Article by Julia Goffredi, Educational Developer, Bank of America Center for Excellence in Learning, Teaching and Technology
Most days when I'm on campus, I take a midday walk. Nothing ambitious; just enough time to clear my head before heading back to my desk. Some afternoons I'll follow the Jones Falls to see what birds are roosting along the water. Other days I'll check what's brewing at the coffee shop in Bolton Hill, what's playing next at The Charles Theatre, or what's on display in the latest exhibit at the Walters. It's a small stretch of the city, but it holds an entire world if you slow down enough to notice it.
What I notice most, though, is the steady current of people moving along Mount Royal Avenue at almost any hour of the day. By midmorning, the campus is already filling in: students heading to their classrooms, walking through library stacks, or settling in with headphones on to join a Zoom meeting. Some of these students drove in before the sun came up, while others are hopping off the MARC train or light rail to make their evening class. All of them, one way or another, made their way into this stretch of Midtown Baltimore today for one reason: to learn something that changes what's possible for them next.
And this is just one entry point into a much larger University of Baltimore. That same experience is available at the Universities at Shady Grove, where students are earning a UBalt degree ninety minutes from Baltimore City. It's happening through a laptop in a break room during a lunch hour, or at a kitchen table after a night shift ends. For over a hundred years, the same instinct has run through this institution, wherever a student happens to be sitting: build the education around the student in front of you, not the other way around.
That instinct is exactly what the Transformative Teaching Award, presented by the Center for Excellence in Learning, Teaching and Technology, exists to recognize.
A transformative teacher at UBalt rarely fits one single mold. Some years, the award goes to a faculty member who built a new, immersive experience into their course. This might be a simulation, a studio, a clinic, or something that didn't exist in the curriculum until they built it. Other years it recognizes a high-impact practice done exceptionally well: undergraduate research, a capstone rebuilt around real community partners, a service-learning project that asked more of students than a typical semester does. Sometimes it's a faculty member who brought an emerging technology into the classroom in a way that genuinely deepened learning, not just modernized a syllabus. Sometimes it's quieter still, like a curricular revision built over several semesters or one inventive practice that became a tradition because it simply worked.
What ties all of it together isn't the format, or the room it happens in, but something closer to attentiveness. These are faculty who design courses with real rigor and real relevance, tied to what their students actually need next, whether that student is sitting three feet in front of them or three hours away on a screen. They adjust mid-semester when something isn't landing, rather than waiting for the next academic year to fix it. They build classrooms, in person or virtual, where a working parent's or career-changer's lived experience counts for something, and where feedback genuinely shapes what happens in the room next. And they keep doing the quieter work of asking themselves honestly what worked and what didn't, and doing it differently the next time around.
Later this month, our faculty will have dedicated space to share exactly that kind of work. CELTT is expanding our annual Teaching & Learning Day into a Teaching & Learning Mini-Week, running virtually October 27 and 28, with sessions led by and for UBalt faculty across all four schools, wherever they teach. We'll close the week on Thursday, October 29, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. with our Culminating Breakfast, where presenters and participants alike share what they explored and where we gather to celebrate this year's Transformative Teaching Award recipient.
That morning, I'll be taking an earlier walk from the Bogomolny Library to a room full of the people who make all that foot traffic down Mount Royal Avenue, and every quieter version of it happening elsewhere, worth it year after year.
Teaching & Learning Mini-Week (October 27–29) and the Culminating Breakfast are open to UBalt faculty. Faculty interested in presenting or attending can contact CELTT for more information.