Exploratory Teaching Groups

2025-2026 Open ETGs

A number of ETGs are open to participation from faculty & instructors at the University of Chicago. We invite you to explore their projects here and fill out this interest form to get involved.

Facilitated by Selma Yildirim, Associate Instructional Professor, Mathematics and Michael Hernandez, Instructional Designer, Academic Technology Services

Open to all faculty & instructors

This ETG aims to bridge instructor and student understanding about the appropriate use of AI tools in the learning process and the establishment of norms in the classroom community. This ETG’s participants will engage with current research in order to learn about how technology changes human behavior and influences thinking, consider factors affecting Gen AI tools that impact their teaching, develop ways of using AI in their classrooms that encourage learning and build positive thinking practices, and contribute to resources that are helpful to other educators.

Get Involved: This ETG’s first event will take place on Thursday, October 16 from 1:30pm-2:45pm in Wieboldt 310 D/E or on Zoom.

Facilitated by Bel Olid, Assistant Instructional Professor in Catalan and Spanish, Romance Languages and Literatures 

Open to all faculty, instructors, and graduate student instructors 

There is a need on campus for a dedicated space for faculty to build a deeper, more critical understanding of queer pedagogy, a framework that challenges the nature of knowledge, power, and learning. This ETG serves as a meeting point for a cross-disciplinary group of instructors to engage with the core theories that inform this work, as well as a low-stakes entry point for faculty interested in transformative pedagogy. Participants will finish the year with a robust theoretical vocabulary and a supportive peer network, which will empower members to approach their pedagogy with greater critical awareness in the future and enhance their teaching practices.

Get Involved: This ETG’s first event will take place on October 24, 11:30am-12:20pm, in Wieboldt 310 D/E.

Facilitated by Borja Sotomayor, Senior Instructional Professor, Computer Science and Valerie Levan, Senior Instructional Professor, Humanities Collegiate Division 

Open to all faculty and instructors 

Using Specifications Grading, an alternative to traditional grading, can improve our teaching experience and relieve students’ anxiety about grades. Incorporating it into a well-designed course requires continual reflection and revision, and this ETG provides the opportunity for talking through those challenges. We provide a space for instructors to workshop how to incorporate specifications grading into their teaching, create public-facing materials that can be used by other instructors, assess the effectiveness of specifications grading in our classes, and gather data on how specifications grading affects students’ reliance on AI and their attitudes toward academic honesty.

Facilitated by Britni Ratliff, Senior Instructional Professor and Associate Master, Physical Sciences Collegiate Division, and Director of STEM Pedagogy for the Physical Sciences Division and Zsuzsanna Szaniszlo, Senior Instructional Professor, Neubauer Phoenix STEM Director 

Open to faculty and instructors in STEM disciplines

Participants in this ETG will learn about the motivating pedagogies, design, and implementation of existing Collaborative Learning activities in PSD and BSD, and will engage in discussions regarding the adaptation of these practices to their own teaching across the disciplines. We plan to raise awareness of the challenges and opportunities regarding departmental and individual adaptations, and available institutional support and resources.

Facilitated by Matt Smith, Senior Instructional Professor and Director of the French Language Program, Romance Languages and Literatures and Rebecca Petrush, Instructional Professor of French, Romance Languages and Literatures

Open to all language faculty and instructors  

Our ETG explores the multiliteracies framework in language teaching, an approach that uses humanistic tools like close reading, critical thinking, and cultural analysis in the language classroom. We'll use Kate Paesani and Mandy Menke’s Literacies in Language Education as a starting point for cross-language conversations on implementing multiliteracies approaches in the classroom. Using this approach will enhance students’ overall learning while also serving the university’s teaching mission at a time when defending the value of the humanities is more crucial than ever. 

Get Involved: This ETG’s Autumn meetings will take place on Monday, October 20 and Monday, November 10, 1:30PM-2:20PM.

Facilitated by Nicolas Portugal, Assistant Instructional Professor in French, Romance Languages and Literatures and Verónica Moraga, Associate Instructional Professor in Spanish, Romance Languages and Literatures 

Open to all language faculty and instructors 

This ETG addresses the need for more structured opportunities for peer observation and reflective teaching across language programs. By facilitating cross-language classroom visits and guided discussions, the project encourages the exchange of pedagogical strategies, strengthens community among language instructors, and supports professional growth. Over the year, we aim to build a culture of collaborative reflection that not only enhances individual teaching practices but also helps identify and share effective approaches that can inform broader classroom instruction across departments.

Facilitated by Agnes Malinowska, Assistant Instructional Professor, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities and Ella Wilhoit, Associate Instructional Professor, Master of Arts Program in Social Sciences  

Open to faculty and instructors with advising and mentoring duties in MAPSS, MAPH and CIR 

This ETG centers around a pedagogical exploration of the unique challenges and affordances of mentorship and advising in one-year MA programs. We root our inquiry in a discussion of Maria Lamonaca Wisdom’s How to Mentor Anyone in Academia (Princeton UP, 2025). Using the reading as a point of departure, we will work to cultivate reflection about advising practices and goals for addressing the mentoring needs of MA students. The ETG’s primary year-long goal is to facilitate an exploratory space for eliciting shared strategies for successful and sustainable mentorship in the one-year MA in relation to existing scholarship on mentorship.

