The Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning

Teaching in Times of Disruption

We invite you to review this wide range of resources related to teaching when a variety of disruptions might occur in your classrooms.

From the Sheridan Center

The Sheridan Center offers a variety of free consulting services for members of the Brown teaching community. Approaches include 1:1 meetings, course observations, and early student feedback.
The Sheridan Center makes available a number of recorded presentations and workshops available upon request to the Brown community, on topics such as asynchronous teaching and alternative grading strategies. To view these programs, please complete this brief request form.

Online Resources

The hallmark of asynchronous learning activities is that students do not participate at the same time. This resource provides strategies for asynchronous course design and examples of concrete activities and assignments.
These Digital Learning and Design (Sheridan Center) resources suggest ways to use digital tools like Google, Panopto, Zoom, and Canvas to maintain key teaching and learning functions.
The research is compelling that students learn more in classes that integrate active learning. This Sheridan newsletter offers a variety of opportunities for incorporating active learning into online and remote-accessible environments.
Writing-to-Learn (WTL) activities are often short, low-stakes writing assignments which can be designed as in-class activities or as take-home/at-home assignments. This newsletter offers ideas ideas for implementing WTL in synchronous and asynchronous contexts.

Teaching During COVID

These Sheridan Center reports document innovations that Brown faculty made in the Spring and Fall 2020 terms, as well as student responses to these shifts.

The transition of Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) to distance teaching can be challenging. Below, we highlight eight Brown University Sheridan-HHMI instructors’ experiences to identify key strategies for making the pivot in Spring 2020.

Sheridan Center and Digital Learning and Design staff report on the May 2020 faculty survey, linking key themes to research and highlighting faculty examples for online/hybrid teaching.