What’s it like to be an Educational Development Fellow?

A Reflection on Being CTL Educational Development Fellows 

Fall 2025 

By: Nicole Strombom, Nico Herzberg, Nikita Gupta, and Sarah Swiston 

The semester is coming to a close, and the CTL Educational Development Fellows have been very busy. The Fellows took a hands-on role in providing programming and support to graduate and professional students.  

Programs and Events CTL Educational Development Fellows Supported 

IGNITE 

This year is the second year of the IGNITE program. Nicole Strombom, Sarah Swiston, and Nico Herzberg led the three IGNITE sessions beginning with a discussion about student’s self-esteem and classroom community. This discussion offered an early reminder of how to build comfortable and inclusive classroom settings. October saw IGNITE participants chat about AI: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. As so much of academia is changing, pivoting, and engaging with AI, this chat offered a timely discussion about our changing classrooms. November offered a discussion about how the language we use, as teachers, in the classroom impacts our students. Participants grew in their teaching knowledge, ability to mentor, and interdisciplinary knowledge. The spring IGNITE team is looking forward to more engaging discussion. Registration is now open.  

EPiC 

EPiC is the introductory teaching development program at the CTL, led this Fall by Grad Fellows Sarah Swiston and Nikita Gupta, and CTL Assistant Director of Graduate and Postdoc Programs Lisa Kuehne. In September, participants discussed how to invoke, build on, and correct students’ prior knowledge when teaching new concepts. October introduced participants to active learning methods and research on their efficacy, which led to a rich discussion on the challenges of implementing these methods in diverse classrooms. November concluded with designing summative and formative assessments for specific learning objectives. These discussions made pedagogical research accessible to participants and equipped them with evidence-based teaching practices that are easy to adapt to classrooms.   

Additionally, dedicated “grad chat” in EPiC meetings offers a space for participants to receive feedback on their goals for teaching development and discuss challenges they encounter on the way. Previous participants have gone on to be part of diverse programming like reading communities and IGNITE, earn teaching certificates, attend pedagogical workshops and teaching conferences in the region and more. The Fall cohort for EPiC expressed that being part of a community of graduate students interested in pedagogy and learning about each other’s unique trajectories remains a valuable motivator for their individual teaching development.  

Reading Community 

The reading community met five times on a weekly basis from the 17th of September to October 15th. Over the course of these meetings, we discussed Jessamyn Neuhaus’ Snafu Edu: Teaching and Learning When Things Go Wrong in the College Classroom. Nico Herzberg and Elina Salminen, Assistant Director for Educational Development, co-facilitated discussions. Our group was quite diverse, both in terms of discipline and experience, which made for interesting conversations about how to deal with setbacks in teaching settings. Despite their relative ubiquity in the classroom, mistakes are often treated as something that instructors should avoid at all costs. Neuhaus’ book argues the opposite: that mistakes, or “snafus” as she refers to them, present instructors with the opportunity to reflect on their teaching practice and build connections with their students. In the reading community, we discussed the applicability of this approach and brainstormed ideas for incorporating it into our own teaching practice. As such, the reading community provided students with a safe space to think about these questions on a more abstract level while at the same time sharing and reflecting about their own experiences in the classroom.  

Conferences 

The CTL offered support for fellows attending conferences related to teaching or education research. In October, Sarah Swiston attended the Focus on Teaching and Technology Conference (FTTC) alongside several other members of the CTL. The conference provided practical advice for integrating new tools in the classroom, including game-based activities and AI. Sarah also attended a discipline-specific teaching conference organized by the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT). The conference offered novel strategies for teaching biology to students in K–12 schools, 2-year colleges, and 4-year colleges. NABT hosted the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER) Midwest conference, including sessions about ongoing research on best practices for improving accessibility and students’ sense of belonging. 

Open House 

In late November, the CTL’s Educational Development Team and The Learning Center collaborated with The Writing Center and Speaking Studio to host an open house. During the event, we chatted with fellow graduate students about spring programming and provided open consultations. Several students enrolled in the Professional Development in Teaching Program (PDT) and learned about resources to broaden or enhance their teaching experiences.  

Nicole A. Strombom After two years as a CTL Educational Development Fellow, I am finishing my Ph.D. this fall. During my time as a Fellow, I helped build IGNITE, cofacilitated a semester of the SoTL seminar, helped with orientation, developed resources to translate teaching concepts, and worked on many CTL programs and initiatives. Through the fellowship, I grew my ability to work in interdisciplinary teams, was exposed to many management tools, gained confidence in my teaching ability, and was given the opportunity to mentor others. I am grateful for the mentorship, training, and learning experiences working with the CTL afforded me. Farewell to my CTL Fellowship!  Read more about Nicole’s work at the CTL

Sarah Swiston After benefitting greatly from the CTL throughout my Ph.D. program, I was interested in helping deliver teaching professional development programming to other graduate students. I joined the CTL as a fellow this fall and co-facilitated the EPiC and IGNITE learning communities. In these learning communities, I got to know a multidisciplinary group of graduate students who are passionate about teaching and pedagogy, and we provided them with resources that will serve them in the future. I was also able to improve my own teaching by listening to the experiences of others, as well as attending conferences and workshops.  Additionally, I believe my experiences with the CTL helped my job applications stand out to future employers. I am planning to defend next year, and I will begin a teaching postdoc after graduation.

Nico Herzberg As my involvement with the CTL grew (through programs like the PDT), I became increasingly curious about what goes on behind the scenes at the CTL to meet the needs of the teaching community at WashU. Over the course of the past couple of months, I’ve gained invaluable insight in this regard, helping organize and plan for programs such as IGNITE and the Reading Community. Facilitating conversations between fellow educators about our teaching practices is quite different than teaching undergraduates in a classroom setting. Doing so has allowed me to add a new dimension to my pedagogical toolkit. One of the things that I have enjoyed the most about this position is connecting with students from a wide range of disciplines and varying levels of experience in teaching. I believe that giving graduate students the opportunity to build these networks is an important aspect of the CTL’s mission, and I’m looking forward to taking on greater responsibility in the months that follow in ensuring that that mission is fulfilled.

Nikita Gupta This was my first semester as Grad Fellow in Ed Dev at the CTL. As a participant in EPiC in 2023-2024, and IGNITE in 2024-2025, I experienced the impact of pedagogical discussions on my confidence and teaching skills in the classroom. My role as facilitator for EPiC equipped me to enable the development of others interested in teaching. Each EPiC meeting is a live demonstration of evidence-based teaching practices. It has been rewarding to see participants connect their previous knowledge to new pedagogical concepts and learn from each other using active learning methods.  As a Fellow in the CTL, I was also exposed to the programming opportunities for teaching development at WashU, online through the CIRTL network and in the Missouri region. This has been extremely valuable as I plan my future in research and teaching. I also learned about the depth of teaching support that underlies the quality of the learning experience at the university, not limited to workshops and trainings for faculty and TAs but also including reading communities, teaching observations, one-on-one consults, extensive classroom services and much more.   .