PTF Impacts

The majority of the clinical population served at the UT Speech and Hearing Center is Spanish-speaking, yet there is no audiology-specific training for students providing care. This program provides targeted training for audiology graduate students to best serve their Spanish-speaking patients. The culmination of this experience results in a digital badge provided by the Moody College of Communication, which can be viewed here.

In Fall 2024, PTF Ruth Shear helped launch the new general chemistry labs, rewritten to include Research Methods material (rebranded "thinking like a scientist"), and taught to 4500 students. This involved a complete overhaul of the CH204 general chemistry lab course, turning it into two classes: CH104M and CH104N. These courses are required for the vast majority of CNS majors as well as all pre-health students. The courses were piloted in Fall 2024 with 400 students, and fully launched in Fall 2025 with over 4500 students.

On April 11, 2024, three Provost's Teaching Fellows presented at the final session of the "Teaching as Wellbeing" mini-conference series, hosted by the UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers in collaboration with UT System faculty developers. The series served as a monthly think tank about the relationship between teaching, learning, and wellbeing for educators and educational developers across UT system.

As part of Steve Finkelstein's PTF Initiative, a campus-wide faculty learning community constructed a canvas sandbox website where they could share materials related to climate change, with annotations, with the broader UT community. They collected the group's materials, and then tried to organize them in a useful way. The materials include lectures, activities, quizzes, projects, pre/post tests, etc., and are organized both by learning objective and by course. The website is now live, and a publication on pre/post survey results is being prepared.

This video project was designed to be shown in all Signature Courses at UT. Together with a discussion prompt, the video aims to acquaint students with mental and physical health resources on campus, and to teach them strategies for success.

Each year, the PTF Chair-Elect has the opportunity to share recurring Teaching Tips with all faculty at UT. These messages cover a variety of topics, styles, and methodologies, from brief and practical classroom strategies to in-depth conversations with voices from across campus.

This year’s Teaching Tips  were written by Chair-Elect Nina Telang, from the Chandra Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Each year, the PTF Chair-Elect has the opportunity to share recurring Teaching Tips with all faculty at UT. These messages cover a variety of topics, styles, and methodologies, from brief and practical classroom strategies to in-depth conversations with voices from across campus.

This year’s Teaching Tips  were written by Chair-Elect Jessica Toste, from the Department of Special Education.

For her Provost's Teaching Fellows initiative, Nina Telang developed of a Supplemental Instruction (SI) program in a sophomore-level Electrical and Computer Engineering course, EE319K: Introduction to Embedded Systems. 

Supplemental Instruction (SI) study sessions to help students succeed in introductory courses by employing a peer teaching model. SI Leaders – TAs or peers who have already successfully taken the course – plan and lead two identical, voluntary SI sessions each week, which students can join at any point in the semester. 

Former PTF chair Nina Telang co-presented this paper at the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference in August 2022.

Former PTF chair Nina Telang co-presented this paper at the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Gulf-Southwest Annual Conference in March 2021. This paper shares a detailed look into the implementation of a new student initiative focused on promoting student success and well-being.

Read the complete paper here, or find the abstract below.

Former PTF chair Nina Telang co-presented this paper at the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Virtual Annual Conference in June 2020.

Former PTF chair Nina Telang co-presented this paper at the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference in June 2019.

Before deciding what your career goals are, it’s critical to know what you value most in a job. What gets you out of bed to go to start the day, go to work, and/or live your life? This exercise will help you define and prioritize what drives you. We provide definitions of 8 common "drivers". Once you understand these drivers, you can take the exercise and go through a ranking process to determine which are most important to you (i.e. you’re less likely to compromise on these) and which are less important (i.e. you’re more willing to compromise on these).

PTF Leaders Cynthia LaBrake and Mary Neuburger presented both a poster and a talk at the 2018 Reinvention Collaborative meeting (now the Association of Undergraduate Education at Research Universities, UERU) on November 8-10, 2018 in Arlington, Virginia. The 2018 Biennial National Conference featured more Undergraduate Vice Presidents/Provosts and more participants overall than any previous Reinvention Collaborative meeting.

The 2017 Provost's Teaching Fellows Steering Committee prepared this poster as part of the Symposium Changing Education: Redesigning the Undergraduate Experience, hosted by Project 2021 and the Faculty Innovation Center at UT Austin on March 30, 2017. The format included keynote presentations punctuated by short talks and plenty of time for discussions in breakout sessions.

As part of his PTF Initiative, Luis Martins founded the Entrepreneurship Minor within the McCombs School's Rosenthal Department of Management. The Entrepreneurship Minor is available to all undergraduate students at UT Austin, and develops entrepreneurial mindsets and skillsets that equip students to have impact on organizations and society as startup founders or as employees in established organizations.

In 2016 Cythia LaBrake presented about her PTF Initiative in a poster session of the National Chemistry Education Meeting. Her presentation was titled "Active Learning at Scale: Lessons from General Chemistry."

View the poster in larger format here.

More than a dozen of the country’s leading education experts met at Rice University October 13-14, 2014 for the biennial De Lange Conference, “Teaching in the University of Tomorrow.” This conference was presented in collaboration with Scientia, an institute for the history of science and culture, and the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University.