Announcements

Save the Date: New Faculty Orientation

New Faculty Orientation for academic year 2018-19 will be on Monday, August 27, 2018. New faculty (both tenure-track faculty and 100% non-tenure-track instructional faculty) will be contacted via email by TEFD to RSVP for the event.


Upcoming Events

August
27
Monday, August 27, 2018 -
9:00AM to 3:30PM
New Faculty Orientation
New Faculty Orientation is designed to introduce first-year faculty to resources that will support their research, teaching, and professional networking. The event is intended for new full-time faculty across all ranks (lecturers, assistant professors, associate professors, full professors, chairs, and deans). Pre-registration is required and TEFD will contact new faculty directly to invite them to the event.
September
07
Friday, September 07, 2018 -
9:00AM to 10:30AM
What UMass Amherst Students Need and How to Support Them

We often hear about UMass Amherst students as statistics: GPAs, number of majors, or demographic percentages. But what do we know about our students as learners? And how can we, as faculty, support them during their critical years at UMass Amherst? There is no better time for this discussion than right at the start of the fall semester, when we enter the classroom and start to form relationships with our students. More information about What UMass Amherst Students Need.

October
05
Friday, October 05, 2018 -
9:00AM to 10:30AM
GoFund Me: On-Campus Funding Opportunities for Teaching and Research

Working at UMass Amherst is like living in a city: the campus feels geographically expansive, it’s hard to communicate across boroughs, information gets lost, and you find yourself sticking to the same familiar locations. But within this city, there are always opportunities to seize if you know how to find them; we apply this same analogy to locating on-campus funding for your teaching and research development. More information on GoFund Me: On-Campus Funding Opportunities.

November
02
Friday, November 02, 2018 -
9:00AM to 10:30AM
Now What? Mid-Semester Quick Fixes

You are more than halfway through the semester and something feels—off. You have been moving forward with the schedule of topics listed on your syllabus, but you have a gut feeling that your students have not mastered the content. Or maybe you have noticed that students are not coming to class. Perhaps you get the sense that students are bored or disgruntled. You have come to a decision point: Do you just push through to the end of the semester, or are there some easy fixes you can implement to make the remainder of the course meaningful for you and your students? More information on Now What? Mid-Semester Quick Fixes.

Faculty Profile

David Gross Partners with TEFD to Study Teaching
Professor | Biochemistry & Molecular Biology

“Comparing across three different sections of the same course, we did not find statistically significant differences in individual performance, effort, or team performance depending on whether teams were formed by the instructor, by students, or randomly by the learning management system.”

In collaboration with TEFD’s Mei-Yau Shih and Sarah Pociask, David Gross (Biochemistry & Molecular Biology) studied the impact of team formation strategies on student performance and attitudes in one of his team-based courses. They found that instructor-designed teams were more diverse, but that students in these teams performed no better than their peers in self-selected or randomly assigned teams. To find out more, read the full article, which was published in the July 2017 issue of the Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

See Past Faculty Profiles