Preconference Workshops

Choose from a selection of 2.5 hour preconference workshops to further enrich your conference experience.

Enrollment is offered during conference registration. The cost is $319 for each preconference workshop. If you have already registered for the conference and would like to add a workshop to your registration, call 608-246-3590 to enroll.

Morning Workshops

Friday, June 11
9:00 – 11:30 am

Who Tells Your Story? Claim Your Agency and Document Your Teaching Effectiveness

Build It, Test It, Teach with It: Creating AI Teaching Assistants and Interactive Explainers

Earning Students’ Trust: Relationship-Rich Teaching in a Time of Mistrust

Afternoon Workshops

Friday, June 11
1:00 – 3:30 pm

Teaching for Citizenship: Strategies for Preparing Students for Technical and Civic Proficiency

Strategies and Tools for Designing Neurodivergent-Friendly Instruction

Who Tells Your Story? Claim Your Agency and Document Your Teaching Effectiveness

Friday, June 11 | 9:00 - 11:30 am

When it comes to teaching effectiveness, who tells your story? Often, documentation of teaching privileges student or colleague voices or simply lets materials speak for themselves. Using the Critical Teaching Behaviors (CTB) framework, attendees will discuss a documentation method that promotes instructor agency in shaping teaching narratives while fostering reflective habits that improve teaching. The framework provides guidance to instructors crafting their first teaching narrative and presents more experienced teachers with a new lens to think about their teaching. Start constructing a persuasive, coherent teaching narrative using the CTB framework and evidence from instructional artifacts readily available to you.

Lauren Barbeau, PhD

Build It, Test It, Teach with It: Creating AI Teaching Assistants and Interactive Explainers

Friday, June 11 | 9:00 - 11:30 am

This workshop gives faculty time to explore, build, and test AI-supported teaching tools for their courses. Participants will first learn the basics of how custom GPT teaching assistants and interactive explainers can support student learning, then they will spend much of the session experimenting with examples, revising prompts, testing AI responses, and considering how these tools could be adapted for their own teaching contexts. The workshop will emphasize practical design choices, including how to create course-aligned instructions, guide student interaction with tools, support active learning, and build in responsible-use expectations. Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of what these tools can and cannot do, along with a draft concept, prototype, or implementation plan for an AI teaching assistant and interactive explainer they could continue developing after the session.

JJ Wallace, PhD

Earning Students’ Trust: Relationship-Rich Teaching in a Time of Mistrust

Friday, June 11 | 9:00 - 11:30 am

Relationship-rich education has emerged as one of higher education’s most promising approaches to improving student learning, belonging, retention, and well-being. The classroom—in all modalities—is a crucial site for cultivating the meaningful, trusting connections that make these outcomes possible. This workshop will deepen participants’ understanding of the importance of relationships to student and educator success and guide them through a process of reflection and planning focused on earning and sustaining students’ trust across differences of identity and in a time characterized by widespread mistrust.

Isis Artze-Vega, EdD

Teaching for Citizenship: Strategies for Preparing Students for Technical and Civic Proficiency

Friday, June 11 | 1:00 - 3:30 pm

The college classroom plays a critical role in preparing students to be technically proficient workforce participants, the benefits of which can be seen in rapid technological advancement. However, the classroom can potential play a dual, equally powerful role, in preparing students to be effective members of a thriving democratic society. For the latter, instructors need to lean in more explicitly to the behaviors and attitudes that are sometimes implicit in effective classroom instruction. In this workshop, we will engage in activities that elevate the roles of active listening, critical feedback and critical consciousness, regardless of the subject matter of the course. We will also discuss ways in which these attributes can be assessed to ensure that the impacts of this explicit incorporation are realized.

Bryan Dewsbury, PhD

Strategies and Tools for Designing Neurodivergent-Friendly Instruction

Friday, June 11 | 1:00 - 3:30 pm

The number of neurodivergent students (students with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, etc.) in higher education continues to grow each year (ACHA, 2026). Yet many instructors feel unprepared to effectively reach and teach this unique population of students. This workshop gives professors the background knowledge, practical strategies, and tools needed to begin designing instruction that supports the neurodivergent (and non-neurodivergent) students in their courses. The presentation portion of this workshop demystifies the concept of neurodivergence by sharing introductory information about the strengths of neurodivergent students and the challenges they are likely to encounter in an academic setting, along with 10+ “use tomorrow” strategies for supporting neurodivergent students. The hands-on portion of this workshop asks instructors to use the information they’ve just learned as they examine and redesign one of their own assignments through the lens of their neurodivergent students.

Jennifer Pusateri, PhD