Spring Speaker Series
As we prepare to return to a new normal in the fall, the Spring Provost Conference Virtual Luncheon Series invites national experts to campus to think with us about how we as a university want to imagine and enact the post-pandemic university. This series offers time and space for us to think through pressing problems in higher education–faculty workload equity, faculty COVID-19 accommodations, and pandemic impact statements, and evaluating teaching excellence. These issues predate the pandemic and are also exacerbated and changed by the pandemic. In concert with national thought leaders and existing university task forces, committees, and academic leaders, we will consider how DU faculty and staff design intentionally for equity in our practices, processes, and policies. How can we take this opportunity to capture the best from the past, the lessons from the pandemic, and visions to plan for a sustainable and hopefully improved post-pandemic university? We hope you will join us in these conversations.
Provost’s Luncheon Panel
Advancing Teaching Excellence: A conversation about recognizing, evaluating and rewarding teaching across rank and series
Date/Time
May 18th, 12 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
1-hour panel with Provost followed by conversation hour
Please join us for a discussion on the what, why and how of transforming teaching evaluations to advance our institution's educational mission. We will be hosting a discussion with three change leaders who have promoted and studied the advancement of more scholarly approaches to teaching evaluation on their campuses and nationally. The discussion will range from high-level framing to the nuts and bolts of supporting all campus sustainable and scalable change.
Featured Speakers
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Gabriela Weaver
Gabriela Weaver is Assistant Dean for Student Success Analytics and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She previously served as Vice Provost for Faculty Development, and director of the Institute for Teaching Excellence and Faculty Development (TEFD). Prior to coming to UMass, she served on the faculty at Purdue University as professor of chemistry and science education and the Jerry and Rosie Semler Director of the Discovery Learning Research Center. In 2012, she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for distinguished contributions to transforming science education at the undergraduate level. In 2019, she was awarded a Fellowship with the American Council of Education, which she carried out at Boston University. She has been a co-author on two chemistry textbooks, the 2015 book Transforming Institutions: Undergraduate STEM Education for the 21st Century (and its 2021 partner volume), the 2020 book Engaging Undergraduate Students in Research at Scale, as well as numerous scholarly articles, book chapters, and reports of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM). From 2004-2012, she served as director of the NSF-funded multi-institutional project Center for Authentic Science Practice in Education (CASPiE), dedicated to involving first- and second-year undergraduate students in research experiences. Her research interests include educational practices that increase student success and the institutionalization of such practices through the transformation of cultures and processes in higher education. She earned a B.S. degree in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
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Noah Finkelstein
Noah Finkelstein is a Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder and conducts research is in physics education, specifically studying the conditions that support students’ interests and abilities in physics – developing models of context. In parallel, he conducts research on how educational transformations get taken up, spread, and sustained. He is a PI in the Physics Education Research (PER) group and a co-director of CU’s Center for STEM Learning. He co-directs the national Network of STEM Education and is involved in education policy serving on many national boards, including a National Academies’ roundtable and the Board of the Higher Learning Commission. Finkelstein a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a Presidential Teaching Scholar and the inaugural Timmerhaus Teaching Ambassador for the University of Colorado system.
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Andrea (“Dea”) Follmer Greenhoot
Andrea (“Dea”) Follmer Greenhoot is Professor of Psychology, Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence, and Gautt Teaching Scholar at the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on memory and cognitive development and on strategies for advancing transformed teaching and learning in higher education, informed by cognitive and developmental science. Dea is also Associate Director of the Bay View Alliance (BVA), a consortium of research universities studying strategies to scale and sustain adoption of evidence-based and equity-minded teaching practices. She directs the BVA’s TRESTLE initiative, an NSF-funded effort looking at department-embedded expertise, community building, and public documentation of impact as mechanisms for department-level educational transformation. She also leads the KU effort on TEval, a BVA collaboration to transform teaching evaluation through a multi-dimensional, multi-source framework.