization in the classroom. 

Find out more below about TEI’s opportunities to learn, contribute, and lead across the career stages and grow your part of the vibrant culture of reflective, effective, and scholarly teaching and learning that we have here at Laurier.   

Early Career: Building Teaching Skills

• Earn the Course Design Certificate, a two-day workshop offered twice per year (May and August), which covers all aspects of course design, including developing learning outcomes and assessment practices. 
• Engage in skills development workshops with foundational and responsive topics such as lesson planning and feedback practices, approaches to generative AI in the classroom, designing marking rubrics, and managing challenging classroom conversations.
• Get inspired with TEI’s Teaching Dossier preparation workshop, particularly useful for pre-tenure faculty, faculty applying for an Early Career Teaching Excellence Award, and graduate students seeking academic employment.

Mid-Career: Honing and Highlighting Skills

• Join monthly Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) that encourage participants to share their teaching experiences and learn from others.  FLCs are facilitated by one of TEI’s educational developers and are each designed differently to respond to group dynamics, interests, and goals. Laurier Faculty can find programming on Connect. 
• Request to participate in the teaching observation program, with TEI’s educational developers or to be coordinated with peers, to gain insight into areas of impact and improvement in the classroom. 
• Explore TEI’s instructional grants to undertake research projects that develop and evaluate new teaching practices and contribute to scholarly pedagogical inquiry at Laurier and beyond.
• Apply for a Donald F. Morgenson Teaching Excellence Award in one of the following categories: Innovation, Internationalization, or Mentorship; or a Faculty- or campus-specific award like the Dr. Leo Groarke Teaching & Learning Award of Excellence at Laurier Brantford.
• Learn from TEI’s Faculty Spotlight videos that feature Laurier faculty discussing the design and impact of a teaching strategy or innovation implemented in their classrooms that colleagues can try in their own teaching. 

Peak-Career: Contributing Through Educational Leadership

• Share knowledge and experience by proposing, partnering or leading a TEI faculty learning community, workshop or panel on topics of interest (e.g. large-class teaching, generative AI).
• Deepen and expand your educational leadership and mentorship roles to strive for teaching recognition through awards like Sustained Excellence and the Hoffman-Little Award. 
• Seek out higher levels of teaching leadership opportunities at Laurier through the Laurier Teaching Fellowship program.
• Partner with TEI to research and communicate teaching and learning approaches and impact through the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), to get involved with the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, or to pursue national teaching awards such as the 3M National Teaching Fellowship.

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