The Tracy Seeley Center for Teaching Excellence at USF

09/05/2024

Bay Area friends: are you exploring how to stay resilient and joyful as you participate in the election campaign this Fall? If so, please join me and Dr. Elissa Epel for an evening of good conversation and supportive practice. Please check out the details below, share widely, sign up and bring a friend!

Join us for an engaging workshop on how to stay grounded and effective while navigating the complicated realities of today!

07/10/2024

✨ It remains an honor to have been named one of the inaugural, original “Powerful Women of Mindfulness.” Thank you, Mindful.org, for sharing these meditations and uplifting these contributions. Check them out at the link, below.

✨ And the good journey continues. Still guiding, teaching and helping orient law students toward both internal and external awareness practices for the good of the world. Still working with, celebrating and inspiring professors across the disciplines to incorporate a contemplative dimension into their classes.

✨ Thanks for sharing staying connected with me here, FB family.

As we celebrate the women leaders of mindfulness, we invited teachers, researchers, and activists to share guided meditations that reflect what they’ve learned from their years of deep practice.

06/10/2020

Leading with compassion is a powerful means to dismantle the structure of systemic racism. Gain a greater awareness of the experiences of others, and you are on the path to becoming a stronger compassionate leader. What else are you learning? What else are you doing? How else do you plan to contribu

06/01/2020

Friends, allies, change-agents and teachers: I write, speak about, and encourage ongoing commitments to teaching and learning about the history of how we constructed, maintained, and preserved-as-we-transformed White Supremacy and other forms of racism through law. I do so not to promote neurotic shame and blame — which do not help — but because, as one of my readers just reminded me, most of us were never taught this, even in our “good” schools. And because that history is immense, and still with us, living through us and all around us, each and every day. If we want to do our part to remake the world from here, we owe it to ourselves and to our communities to read, understand and teach about White Supremacy and the systemic nature of racism.

02/20/2020

http://usfcte.net/
Tomorrow Feb. 21 | 2–3:30 p.m.! Join Linda Adler-Kassner, Professor and Associate Dean of Education, UC Santa Barbara for her talk: From Wells to Wormholes - Engaging Threshold Concepts Through Inclusive Teaching and Learning: http://usfcte.net/

Please bring a piece of student writing from one of your introductory classes, as well as a piece of reading from one of your introductory classes.

07/03/2019

Join the CTE Summer Book Club: http://usfcte.net/summerbook/

A dinner and conversation about teaching with 100 colleagues!

On Thursday, Aug. 15 from 6–8 p.m., CTE will host USF’s ninth annual faculty Summer Book Club. The Summer Book Club gives faculty the opportunity to read a common book over the summer and convene in August for a dinner and interactive discussion that will serve as the inspiration for CTE programs and events throughout the academic year.

This year's Summer Book Club selection is The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (20th Anniversary Edition) by Parker J. Palmer. The book will be provided by CTE when you sign up.

"If you are a teacher who never has bad days, or who has them but does not care, this book is not for you. This book is for teachers who have good days and bad — and whose bad days bring the suffering that comes only from something one loves. It is for teachers who refuse to harden their hearts because they love learners, learning, and the teaching life." — Parker J. Palmer.

We hope you'll find this book inspiring and engaging; we know it will inspire lively conversations in August and beyond.

Each summer, we invite all faculty to read a single book about teaching and join us for a dinner and interactive discussion of the book. The dinner and discussion take place each August.

07/02/2019

2019–20 Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs)! http://usfcte.net/flcs/
We're excited to announce the Faculty Learning Communities for the 2019-20 academic year! Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) bring together small interdisciplinary groups of faculty (six to ten), who meet twice a month each semester for an academic year to address a pedagogy or academia-related issue of mutual interest. FLCs are a great way to meet colleagues and expand your knowledge of teaching.
Find the 2019-20 FLC descriptions and online sign-up form here: http://usfcte.net/flcs/

04/08/2019

USF students, faculty and staff, please join us for the Annual Provost's Lecture on Teaching and Learning this Thurs 4/11 @4:30 in Fromm! There will be coffee and cookies and an awesome talk about collaboratively using multiple areas of expertise to problem-solve with Dr. Sha Xin Wei (Arizona State University)!

