TLL’s Advancing Inclusive & Equitable Teaching in 3D Wins POD 2024 Innovation Award

Finalists were invited to present a poster about their projects at POD’s Annual Conference

We are excited to announce that TLL’s Associate Directors Ruthann Thomas, Raechel Soicher, and Amanda Baker are the recipients of the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network’s¹ 2024 Innovation Award for their project, “Advancing Inclusive & Equitable Teaching in 3D: Department Partnerships with Data and Discussion.” The POD Network Innovation Award recognizes the achievements of POD Network members who have developed and implemented creative ideas to improve teaching and learning and enhance the effectiveness of educational development, both in their institutions and in the field of educational development.

Raechel Soicher and Ruthann Thomas posing in front of the poster they submitted to the Award committee at POD 2024 in Chicago. — Raechel Soicher (left) and Ruthann Thomas pose for a photo in front of their poster at POD 2024 in Chicago.

In 2024, the POD Network received 34 submissions. Four finalists were selected from among these submissions, and the award was ultimately granted at the annual POD Network Conference on November 20th, 2024. The work of Dr. Thomas and her colleagues stood out to the selection committee for their approach to capturing the complexity of inclusive and equitable teaching and their context-specific support that allowed partnering departments to implement pedagogical changes affecting over 1000 MIT students.

“The committee was particularly impressed by the nuanced approach to educational development that used context-specific data from multiple sources to inform meaningful discussions and identify sustainable solutions,” said Eva Dobler, the POD Network’s Innovation Award Chair.

The MIT Inclusive + Equitable Teaching (IE-Teaching) project is an ongoing effort from the Teaching + Learning Lab to collect survey data from students, analyze course syllabi, and interview instructors to get a multidimensional perspective on inclusive and equitable teaching. The goal of the project is to leverage data to motivate, inform, and tailor teaching development to the varied needs of academic departments.

If you’d like to learn more about the project, including how to have your department participate, please email our team at: ie-teaching@mit.edu.

The POD Network is North America’s largest educational development community, supporting more than 1,400 members representing every US state and more than 30 countries, to develop professionally through meaningful and sustained interaction. ↩︎