Welcome Back Symposium

Term: Fall 2024

Date: August 23rd, 2024

Time: 9:00am - 12:00pm

Location: Online Only

Instructors: Michael Enz, Hannah Harris, & Abbie Gill

Presented By: Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL)

Description:

Join your campus colleagues for the Virtual Welcome Back Symposium 2024: Teaching Strategies for Increased Student Engagement. The symposium will be held on Aug. 23, 2024, from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. online.

This symposium, hosted by the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, is focused on motivating and engaging students in courses to increase academic success. Throughout the event, participants will hear from Virginia Tech colleagues about their teaching strategies for fostering student engagement as well as from Derek Bruff, former director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching (CFT) and current Visiting Associate Director for the University of Mississippi’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, who will present the opening keynote. 

Bruff is an educator, higher ed consultant, and the author of two books, Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching and Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments. He writes a weekly newsletter called Intentional Teaching and produces the Intentional Teaching podcast. He consults regularly with faculty and administrators across higher education on issues of teaching, learning, and faculty development. Bruff’s major accomplishments while leading the CFT include building a “students as producers” approach to course design into CFT programming as a way to help faculty at a research university rethink their teaching and engage their students in deep learning, and integrating learning management system and other instructional technology support into the CFT to help instructors teach in a variety of modalities (in-person, synchronous and asynchronous online, hybrid). Bruff has a PhD in mathematics and has taught math courses at Vanderbilt and Harvard University.

The goal of the symposium is for teaching faculty members at Virginia Tech to gain information, inspiration, and ideas for strategies that they can implement in their teaching to increase student engagement.