Pathways for Professional Teaching Development

Originally published April 17, 2026

Investing in Your Professional Teaching Development to Impact Student Learning

Last week’s Teaching Together focused on gathering and reflecting on evidence of teaching effectiveness from students, peers, and yourself as ways to show why you teach the way you do. This week we are looking at ways that you can expand your toolbox to enhance your teaching effectiveness. By engaging in professional teaching development opportunities, you can grow your pedagogical knowledge and develop skills that can lead to changes that positively impact student learning (Wright et. al. 2018). In the process, you can also share learning from teaching challenges, experiments, and innovations with other educators which helps to build relationships and foster a reflective and effective teaching community here at Laurier and beyond. 

At Laurier, TEI supports the varying needs of professional teaching development across career stages, course contexts and disciplines through: 

• one-on-one consultations with an Educational Developer, 
• faculty learning communities and communities of practice, 
• short- or certificate-oriented workshops, 
• teaching observations, and 
• curated teaching resources. 

Professional teaching development can also be an opportunity for you to contribute your own knowledge and experiences to faculty peer-to-peer learning through educational leadership opportunities, such as:

• recording a Faculty Spotlight on an effective teaching practice or assessment strategy, 
• participating on a teaching panel at Laurier or beyond,
• writing an evidence-informed Research Note on a pedagogical question, 
• engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning with a TEI instructional grant,
• collaborating and innovating through Laurier’s Teaching Fellows program, or
• co-leading a session at a faculty learning community (FLC) as we did this past year with our FLC on generative AI and Academic Integrity (2025-26).

Each of these activities are sources of evidence that can be included in documents such as teaching dossiers, teaching award applications, or annual reports of activities, especially when paired with reflective commentary on the impact that those activities have or will have on your teaching practice.  

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