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Department Service Requests

Teaching and Learning Innovation has a number of services designed to support the curricular and academic needs of colleges, departments, and other units.

Our offerings generally fall into three categories:

  1. Workshops, seminars, and retreats that aid in the development of foundational or new teaching practices;
  2. Teaching observations, contributing to a department’s teaching review process, and review of course materials to support reflection on the teaching and learning experience in courses;
  3. Facilitated conversations about relevant, evidence-based topics related to teaching and learning, as well as research on teaching practice.

Within these categories, TLI can support your unit or department related to teaching, learning, curriculum development, and research related to teaching and learning.


  • Designing and implementing ways to evaluate teaching effectiveness
  • Facilitating peer observation within a department or program
  • Making sense of student course evaluation data
  • Facilitating reflection on discipline-specific teaching practices (“signature pedagogies“)

  • Supporting faculty in designing assessments to determine teaching effectiveness in individual courses, curricular sequences, or larger programs
  • Supporting departments in their research on student learning in a course, department, or program
  • Consulting on the effectiveness of learning spaces

  • Supporting department, program, or unit as they develop or revise curriculum
  • Consulting with directors of graduate studies to develop pedagogical learning experiences for graduate and/or professional students
  • Facilitating collaborative development and/or assessment of specific topics, skills, or lessons as well as aiding instructional staff in aligning a department’s or school’s teaching objectives to course design, assignments, and teaching practices for individual instructors

  • Facilitating design of studies on teaching practices or curriculum innovation.
  • Supporting faculty in reviewing the literature on teaching practices or curriculum innovation, in partnership with UT Libraries.
  • Supporting faculty in preparing activities and materials for applications for IRB approval of SoTL studies.
  • Supporting data collection processes, from informed consent to collection activities.
  • Supporting data analysis processes, in partnership with staff and faculty from other campus units, such as UT Libraries and OIT.
  • Supporting the writing process as SoTL projects reach their conclusions.
  • Supporting departments or units in publishing on curricular innovation.


Below are examples of recent TLI collaborations with other departments on our campus. We share this information to provide ideas about ways in which our unit can work with you.

  • A two-day retreat with the Department of Biology focused on student well-being as well redesigning assessment practices across the large, 100-level, for-majors sequence
  • A one-hour workshop for Modern Foreign Languages on focused on guided reflection and preparation for the Fall 2021 semester.
  • Professional development events for Physics, Political Science, Kinesiology, and Communication for graduate students related to teaching practice, pedagogy, and other topics.
  • A one-hour workshop on preparing for difficult conversations in the classroom for the Haslam College Teaching Lunch-And-Learn session
  • Ongoing collaboration on more than 10 SoTL projects, within and beyond the SoTL Incubator program.
To request our involvement, please complete our Department Service Request form.

 Department Service Request Form