Consultation Services

Individual Faculty Consultations

The Center offers individual consultations for faculty in a wide range of instructional and design areas. All individual consultations are confidential. Faculty can meet with professional educational consultants and get feedback or support in the following topics.

Course Design	Handling Difficult Situations
General Consulting	Classroom Management
Syllabus Creation	Universal Design
Assessment and Evaluation	Student Feedback
Large Classes	Inclusive Teaching
Technology and Teaching	Active Learning
Service Learning	High-Impact Practices
Classroom Communication	Mentoring

Curriculum Consultations

At Texas A&M University, one of the departmental consulting services that the Center for Teaching Excellence provides is to help facilitate the process of curriculum redesign. Prior to embarking on this project, however, it is essential to ensure that sufficient leadership support and faculty buy in exists as this process may take several years to accomplish and requires a high level of commitment. The curricular redesign team should include departmental leadership and faculty from its various divisions and programs. To schedule a curriculum consultation, please contact us at cte@tamu.edu.

Group and Departmental Consultations

Focused on a topic of interest to more than one faculty member, group consulting can address topics like curricular redesign with a department or a group of instructors all teaching sections of the same course who want to increase course continuity between sections. Any size group is welcome. Schedule a consultation.

Graduate Assistant Teaching Consultations

CTE offers one-on-one consulting with all graduate students and postdoctoral researchers on teaching-related topics such as instructional methodology, syllabus design, effective feedback, and assessment. In addition, graduate students serving as Teaching Assistants (TAs) can schedule an observation of their classroom teaching and receive written feedback for their records. Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers can meet with a CTE consultant to discuss and/or review their teaching philosophy statement.

Technology-Pedagogy Integration Consultations

The CTE offers support for faculty interested in integrating technology into their teaching. Consultations focus on the pedagogical, instructional, and design aspects of integrating technological theory, principles, approaches, and tools into teaching and learning.

Peer Mentoring and Peer Review of Teaching

Texas A&M University Faculty Performance Evaluations Task Force recommended a framework of Faculty Teaching Performance Evaluation that can be customized for use by individual departments and colleges (June 2010). It emphasized flexibility for units, multiple dimensions, and multiple sources of data, separate formative and summative processes, and integral faculty involvement.
Based on these recommendations, the CTE has a repository of information and tools related to Peer Review of Teaching (PRT) for departments that are interested in implementing a PRT process including:

Tools for customizing peer review processes and associated instruments and rubrics.
Classroom observation forms and rubrics; forms for pre and post meetings; rubrics for evaluating syllabus, self-assessment tools, etc.
Resources and workshops conducting classroom observations and providing constructive feedback.
Summary of the literature and list of references.

Resources:

The Center’s team of Instructional Consultants has extensive knowledge of the scholarly literature on teaching and learning including course and curriculum design, teaching methods, active learning, student engagement, technology for teaching, and assessment.

For assistance, contact Jean Layne, Lead Instructional Consultant at jlayne@tamu.edu or 979.862.4269.