Documentation:New Faculty Orientation Guide/Welcome
Get Started
As a new UBC faculty member, your early days and weeks will be both energizing and overwhelming. As you prepare to teach new classes, meet new colleagues and familiarize yourself with the UBC campus, you will inevitably experience moments that are both rewarding and perplexing. In order to help facilitate your transition, we have created this guide as a “first step” resource for you.
What the Guide is NOT
This 2018/2019 guide is not a comprehensive compilation of all policies and documents that apply to new faculty, nor is it a repository of all information that could potentially be useful to new faculty. Rather, the guide is intended to be a starting point—a helpful collection of materials most commonly of interest to new faculty in their first year of teaching at UBC. When possible, links are provided to the websites of other resources and service units at UBC that may offer additional information and assistance on your journey.
Topics in the Guide
Some of the topics we touch on in this guide include:
- Understanding who your learners are
- Challenges you and your learners may face
- Considerations for the first day of class
- Assessing learning and giving feedback
- Pedagogical approaches with learning technology tools and much more!
No matter where you are in the cycle of your course, you can quickly navigate this guide to find what you need.
A Word on Educational Leadership
Educational leadership is a key component of the role of faculty in the Educational Leadership Stream, and is also relevant to faculty in the Professoriate Stream and to Lecturers.
Educational leadership may be thought of as impact of teaching and learning beyond one’s own classroom. The Collective Agreement defines it as, “activity taken at UBC and elsewhere to advance innovation in teaching and learning with impact beyond one’s classroom” (Article 4.04). Educational leadership activities include, but are not limited to, contributions to curriculum, activities that advance equity and inclusion in teaching and learning, formal teaching related leadership responsibilities within your Department/Program/Faculty and engagement in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
CTLT has a number of resources to support how you think about and track the evidence and impact of your educational leadership activities. For more information, visit our website or email us at ctlt.info@ubc.ca.
If you are in the Educational Leadership Stream and joining UBC’s teaching and learning community, we encourage you to join the Educational Leadership Network, a community of Instructors, Senior Instructors and Professors of Teaching. For more information, please visit UBC Educational Leadership Network.
Faculty Spotlight - Get Started
Marcello Pavan, PhD Sessional Lecturer
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Faculty of Science
In summer 2011, UBC Physics and Astronomy approached me to teach the Physics 100 course. I taught laboratory courses there before, but never a big lecture course, so to say I was nervous would be an understatement. Fortunately, UBC set me up to succeed, first with the department asking me to give a practice lecture to their teaching subcommittee, and then with the support of colleagues in the (then) Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative and CTLT. By the time it came to teach, I felt ready to go. Then of course the realization that things were harder than first thought set in, but the continued support of colleagues and CTLT has sustained me. Now I can’t wait to face those students again every September!