The Preparing Future Faculty Certificate in College Teaching is offered by the Preparing Future Faculty Program. The Certificate is offered free to all enrollled students at CGU. Alumni may earn the Certificate by enrolling in a PFF Certificate program course - for details, please contact the PFF program office.

Students aspiring to teach in formal academic contexts, or whose work will take them into consulting or other leadership work that engages and leads minds will benefit from the PFF Certificate program.

 

The Certificate program helps you develop the following knowledge and skills:

• Teaching as a leadership process that integrates excellence, ethics, and engagement to include and support all learners toward success.
• Inclusive pedagogy that embraces and integrates diversity in all its forms (culture/ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, sexual orientation, abilities/disabilities, learning modalities, life experiences).
• An understanding and design approach with inclusive pedagogy as part of the mission of higher education to prepare a diverse student body for the emerging world.
• An understanding of how and why learners engage and disengage with learning.
• How to select and design pedagogical strategies and tools, including in digital form, to support learning engagement and success.
• How to build and maintain a reflective practice and identity as a teacher-scholar. 
• How to design courses that are inclusive and engage students in active learning to master both course content and critical skills for the 21st century.
• A critical awareness of yourself as an educator and leader articulated in a teaching philosophy statement.
• How to begin and maintain a reflective practice so that you are an agile and life-long learner as an educator and leader. 

 

The Certificate program comprises 2 modules. Module 1 is a series of Mandatory and Elective Topics. Module 2 develops your Practicum and Portfolio.

WORKSHOP MODULE

• The Mandatory workshop series guide you in exploring and developing your teaching identity as a leader and designer of inclusive pedagogy and active learning. These workshops also prepare you to develop your 2 main portfolio items, a Teaching Philosophy Statement and a set of course design items and a sample course syllabus.
• The Elective workshop series help you explore classroom facilitation processes such as designing engaging, active learning processes in lectures, discussions, and group work; formative assessment feedback and grading; building community and connecting with students; integrating digital tools in working inclusively with a diversity of learners and contexts. Please see the PFF website for the current list of Elective topics. 

PRACTICUM AND PORTFOLIO MODULE.

• Portfolio. Based on your work in the Mandatory workshop series, you write a teaching philosophy statement and design a course in your discipline to create a sample set of student learning outcomes aligned to an assessment plan, a course syllabus, assignment and rubric, and course rationale. Your portfolio will also include any useful teaching strategies, notes, and useful templates that you curate as a teaching toolkit.
• Practicum. For the Practicum, you attend a Teaching Clinic and do a Teaching Demonstration. You also explore your discipline in undergraduate settings through a Class Observation, a Teaching Experience session, and 2 Informational Interviews with faculty who teach undergraduates. 

CAPSTONE. To complete your program, you build a teacher-scholar website to showcase your scholarship and your teaching and write a final reflective essay that looks back to the experience of becoming a teacher and a leader of inclusive pedagogy.