Faculty Retreat Grants

About

This year, attendees will again be eligible to apply for a $4,000 grant from the Teaching Advancement Board to help implement ideas inspired by the retreat in their own courses. The grants that meet the objectives, terms, and criteria below will be awarded on a competitive basis.

View the list of 2020 Faculty Retreat grant recipients (pdf)

Initiative

These grants enable recipients to design and implement an instructional enhancement that has a high probability of improving education at Illinois. The projects most likely to be funded are those inspired by this year’s faculty retreat and aligned with the criteria below. The grant can be used to fund a graduate assistant to assist in the enhancements.

Objectives

• To support the implementation of teaching enhancements inspired by the faculty retreat
• To seek broad participation from the many disciplines across campus.
• To create a diverse and vibrant community of instructors and graduate students developing educational enhancements and reforms.

Terms

Instructors who attended the faculty retreat may apply for the grants, provided they accept the following conditions:

• They will attend an organizational meeting in mid-May to meet and introduce their projects. Additional meetings during the academic year will be determined.
• They will provide a brief summary of the project for the 2022 Faculty Retreat.

Criteria

The Teaching Advancement Board (TAB) and the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL) will evaluate proposals and present recommendations for awards to the Provost. Selection criteria include:

• To what extent would the successful completion of the project improve the quality of our students’ learning experience?
• To what extent would the proposed educational enhancements be generalizable across the campus?

Priority will be given to those proposals that build on the 2021 Faculty Retreat theme of "Creating Wicked Students... Now and Beyond." Suggested topics are developing strategies and/or assignments to help students develop “wicked competencies,” transforming your class into an academically safe learning environment, or implementing innovative types of assessment tools.

Proposals

Information required:

• Instructor name
• Department
• Proposal title
• Course name
• Course number
• When will these enhancements be implemented? (Fall 2021, Spring 2022, and/or Summer 2022)
• Description of course enhancement (300 words)
• Department Chair/Head approval

*Grant proposal submissions will open Friday, March 12th through this website.*

Timeline:

• Application deadline: Friday, April 9, 2021 at 5:00 p.m.

• Award announcement: Early May 2021
• First meeting: Mid-May 2021