The Center for Faculty Development provides a variety of printable resources to faculty, including forms, guidelines, and information sheets on a number of teaching and learning related topics. If you are looking for something that is not listed below, please contact us for assistance. If you would like to discuss any of the resources below with a Center for Faculty Development consultant, please complete our online consultation request form.
Permission is granted to educational institutions to print copies of Center for Faculty Development documents for internal use, provided that each copy acknowledges the authorship of the Center for Faculty Development. Online copies are not permitted, but links to our site are encouraged.
The Center for Faculty Development maintains an updated course syllabus template at the request of Academic Assembly.
Full details, including itemized updates, are on available at this separate webpage.
Agreements (also referred to as ground rules, guidelines, or norms) can help share responsibility for a constructive class environment, can contribute to trust, and promote belonging and inclusion (Addy et al., 2021; Ambrose et al., 2010; Brookfield & Preskill, 2005).
Depending on the types of learning activities in our courses and on the topics we discuss, we can develop context-specific sets of agreements for class interaction.
Many of us at SU are doing this by co-constructing agreements with students in the first class, which can take 15-20 minutes. Sometimes, the subjects of our courses – particularly some social justice topics – may mean that it makes more sense for us to provide predetermined agreements to our students (University of Michigan CRLT, n.d.).
Two things to bear in mind are: (1) that agreements need to be ones that both students and faculty can follow (meaning that sometimes students will suggest agreements that we cannot support, so we can simply explain why that’s the case); and (2) the agreements need revisiting regularly (say, once a week) so that they stay fresh in students’ minds as they continue learning.
The University of Michigan’s CRLT provides example agreements as well as questions to consider as we decide which approach is going to work best for our courses.
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Reprinted with permission from: Rhodes, T. L. (Ed.) (2010). Assessing outcomes & improving achievement. Washington, DC: AAC&U.
Reprinted with permission from: Rhodes, T. L. (Ed.) (2010). Assessing outcomes & improving achievement. Washington, DC: AAC&U.
Reprinted with permission from: Rhodes, T. L. (Ed.) (2010). Assessing outcomes & improving achievement. Washington, DC: AAC&U.
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We encourage you to adapt these forms to suit your own context and the kinds of questions you would like students to answer. Remember that you'll need to respond to students' comments – ideally in the next class after receiving the feedback – so be sure that you will have time to organize their feedback; if you think you will be short of time, try to reduce the amount of feedback students provide you.
Each link automatically downloads an MS Word document.
If you'd like help thinking through how best to respond to student feedback, request a consultation with us.
We encourage you to save yourself some time by using these two documents below to structure your course evaluation analysis so that you can make good decisions based on real data.
Both links automatically download an MS Word document.
If you'd like help in analyzing student evaluation comments, we can show you using the feedback from a single course and we'll give you our template for you to use with future classes. To do so, request a consultation, and we'll get back to you.
Explore our website for further ideas.
Connect with faculty colleagues and with other centers and offices on campus.