Exploratory Teaching Groups
Exploratory Teaching Groups (ETGs) provide faculty and instructors a collaborative framework to explore and discuss ideas, issues, and challenges in their teaching, with the goal of developing new practices, resources, or other educational interventions. The year-long program is driven by the teaching interests and pedagogical development goals of faculty and instructors, so proposals are welcome on any topic and the format is flexible. Faculty and instructors may use ETGs to investigate new teaching strategies, tools, or approaches; to engage in a collaborative course (re)design project; or to advance any other project related to teaching and learning in their courses or programs.
Possible formats include a pedagogical reading group, a series of structured discussions or workshops around a theme, a “working group” that tackles a particular topic or project, and so on. CCTL staff support the ETGs with regular check-ins and, when necessary, consultations and referral to relevant research or additional resources. ETGs fall into two broad categories: those with an open invitation, which any faculty members or instructors at UChicago may join, and closed groups, which participants must be invited to join. A list of past Exploratory Teaching Groups is available here.
Faculty and instructors are invited to discuss their proposals with the CCTL before submitting. Contact Amanda M. Jungels at amanda.jungels@uchicago.edu with any questions.
2026–2027 Open Exploratory Teaching Groups
Exploratory Teaching Groups (ETGs) provide faculty and instructors a collaborative framework to explore and discuss ideas, issues, and challenges in their teaching, with the goal of developing new practices, resources, or other educational interventions. The following ETGs are open to participation from faculty & instructors at the University of Chicago. We invite you to explore their projects below and register for their events or fill out an interest form to get involved.
Facilitated by Ashley Lyons, Associate Director, The Chicago Center for Writing, and Nancy Martin, Associate Instructional Professor, The Chicago Center for Writing
ETG Kick-off Event: Wednesday, October 28 | 4:00PM - 5:00PM | Wieboldt 310D/E
As LLM use continues to challenge student learning in the Core and beyond, many instructors are looking for–and experimenting with–effective alternatives to traditional writing and assessment models. In-class writing assignments (whether as scaffolding or the assignment itself) invite students to slow down–to develop independent lines of inquiry and to revise, refine, and track the progress of their ideas. This ETG will provide instructors with the opportunity to learn more about the many types of in-class writing, to discuss and workshop how to effectively scaffold assignments and build value for in-class writing amongst students, to share questions and challenges, and to hear successes and practical wisdom from instructors who have been creatively incorporating in-class writing as part of their pedagogy.
Open to: all faculty and instructors across disciplines
Facilitated by Borja Sotomayor, Senior Instructional Professor, Computer Science, and Valerie Levan, Assistant Senior Instructional Professor, Humanities Collegiate Division
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.
Open to: all faculty and instructors across disciplines
Facilitated by Shiva Rahmani Khanghahi, Associate Instructional Professor, Germanic Studies
The Language Teaching Design Studio: Collaborative Lesson Design Across World Languages is a year-long, hands-on Exploratory Teaching Group that transforms professional development into collaborative lesson design. Bringing together instructors from across the University's language programs, each studio session centers on a shared pedagogical challenge as participants independently design classroom activities, exchange ideas, analyze instructional decisions, and refine lessons through collaborative feedback. Rather than discussing teaching in the abstract, participants leave each session with adaptable, classroom-ready materials and new pedagogical strategies grounded in communicative language teaching, backward design, proficiency-oriented instruction, and active learning.
Open to: all language faculty and instructors
Facilitated by Tessa Huttenlocher, Assistant Instructional Professor, Sociology, and Diana Schwartz Francisco, Associate Instructional Professor, History
In this continuation of the 2025-2026 Thesis and Research Capstone Seminar ETG, participants will contribute to an edited volume of essays and supplemental materials that address the unique challenges of teaching a thesis or research capstone seminar.
Open to: all faculty and instructors who oversee undergraduate thesis and research capstone projects/courses
Facilitated by Jessica Landau, Assistant Instructional Professor, Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization
Biodiversity loss is one of the most pressing environmental issues today; however, UChicago courses overwhelmingly focus on climate change, sustainability, and technoscientific solutions to environmental destruction. This ETG is focused on creating an interdisciplinary curriculum on biodiversity for UChicago undergrads that combines approaches from ecology, social sciences, and the humanities to create nuanced and comprehensive understandings of biodiversity and biodiversity loss in theory and practice.
2026-2027 Closed Exploratory Teaching Groups
The following ETGs are available to select participants from within particular programs, departments, or projects and are not currently accepting new members. Explore the goals and scope of their work in the descriptions below.
Facilitated by Megan McNulty, Senior Instructional Professor, Biological Sciences Collegiate Division; Samantha Fenno, Senior Instructional Professor in the Humanities Collegiate Division and English, and Core Chair of Human Being and Citizen; and Sarah Ziesler, Senior Instructional Professor, Mathematics
This group constitutes a third chapter in a project begun via the Core on the Ground ETG in 2024-25 to create a forum in which instructors across the Core Curriculum can come together to better understand the intellectual virtues each Core area aims to foster and how the various Cores approach them. We hope that an exchange amongst instructors might shed light on how students experience the Core and create opportunities to reinforce shared values and develop our own thinking about what the Core is. In this year's ETG, we share approaches to specific challenges that we all face.
Facilitated by Karlyn Gorski, Assistant Instructional Professor, Harris School of Public Policy, and Jim Leitzel, Senior Lecturer and Executive Director, Undergraduate Program
Building on our work during the 2025-2026 academic year, we aim to build stronger coherence across core classes in the Public Policy major, thoughtfully consider the role of AI in our major, and explore the impact of the new economics major track in Politics and Policy. We also track initiatives being introduced this year that stem from our ETG work in 2025-2026, including offering core classes in multiple quarters and providing an in-house statistics course beginning in Spring 2027.
Facilitated by Agnes Malinowska, Associate Instructional Professor, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities and Department of English Language and Literature and Paula Martin, Assistant Instructional Professor in Comparative Human Development
This exploratory teaching group offers a space for instructors to reflect together on the vulnerabilities, uncertainties, and challenges that arise in teaching. Building on the community established during the group's first year, participants will discuss questions and experiences from their own teaching, explore shared pedagogical concerns, and develop strategies for responding thoughtfully to difficult classroom situations. This year, we will expand our collaborative work by incorporating peer classroom observations, creating opportunities for participants to witness one another's teaching and engage in dialogue about pedagogical experimentation, growth, and classroom practice. While our conversations sometimes focus on teaching politically or emotionally charged topics, they also encompass the many other ways vulnerability emerges in the classroom—from designing syllabi and navigating AI policies to facilitating discussion and responding to difficult classroom dynamics.
Facilitated by Fei Liu, Associate Instructional Professor, Statistics, and Subhadip Chowdhury, Assistant Instructional Professor, Mathematics
This ETG brings together instructional faculty from Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, and Statistics to document collaborative learning practices across disciplines, develop a shared assessment of the impact on student affect and learning outcomes, and create a plan for translating multiple years of accumulated program data into a series of publishable Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) manuscripts. Our 2026–2027 work focuses on outlining a publication strategy and completing a first-draft manuscript which serves as the foundation for subsequent SoTL publications on the Program.