Join Provost Don Heller and the Tracy Seeley Center for Teaching Excellence for the 2019 Annual Provost's Lecture in Teaching and Learning with Dr. Sha Xin Wei (Arizona State University). Dr. Sha is Professor and Director of the School of Arts, Media + Engineering and the Synthesis Center for respon...

12/04/2018

“Transformative” teaching is exhausting. Here are some suggestions on how to lighten the load.

10/17/2018

Join CTE for the upcoming Teaching Cafe: Teaching Controversial Issues: Framing Issues and Choosing Pedagogical Approaches

Oct. 30 | 11:45 a.m.–12:45 p.m. in Malloy 230
Oct. 31 | 12–1 p.m. in UC 402/403

Conflicts in the U.S. and abroad are making educators pay increasing attention to how we teach controversial issues in ways that cultivate inquiry, critical thinking, and political consciousness. This teaching cafe grows out of last year’s Faculty Learning Community on the same topic. The cafe will focus on how to frame controversies we want to explore with students, and how to choose pedagogical approaches to teach them. It will address questions such as the following: Is a particular issue open or is it settled? Is it empirical or normative? What kinds of questions will frame the issue so that students examine multiple perspectives on it?

Learn more and RSVP: http://usfcte.net/teachingcafe/

10/12/2018

Join us for the CTE Teaching Cafe on October 30 & 31!

Teaching Controversial Issues: Framing Issues and Choosing Pedagogical Approaches

Oct. 30 | 11:45 a.m.–12:45 p.m. in Malloy 230
Oct. 31 | 12–1 p.m. in UC 402/403

Conflicts in the U.S. and abroad are making educators pay increasing attention to how we teach controversial issues in ways that cultivate inquiry, critical thinking, and political consciousness. This teaching cafe grows out of last year’s Faculty Learning Community on the same topic. The cafe will focus on how to frame controversies we want to explore with students, and how to choose pedagogical approaches to teach them... https://shrtm.nu/HQog

10/10/2018

Link to Piled Higher and Deeper

10/10/2018

Academic Freedom in Dangerous Times : A Panel Discussion with USF Faculty

Oct. 10 3:30-5:00 pm - TODAY!

University faculty face a national climate of rising intolerance and a widening partisan gap in perception of the value and impact of higher education. We have witnessed a steady decline in higher ed’s commitment to the protections of tenure, even as Information technology and social media play a new and unpredictable role in public perception of faculty work. Co-sponsored by CRASE at the University of San Francisco

RSVP: shrtm.nu/FQuY

09/21/2018

Join the CTE next Monday and Tuesday for 45 minutes to learn about gathering evidence that will prepare you to tell the story of your teaching.

Sept. 24, 2018 | 12–12:45 p.m. in UC 504
Sept. 25, 2018 | 3–4 p.m. in UC 402/403

Don’t let end-of-semester student ratings tell the story of what’s happening in your classroom. Student ratings provide us with important information, but this information can be hard to interpret and hard to translate into specific actions, such as choices about course design or teaching strate...

09/17/2018

Tomorrow's Teaching and LearningMessage Number: 1664To use clickers effectively in formative assessment, we need to do more than simply stop periodically throughout a lecture to ask students a few questions. We need to have an instructional goal in mind that clickers help us to realize Folks: The p...

09/10/2018

Finding some fun, peer-reviewed sources with The Chronicle of Higher Education ...

September 4, 2018 by Allan Metcalf How Americans Speak: the Facts Noam Chomsky: no Philly vowels(Image via Wikipedia) If you really want to know how people use the English language in North America, you will find one consistently reliable peer-reviewed source of information, four times a year: the j...

09/07/2018

CTE Fall Reading Circles

07/30/2018

Let go of the fantasy that you must use every minute of a strictly planned class schedule to introduce, explain, clarify, and cover.