Teaching Innovation Scholars Program

Next call for applications to come in early Spring 2025!

The Teaching Innovation Scholars program (TIS) provides an opportunity for you to identify the most pressing needs of your students as learners, design evidence-based innovative ways to address their needs, and systematically study the effectiveness of the innovations. Note: TIS supersedes the Teaching and Learning Scholar Program (access the T&L Scholars program archive that opens in a new tab).

In becoming a Teaching Innovation Scholar, you will join a supportive community of educators who are dedicated to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Innovation Scholars meet online as a group every other week to reflect, discuss, and provide/receive feedback on their work.

Because this is a cohort program, you will have an opportunity to share your investigation-in-progress with your Scholar colleagues in order to better make sense of the evidence you gather and refine your work so that it can be shared more broadly in presentations and publications.

For the 2025 cohort, special consideration will be given to projects ideas that are grounded in the following innovation priorities:

  • Engaging Many Kinds of Learners: 
    Personalizing learning in courses where students have highly differentiated backgrounds, prior knowledge, expectations for learning, and future career paths
  • Maximizing Both Uniqueness and Continuity-of-Learning across the Network:  
    Helping students develop consistent core proficiencies across sites while leveraging globally-relevant opportunities at the site where learning occurs
  • Broadening Opportunities for Experiential Learning within Courses:  
    Developing innovative teaching practices that expand the opportunities for experiential learning
  • Teaching and Learning with Generative AI:
    Helping students develop the proficiencies necessary to succeed in a world transformed by AI.

PROGRAM BENEFITS:

  • Join a growing community of Northeastern educators engaged in scholarly investigation of teaching and learning.
  • Conduct research within your own teaching that can be shared through scholarly conferences and publications.
  • Receive mentorship and have an opportunity to become a mentor to other educators.

EXPECTATIONS AND TIME COMMITMENT:

  • Attend a multi-day SoTL institute online in early early May to come together as a community and develop your plans.
  • Attend all meetings online during the academic year (60 minutes, every other week). Each meeting will also involve pre-work, such as readings and exercises.
  • Complete a series of writing and peer feedback tasks over the spring and summer.
  • Use an online journal in Teams to document and reflect on your work, receive/provide feedback, and store works-in-progress (private within the Scholars group). 
  • Conduct a systematic, evidence-based SoTL study of your students’ learning, beginning with a pilot in Fall 2025 and a second round in Spring 2026.
  • Participate in CATLR events to share your insights with others at Northeastern.
  • At the end of your Teaching Innovation Scholars experience, author a short essay that shares your work publicly with the Northeastern community and share your work at CATLR’s annual conference.
  • After completing the program, be willing to mentor other educators who are interested in learning about SoTL and conducting their own SoTL projects.

STIPEND:

Teaching and Learning Scholars will receive a stipend of $2,500 per person for full participation in the program.

ELIGIBILITY: 

The Teaching and Learning Scholars Program is open to full-time faculty who teach for-credit courses at Northeastern University. Scholars meetings take place virtually, and we welcome applicants from across all of the Northeastern network. 

ABOUT THE SCHOLARS PROCESS 

For Teaching Innovation Scholars, we ask that you enter the program with questions and curiosities about your students and their learning, as opposed to a defined idea for a project (see application details below). In the context of the early summer kick-off institute and subsequent bi-weekly meetings during the academic year, you will work with your Scholar colleagues to consider the origin of your questions and curiosities, and the literature that might inform your line of inquiry, as you bring your Scholars project into focus. 

You will carry out your plan in the fall and spring of the year following your admission into the program. This project could be a close examination of a specific aspect of student learning in your course (what is), a structured investigation of a particular teaching approach (what works), or experimentation with new methods (what could be).

APPLICATION PROCESS AND SCHEDULE: 

The deadline for applications takes place early in the spring semester, with awards announced in mid April.

The form will request the following information. Essay portions of the application have a 250-word limit.

  1. A description of the course in which you will do your SoTL study, with confirmation that the course will run in during the semesters in which your study takes place.
  2. In the course you intend to focus on in your Scholars investigation, what are three challenges or puzzlements you encounter regularly in regard to your students’ learning? How do they connect with and advance priorities listed in the call for applications?
  3. What evidence of student learning do you currently gather in relation to these challenges? What does that evidence look like, what do you do with it, and what does it tell you? What kinds of richer, deeper evidence would you like to gather?
  4. What do you think you would bring to, and how would you benefit from, the Teaching Innovation Scholars community of practice?
  5. Your CV or resume
  6. A letter of support from your department chair or supervisor.

Link to application will become available here in early Spring.

If you have any questions, please email Gail Matthews-DeNatale at [email protected].