As the fall semester approaches, the time has come to announce CITL’s upcoming graduate student learning communities (GSLCs). GSLCs are invaluable resources for any graduate student on IU’s campus, as they provide access to both an experienced CITL consultant AND a community of peers with whom to navigate challenging or unfamiliar teaching and learning experiences.
These GSLCs will most likely meet once or twice per week for multiple weeks during the semester. Be sure to confirm that your schedule can accommodate the meeting times for the GSLC you are interested in pursuing. The meetings will typically require some form of participation (e.g. peer review, reading documents, producing materials, etc.).
If you are already a participant in CITL’s Graduate Teaching Assistantship Program (GTAP) (or if you’d like to be!), completion of a GSLC will count toward one of the requirements!
Here is the list of GSLCs to choose from for the Fall 2025 semester:
Cultivating Student Attention in Our Classes: Teaching in the Age of Distraction
Description: Join this GSLC to discuss how we can help our students (and ourselves) cultivate our attention and reduce distractions in our classes by cultivating our collective curiosity. We will read Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It by Dr. James M. Lang (IUCAT ebook). This book offers practical insights into how attention works, examines the root causes of distraction in the classroom, offers strategies to foster student attention and designing learning environments that better support student focus.
Practical Teaching Magic: Creating Everyday Teaching Materials
Description: This Graduate Student Learning Community (GSLC) will meet in-person six times over the fall to develop everyday teaching materials for your classroom. Each meeting will focus on a different document or skill: creating syllabi and pacing course schedules, lesson planning, assignment creation, and classroom activities. This GSLC will conclude with a peer review session in which you will collect the materials you have cultivated during the learning community and receive feedback from your fellow community members. Participants in this GSLC will walk away from the learning community with the skills needed to create essential teaching materials for a future classroom.
Why They Hate “Academic” Writing and Reading—and How to Change That
Description: Students have always faced challenges with academic writing. What are the roots of this widely observed issue? Our community’s first undertaking will be to identify the causes of antipathy and apathy toward academic writing and reading. We will then discern which roadblocks to intrinsic motivation we can mitigate. Our final collective step will be to revise an activity or assignment for spring semester to align with our latest understanding of reading and writing that are worth doing. The facilitators will follow up with each participant in spring to reflect on how the teaching intervention went and how to move forward.
Applications are due Tuesday, September 2 at 9:00 a.m. Click here to start your application today!
If you have any questions about the application process or GSLCs, please do not hesitate to reach out to our office at citl@iu.edu. You can also email me directly at citlgrad@iu.edu.
Leave a Reply