Confidential consultations on any aspect of teaching are offered by CITLS staff.
Any faculty member can leverage the expertise of CITLS staff to observe classes and labs for general feedback, when trying out a particular teaching strategy, or just to have a fresh perspective from a supportive ally. CITLS staff members can also use various validated protocols to offer detailed feedback on various evidence-based teaching practices. In addition, CITLS can videotape classes and consult with you as you review and respond to these recordings.
Our classroom observations are entirely confidential, tailored to your needs and interests, and not evaluative in nature. Our goal is to help you reflect on your teaching with confidence and self-compassion.
Contact CITLS (citls@lafayette.edu) for more information or to request a classroom observation from a CITLS staff member.
All faculty members are welcome to work with a CITLS Student Fellow trained as a “Student Pedagogical Partner (SPP).” The SPP will meet with you to learn about the type of feedback that you seek, and then they will visit your class on two separate occasions and use various published observational protocols to note their observations.
Afterwards, your SPP will meet with you again to share observations and valuable feedback from their unique perspective as a Lafayette student, without the complication of actually being registered in your course. And as with CITLS Staff, these classroom observations by students are confidential, formative and not evaluative in nature.
Observations with Student Pedagogical Partners are dependent upon student availability. Request an observation and learn more about Student-Faculty Pedagogical Partnerships on our webpage.
Engaging in peer observations, including through our Teaching Squares program, offers a valuable opportunity to receive feedback from fellow educators, share diverse teaching methodologies, and foster a collaborative teaching community. Just like our other observation options, peer-to-peer observations are entirely formative, non-evaluative, and confidential, designed solely to support your professional growth. Faculty can focus these observations on general feedback, specific pedagogical strategies, or specific course dynamics.
CITLS provides templates and guiding frameworks to help structure your peer observations and subsequent reflection conversations. Visit our Peer Observation Resources webpage or contact CITLS (citls@lafayette.edu) to learn more about setting up a peer review of teaching partnership.
CITLS offers personalized, confidential reviews of course evaluations to support your teaching efforts. During a consultation, we will model how we would conduct a thematic analysis to extract useful information, and how we would modify instruction as appropriate. Then, we will support you in carrying out the same process on your course evaluations. Working through these steps will help you identify which areas students perceived to go particularly well in your course and any areas of growth. Please contact CITLS (citls@lafayette.edu) for more information or to request a consult.
Please note: “CITLS is not involved in PTR-related evaluations of teaching. All feedback is for formative usage only, not evaluative, and is expected to be used for those intended purposes. If you have pedagogical questions related to promotion and tenure, please consult the proper contacts at Lafayette. If you have any questions about CITLS’ role, please do not hesitate to ask. We look forward to supporting your teaching efforts.”
The Who’s in Class? Form, developed in collaboration with students, faculty, and staff members, helps instructors foster an inclusive learning environment early on and throughout a course by increasing their awareness of the diverse assets that their students bring to the classroom. Instructors administer the anonymous form online in their courses at the start of the semester, and students complete it on a voluntary basis. Instructors view results in aggregate, and partner with their center for teaching and learning to discuss small, focused steps for making their courses more inclusive. View the published article and freely access the form in the supplementary materials to see the questions and the context in which it has been used.
For Lafayette faculty members interested in using the Who’s in Class? Form, CITLS will share a pre-set survey with links to view the aggregate results. Alternatively, for those wishing to customize the survey, CITLS will share a Google Forms Template that can be altered to fit your individual needs. Contact us at citls@lafayette.edu.