Get Involved: This ETG’s fall meetings will take place on October 30 and November 13, 2:30PM - 3:50PM in Wieboldt 310 D/E.

Facilitated by Abbie Reardon, Executive Director of the Writing Program and Senior Instructional Professor, The College 

Open to Humanities Core and ICA faculty and instructors 

This ETG addresses the pedagogical need to support instructors as the College phases in WRIT 10100, “Inquiry, Conversation, Argument” (ICA), as the new Core writing requirement. As this curricular change is implemented over the next three years, many instructors—in the HUMA Core, especially—will encounter new challenges related to effective writing instruction, assessment, and integration of writing pedagogy across their sequences. Our group provides a collaborative, supportive forum where faculty and instructors can share strategies, discuss concerns, and develop innovative teaching practices related to teaching and learning with writing in the Core. By the end of the academic year, our ETG will have empowered instructors to more confidently and effectively teach writing within the new Core framework.

Facilitated by Tessa Huttenlocher, Assistant Instructional Professor, Sociology; Diana Schwartz Francisco, Assistant Instructional Professor, History; and Patricia Heidotting Conley, Associate Senior Instructional Professor, Political Science

Open to instructors in the Humanities and Social Sciences who teach undergraduate research capstone courses or mentor Master's students working on their theses

Thesis and research capstone seminars are often students’ apex experiences in a program of study. However, there is little support for faculty and instructors who support students as they write their theses. In this ETG, we propose to conduct a review of existing pedagogical knowledge on thesis/capstone seminars and convene a group of instructors teaching these courses to synthesize these insights with concrete implications for course design and teaching practice improvement. This ETG engages the pedagogical literature on the challenges facing instructors of thesis and research capstone seminars and applies it to our own experiences with a look toward improving students’ experiences with these capstone experiences.

2025-2026 Closed ETGs

Facilitated by Zosia Krusberg, Senior Instructional Professor, Physics and Savan Kharel, Instructional Professor, Physics 

In our physics reading group for 2025–26, we attend to one of the most pressing issues in higher education today: the rise of artificial intelligence in teaching and learning. The proliferation of generative AI tools has raised questions about academic integrity, authorship, the role of critical thinking, and the redesign of assessments and learning environments. Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Learning by José A. Bowen and C. Edward Watson offers a research-informed perspective on the opportunities and challenges of teaching with AI. We use the reading to begin conversations on our own experiences with AI in physics instruction with a look toward when and how it can help teaching and learning in physics.

Facilitated by Sarah Ziesler, Senior Instructional Professor, Mathematics; Samantha Fenno, Senior Instructional Professor in the Humanities Collegiate Division and English, and Core Chair of Human Being and Citizen; and Megan McNulty, Senior Lecturer, Biological Sciences Collegiate Division

This group constitutes a second chapter of the Core on the Ground ETG from 2024-25. We aim to create a forum where instructors from the university’s Core Curriculum come together to better understand the intellectual virtues of each Core area as well as their approaches and aims. Importantly, this space allows instructors themselves to articulate these shared educational values. We also aim to illuminate how students experience the Core. In this ETG, we create opportunities to articulate shared values and develop our own thinking about what the Core is. This year’s ETG focuses more explicitly on course content and pedagogy across the Core. 

Facilitated by Linnea Turco, Assistant Instructional Professor, Committe on International Relations, and Peter Tinti, Lecturer, Committe on International Relations 

This group seeks to understand and respond to the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) by Master’s students in the Committee on International Relations. While these technologies hold promise in helping students more efficiently access and filter information, they simultaneously appear to threaten long-term skill development. We aim to understand the evidence of GenAI’s impact on graduate learning, especially on students’ development of specialized subject mastery and independent production of knowledge as researchers. Our aim is to translate this evidence into pedagogical strategies and assessment methods that both ensure intellectual rigor and prepare students for evolving professional demands.

Facilitated by Jessica Darrow, Associate Instructional Professor, Crown School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, and Paula Martin, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Department of Comparative Human Development and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality 

Our exploratory teaching group focuses on how teaching certain content can amplify our anxieties in relation to structural and individual vulnerabilities. In the current politicized climate, assigning course material that deals with pressing contemporary issues remains critical for our pedagogical aims, yet poses challenges for instructors who often feel insufficiently equipped to manage the potential ramifications of teaching emotionally charged topics. Our work together aims to provide a space to process teaching interactions reflective of these concerns and attends to the importance of growing our pedagogical capacity to incorporate the realities of discomfort, vulnerability, and anxiety into our teaching practices, regardless of the topic area.