The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Academic Leadership offers structured learning communities that bring faculty together with the goal of providing regular opportunities to share knowledge, explore teaching practices, and engage in focused professional development within these specific areas. Faculty gain fresh perspectives, receive peer feedback, and develop supportive professional relationships with colleagues who share similar interests. Each semester, CETAL provides safe spaces for experimenting with new teaching methods while fostering expertise in AI integration, pedagogical innovation, and professional growth through peer coaching.
Pedagogy Learning Communities
Teaching with AI Book Group: The Opposite of Cheating
Dates: Wednesdays (9/10, 9/24 & 10/8, 10/22 & 11/5)
Time: 2:00 p.m.
Location: TORW 319
Facilitated by: Sun Kim Thao, Stacy O’Brien
“In these days of an ever-expanding internet, generative AI, and term paper mills, students may find it too easy and tempting to cheat, and teachers may think they can’t keep up. What’s needed, and what Tricia Bertram Gallant and David A. Rettinger offer in this timely book, is a new approach—one that works with the realities of the twenty-first century, not just to protect academic integrity but also to maximize opportunities for students to learn.
The Opposite of Cheating presents a positive, forward-looking, research-backed vision for what classroom integrity can look like in the GenAI era, both in cyberspace and on campus. Accordingly, the book outlines workable measures teachers can use to better understand why students cheat and to prevent cheating while aiming to enhance learning and integrity.” (Amazon description)
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Community Cafe: Teaching & Learning in STEM
Dates: Wednesdays (9/10 & 10/8, 10/22, & 11/12)
Time: 12:00 p.m.
Location: Christian Cafeteria Executive Dining Room
Facilitator: Kyle Hurley
STEM disciplines face unique challenges in the fields of teaching and learning. This year-long learning community will serve as a meeting place for anyone interested in improving, exploring, and growing as professionals. Our topics of conversation for the fall will include technology in and for the classroom, including prevention, identification, and addressing of academic dishonesty; supporting mental health through addressing anxiety and identifying campus resources to help maintain student and faculty motivation and engagement; effective administrative communication and building collaborative faculty communities across campus; and reflection and planning for the spring.
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Global Learning Research & Reading Group
Dates: Thursdays (9/4, 9/18 & 10/2, 10/23 & 11/6, 11/20 & 12/4)
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Location: TORW 302
Facilitator: Allison Freed and Evan Faidley
Curious about what internationalization looks like in your own teaching and research? The current era of globalization calls for higher education faculty and staff to connect learning to diverse perspectives and transformative experiences. Drawing on contemporary practices in internationalizing student learning (e.g., collaborative online international learning (COIL), global shared learning experiences, and the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals), our group will meet twice a month to discuss and develop opportunities for curriculum planning and collaborative research. The first meeting of each month is dedicated to reading and discussion related to the internationalization of teaching and learning, while the second meeting is reserved for small groups to make progress on their research projects. We are happy to invite seasoned and new participants who are curious and excited about global learning!
For the 2025-2026 academic year, we plan to seek publication of our research and continue our inquiries from the fall semester. Regularly attending participants may select from any of the following research projects to complete with fellow group members: (a) developing cultural humility through simulative learning, (b) creating accessible and effective COIL assessment tools, and (c) investigating the impact of multiple COIL opportunities on intercultural competencies.
Anticipated spring dates are 1/22, 2/5, 2/19, 3/5, 3/19, 4/2 & 4/16.
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Trauma-Informed Pedagogy Learning Community
Dates: Mondays (9/8, 9/22 & 10/6, 10/20, & 11/3, 11/17)
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Location: TBD
Facilitators: Jennie Case (Creating Writing), Evan Faidley (College Student Personnel Administration), and Odunola Oyeniyi (School Counseling)
Trauma—including adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), identity-based stress, and economic hardship—can significantly affect students’ ability to focus, stay motivated, retain information, and succeed academically. In this year-long learning community, we will come together to explore the latest research in trauma-informed pedagogy and its application to teaching and learning in our respective courses. We will discuss challenges we encounter in our classrooms, develop discipline-specific, trauma-informed approaches, and support each other in our efforts to reduce compassion fatigue and stabilize holistic well-being.
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Women’s Book Group: The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control
Dates: Mondays (9/15, 9/29 & 10/13, 10/27 & 11/10, 11/24)
Time: 2:00 p.m.
Location: TORW 319
Facilitator: Amy Hawkins
“We’ve been looking at perfectionism all wrong. As psychotherapist and former on-site therapist at Google Katherine Morgan Schafler argues in The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control, you don’t have to stop being a perfectionist to be healthy. For women who are sick of being given the generic advice to “find balance,” a new approach has arrived. Which of the five types of perfectionist are you? Classic, intense, Parisian, messy, or procrastinator? As you identify your unique perfectionist profile, you’ll learn how to manage each form of perfectionism to work for you, not against you. Beyond managing it, you’ll learn how to embrace and even enjoy your perfectionism.” (Amazon description)
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Stanford AI for Educators Learning Community
Dates: Thursdays ( )
Time: 3:00 p.m.
