Our Faculty Cohort Program brings together MIT faculty and instructors to explore innovative approaches to significant and timely teaching and learning questions. This program provides a facilitated space to study, plan, develop, implement, and evaluate innovative curricular and pedagogical solutions and ideas.
Our purpose is to foster a collaborative and collegial teaching community and to provide a venue for broader dissemination of the evidence-based practices of MIT faculty.
As part of this cohort, you will meet regularly over the course of the semester, the year, or multiple years. Cohort topics are selected based on your articulated needs and interests. Cohorts meet regularly as a group to discuss articulated teaching and learning problems and to brainstorm solutions. All full-time faculty and instructors at MIT are eligible to participate.
Past cohort topics include: creating inclusive classrooms, implementing and disseminating evidence-based teaching practices, and developing first-year exploratory subjects.
As a participant, you will be provided opportunities to:
- Co-create solutions to teaching and learning challenges with TLL staff and faculty colleagues from across the Institute.
- Cultivate and support a learning community of faculty leaders who are committed to:
- Integrating evidence-based principles and engagement practices into their research and teaching.
- Advocating for these practices to their colleagues and students.
- Assess and evaluate the effectiveness of their solutions in addressing their teaching challenges.
- Develop effective dissemination and outreach strategies, in partnership with your faculty colleagues and TLL staff.
Meetings are organized around relevant readings from the literature and/or “teaching cases” developed by participants. Each cases includes a particular problem or concern; strategies used to address the concern (successfully or unsuccessfully) and questions for the group regarding solutions to the problem. Because the MIT culture prides itself in problem solving, a major aspect and benefit of the cohorts are that participants work collaboratively to brainstorm solutions to each others’ teaching challenges.
The work of cohort participants are shared, as appropriate via the TLL website, and/or through institute-wide events and programming.