How they work
Each community is eight to twelve instructors from different departments who commit to a year on one question, meet monthly, try something in their own classes, and report back to the group. The Center for Teaching & Learning facilitates and provides readings, but the agenda belongs to the members. Adjunct and instructional-academic-staff colleagues are explicitly included.
Joining
Topics for the coming year are announced in spring with a short application — a paragraph on why the question matters in your teaching. Cohorts are kept deliberately cross-disciplinary. Completing the year comes with a modest stipend or a materials budget, and many communities produce a shared resource other instructors can use.
In and around Porter Falls
The Center for Teaching & Learning on the third level of Halvorsen Library is where new faculty get their footing and where mid-career instructors trade notes across colleges.
The practical details
Format: Small cohorts, monthly meetings across an academic year. Topics: Set each spring — e.g. ungrading, first-year retention, AI in assignments. Support: A small stipend or a course-materials budget on completion. Anything time-sensitive — an accommodation, a booking, a deadline — is worth confirming directly before you rely on it, because the specifics here can change from term to term.
If you have a question
The office behind this is Center for Teaching & Learning (Halvorsen Library, Level 3). Call (715) 555–0265 or email teaching@uwporterfalls.edu during the fall and spring terms, or sign in to MyPorter to send a message or book a time. If it turns out another office owns the question, they will route it rather than send you back to the start.
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. Every office, person, building, phone number and statistic on this page is invented; nothing here describes a real institution or a service you can actually contact.