Location: TORW 319
Facilitator: Jon Baarsch, Jenny Brewer
Feeling like the conversation around Artificial Intelligence in education is moving a mile a minute? If you’ve felt overwhelmed by the rapid changes, hesitant to dive in, or simply unsure where to even begin, you are not alone. In response to these common concerns, we are excited to offer the Stanford AI for Educators Learning Community, a supportive cohort designed specifically as an introduction for faculty who are new to the topic or have been cautious about trying it before now. Our primary goal is to demystify AI and build your confidence in a collaborative, judgment-free environment. No prior experience is necessary—only a curiosity to learn.
This semester-long series is crafted to be your easy entry into understanding and utilizing generative AI. We will blend flexible, self-paced learning with engaging, hands-on practice. If you’ve been looking for a supportive first step into the world of AI, this is the community for you. Join us to move from uncertainty to confidence and explore the future of education together.
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AI Problems & Practice Learning Community
Dates: Wednesdays (9/11, 9/25, 10/9, 10/23, 11/13, 12/4)
Time: 3:00 p.m.
Location: TORW 319
Facilitator: Stacy O’Brien
Are you intrigued by the potential of AI but tired of tech demos that feel disconnected from the real challenges of your work? If you’re looking for practical solutions rather than just another tool to learn, we invite you to join our new AI Problems & Practice Learning Community, which takes a unique approach. Instead of starting with a piece of technology and asking how you might use it, we begin with a shared challenge central to our roles as educators. Each session in this series will be framed around a real-world faculty pain point, such as tackling the time-consuming process of providing meaningful student feedback, designing dynamic in-class activities on the fly, or finding innovative ways to make dense research material more accessible for your students.
The format is designed to be collaborative and hands-on, ensuring you leave with tangible strategies. We will begin each session by collectively discussing the chosen problem, sharing our current methods and frustrations. Following this, we will introduce a small, curated selection of two or three different AI tools or prompting techniques that are strong contenders for addressing that specific issue. You will then join a small breakout group to get direct, hands-on experience with one of these options, applying it to a sample task in a supportive, low-stakes environment. The most valuable part of our lab is the final debrief, where each group reports back on their assigned tool, sharing its strengths, weaknesses, and overall usability. This collaborative model is designed to be efficient and highly relevant, saving you the time of sifting through countless tools on your own. You will walk away with a comparative understanding of multiple AI assistants and a clear vision for how they can be applied to solve a concrete problem you face every day. Please join us to explore, experiment, and discover practical AI solutions together.
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Coaching Circles
New Faculty Teaching Academy (NFTA)
Dates: Tuesdays/Thursdays (8/28 & 9/9, 9/25 & 10/14, 10/23 & 11/11, 11/20)
Time: 1:40 p.m. (xperiod)
Location: TORW 320
Facilitators: Amy Hawkins, Olivia Bundrick, Stacy Lom
This community for first-year faculty meets twice a month, in-person, throughout the academic year to provide new faculty with a strong foundation in research-based strategies for teaching and learning, key insights into UCA-specific resources and student populations, and a supportive environment for discussing and responding to the emergent needs of new faculty. Participants in the program will have opportunities to workshop syllabi and assignments. NFTA provides a laboratory of ideas and supportive feedback for any new faculty looking to establish a strong foundation in their first year at UCA.
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Early Career Coaching Circle (ECCC)
Dates: Tuesdays (9/16, 9/30 & 10/14, 10/28 & 11/11, 11/18)
Time: 3:00 p.m.
Location: TORW 319
Facilitators: Amy Hawkins, Rebekah Luong, Ashley Phillips
Interested in setting yourself up for success in your first few years as a UCA faculty member? ECCC is a learning community with a semi-structured discussion format for faculty in their second through fifth year at UCA. This group will meet twice a month throughout the academic year to support each other in the development of individualized plans to set and achieve goals in the areas of teaching, scholarship & creative activity, and service.
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Academic Leadership Learning Community: How to Know a Person
Dates: Fridays (9/5, 9/19 & 10/3, 10/10, 10/24 & 11/7)
Time: 12:00 p.m.
Location: TORW 319
Facilitators: Nancy Reese & Amy Hawkins
This learning community explores topics and application exercises to hone participants’ leadership skills. This fall we are reading the book How to Know a Person by David Brooks. According to Amazon’s description, “Driven by his trademark sense of curiosity and determination to grow as a person, Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and the worlds of theater, philosophy, history, and education to present a welcoming, hopeful, integrated approach to human connection. How to Know a Person helps readers become more understanding and considerate toward others, and to find the joy that comes from being seen. Along the way it offers a possible remedy for a society that is riven by fragmentation, hostility, and misperception.” Whether you are a new or experienced chair or director or interested in exploring academic leadership roles and responsibilities, this group is for you!
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