Sarah E. Silverman

The practice of including a basic needs statement on a syllabus which directs students to affordable and free food, housing assistance, and health services is rightly gaining more widespread attention. Many colleges and universities now provide sample language that instructors can incorporate into their syllabi and some instructors will go further to say that if…

By the time that I left my most recent job in graduate student and post-doc teaching development for my current one (working with tenure track and non-tenure track faculty), I had a bad taste in my mouth about some of the trends in so-called “future faculty” development. Recently encountering the term “critical labor literacy,” coined…

“I put my absolute best foot forward in the classroom, but sometimes I just wonder if the amount of debt they are taking on could ever be worth it,” a biology instructor recently told me. I am often struck by how present financial issues are in conversations that are on the surface about pedagogical practice,…

In November 2019 I presented a workshop entitled “Instructors are learners too: UDL for faculty and future faculty development.” I also had the opportunity to speak to Lillian Nave of the ThinkUDL podcast about the workshop (here is the link to the episode and my post about it). Use this link to download the workshop…

A key feature of teaching communities of practice (CoP) is the sharing and receiving of feedback on current teaching challenges. Often times, this activity looks like one participant orally sharing a teaching challenge followed by an unstructured discussion in which other participants respond to the challenge with advice for how to address it now and…

Early on in my training as an educational developer, a mentor introduced me to a simple yet profound model of instructor development, based on one developed by Laurie Richlin (1995). I want to thank my mentor and colleagues at the UC Davis Center for Educational Effectiveness for introducing me to this framework. This model breaks…