Teaching and Learning
Teaching and Learning Overview
The Center for Faculty Excellence, as a pan-university center, provides teaching support and resources to faculty and instructors across the career spectrum who serve in all 14 schools at Carolina. CFE staff provide regular teaching workshops, institutes, and consultations with faculty, departments, and schools. Signature programs include our Course Design Institutes, Equity in Teaching Institutes, and Faculty Showcase on Teaching. In addition, the CFE administers grant programs to promote instructional innovation, and we support faculty who seek to engage in research on teaching through Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) projects.
Teaching on Campus
We promote evidence-based, inclusive, and equitable teaching practices that promote active learning and student engagement. Several campus partners and committees meet regularly to modernize UNC’s General Purpose Classrooms (GPCs), which are supported by the ITS Classroom Hotline, as well as other spaces to accommodate a wider range of teaching methods that promote student success through active-learning pedagogies. Updates include mobile furniture, more whiteboards, and digital screens to promote collaboration, teamwork, and presentation skills. CFE has developed step-by-step guides, videos, and other resources to help faculty implement easy-to-adopt, active-learning strategies to promote student learning.
Teaching with Technology
CFE has organized a general webpage of campus-supported resources for Teaching with Technology. Depending upon your course format (face-to-face, hybrid, or online), learning objectives, level or diversity of students, class size, or discipline, CFE staff can help you identify and choose which instructional technology tools best align with your teaching goals and foster student success. Most of these tools are supported by Carolina’s ITS Educational Technologies unit. The Classroom Hotline provides technical support to all General Purpose Classrooms scheduled by the University Registrar’s Office and gives hands-on training for faculty, staff, and students using these rooms. If you need immediate assistance in the classroom, you can use the red phone in the room. Otherwise, you can always contact the ITS Help Desk by phone, chat, or to request service.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in Teaching
We train and encourage faculty and instructors to use teaching practices that foster diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in their teaching practices. Over 150 faculty have completed our Equity in Teaching Institute, and nearly 200 have completed the Course Design Institute, which also addresses DEIA issues. We encourage faculty to explore the many resources by our colleagues in UNC’s Digital Accessibility Office to support the success of all learners.
Professional Development in Teaching
Finally, we encourage you to sign up for the CFE Newsletter (~once a week) to stay current on upcoming opportunities for professional development. You can also follow us on Twitter @unc_cfe. To stay current on research and resources, CFE has an online Professional Interest Manager (PIM) where you can create an account to be notified when resources are added on topics in which you have an interest. We recently launched an initiative on Peer Review of Teaching with the College of Arts and Sciences.
If you have additional questions related to effective teaching, please feel free to contact Dr. Doug James at doug.james@unc.edu or use “Request a Consultation” from the drop-down menu.
Teaching and Learning Consultations
CFE Teaching and Learning staff are available for confidential consultations with individual faculty or instructors across all ranks, from graduate instructors to senior faculty, and department, program, or school leaders.
Instructors and departmental leaders often seek consultations to:
- Design or redesign a course
- Adopt a new teaching strategy (small groups, case study teaching, etc.)
- Integrate a campus-supported instructional technology to their course such as Poll Everywhere or MS Teams
- Respond to difficult or unexpected classroom situations
- Implement equitable and inclusive teaching strategies to help all students succeed
- Assess student learning using midterm evaluations or low-stakes assessments
- Interpret their end-of-course evaluations
- Conduct research on teaching and learning (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning or Discipline-Based Educational Research)
- Prepare dossier materials such as a Teaching Statement for promotion or tenure
Note: For immediate technical assistance with Sakai or Zoom, please schedule directly with ITS Teaching and Learning.