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From Conversation to Classroom Practice: How Penn Faculty Create Classrooms Where All Students Can Thrive

Students socializing under cherry blossom trees on College Green at the University of Pennsylvania

02Apr’26

Feature Stories, Spotlights

April 2, 2026 by Erin Bartnett

One of the reasons Corlett Wood of Biology joined the CETLI Seminar, Teaching that Enables Every Student to Thrive (TEEST), was because she wanted to think about how to form groups to benefit student learning, especially when students might have different levels of experience with the material. After discussions in the TEEST seminar, Wood decided to give the students in her statistics class a pre-course survey to learn more about their experiences with programming and statistics. Now, she uses that information to put students in groups—pairing students with similar levels of experience together, rather than pairing students with little experience to those with lots of experience. “That’s really improved the group dynamics this year,” she says.  

This change gets at the TEEST seminar’s central question: how do instructors foster a classroom environment where all students feel welcomed, challenged, and supported? 

Faculty in the seminar reflect on this question from day one. While many face similar challenges, the cohort sitting around the TEEST seminar table in CETLI 134, like the students in Wood’s classroom and many others, come from a wide range of perspectives. There are faculty from the humanities, the sciences, and the professional schools. Some spend their days in seminar rooms, others in large lecture halls and labs. Some have been teaching at Penn for decades while others are still unpacking their boxes.  

Considering the actual people in the seminar levels up the central question for TEEST: When teaching and learning might mean something different for every person in the room, how do you ensure they not only feel welcome, supported, challenged, but also connect with and learn from one another?  

Throughout the seminar year, faculty found the answers to this question in their conversations with one another, each discovering something slightly different for their teaching needs. As we prepare to open applications for the next TEEST cohort, CETLI reached out to former participants to learn about the concrete ways they have created opportunities for all of their students to thrive.  

Group Work as a Catalyst for Learning

"[Assigning roles for group work] helps students think about how to be creative and innovative and do some problem solving on that micro level in the classroom."
Professor Jerri Bourjolly of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania
Jerri Bourjolly
School of Social Policy & Practice

One purpose for forming groups is to help students, and in this case participating faculty, see how their own experiences can inform their learning.  

On the first day of the TEEST seminar, faculty file into the room and pick a seat, grab a snack, make small talk before the session begins. The first things they discuss, either as a cohort or in small groups, are the questions they have about their teaching, including the successes and challenges they are experiencing in the classroom.  

That brief exercise made Wood feel more connected to the seminar cohort.  As she listened to a modern language faculty member talk about the challenges she was facing in her teaching, something clicked for Wood: “I realized that I was dealing with a lot of the same problems when I teach programming and coding.”  

Jerri Bourjolly of SP2, who is in the current TEEST cohort, said the conversations around group work helped her understand what she had experienced as “some resistance” to group work in her courses: “Sometimes, [students] are not sure how to move forward.” In the seminar, she learned about the value of assigning people different roles—recorder, observer, reporter, etc.—to help students define and make meaningful contributions to the group. Creating that structure actually frees students up, she says: it helps students “think about how to be creative and innovative and do some problem solving on that micro level in the classroom.”  

Active Learning Narrows the Gap

"[Using whiteboards] helps to make sure that everybody is part of the same conversation in a given working group."
Professor Florian Schwarz, School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania
Florian Schwarz
School of Arts & Sciences

The TEEST group also explores how the structure of your courses can contribute to helping all students, but especially those from underrepresented groups, thrive. Studies have shown that active learning, which is often done using in-class group activities, has a positive impact on student learning and can reduce achievement gaps for underrepresented students.   

In 2018, Florian Schwarz of Linguistics converted his large lecture course into an active learning seminar after participating in a different CETLI seminar specifically focused on active learning. The more time he spent teaching an active learning class, the more he realized that active learning went hand in hand with helping underrepresented students thrive, so he signed up for the TEEST seminar during the 2019-2020 academic year. Since completing the seminars, Schwarz has published his own research that demonstrates how the change to an active learning format positively impacted students’ performance in his class. He says there are clear indicators that the changes have also had a direct impact on creating a sense of community in his classroom. 

The special ingredient in Schwarz’s classes, he says, is a physical whiteboard. The shared visual space “helps to make sure that everybody is part of the same conversation in a given working group.” Students love them. He recalls the first time he brought whiteboards to his smaller class, which included three of the students from his larger class where the whiteboards were a common tool. When he pulled the whiteboards out, the three students exclaimed: “Whiteboards! We’re so excited!”   

Getting Students to Participate

Emily Wilson of Classics also enjoys the power of a good prop for getting students to engage. For Wilson, that prop is a tiny, colored frog.  

When Wilson joined the TEEST seminar last year, she wanted to think about how to get students in larger classes to participate. She had a lot of experience with smaller seminar groups, and she was exploring how to make to those larger classes feel as welcoming as an intimate seminar, especially for students coming to the material for the first time. 

Wilson says the TEEST seminar helped her realize that many of the changes she could make were small, manageable, and immediately deployable. For example, she could assign roles for group work and get students to move around the room.  

This is where the frogs come in. For group discussions, Wilson has students choose a random frog figurine from a large container. Students then move into groups that correspond to the color of the frog they chose. Like Schwarz and others, Wilson assigns students to different roles in the group to help them see that the person who is speaking isn’t the only important member of the group, and she gives them a handout to facilitate conversation on a deeper level. 

She also realized she could deploy pre-writing exercises or think-pair-share exercises to help all students engage in the class discussion. Prior to class, she has students submit one sentence and one question on the reading for that week. TAs then read through the submissions and grade for attendance. This allows students who may not be comfortable speaking in class to participate in the conversation in other ways, while also teaching the range of students how to engage in the expected intellectual work of the course and holding them accountable for that work.  

Evidence-Based Approaches

Before joining the TEEST cohort, Katherine France of Dental was certain she would not get students to participate through the “cold call.” But when the TEEST cohort reviewed research that suggested otherwise, she was ready to reconsider.  

Discussions of the evidence-based research helped her make concrete changes to her teaching and also helped her understand the theories behind strategies that might work in different settings. She recalls when the cohort read and discussed research by Elise Dallimore, Julie Hertenstein, Marjorie Platt which suggests that when done right, cold calling can actually level the playing field for all students. “I did not know that there was actual, real, good evidence suggesting positive impacts,” France says. Now, she tells students from day one that she is going to call on every student in the roster as part of their introduction to the course material.  

For Bourjolly, discussing research, particularly Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do by Claude Steele, has inspired her to be more attentive to her students’ experiences more broadly. For example, Bourjolly says the book has given her strategies for helping students experiencing imposter syndrome. Before the seminar, she wanted to tell students, “You’re here! You're supposed to be here!” But now, she has a better understanding of why students might be experiencing imposter syndrome and feels ready to implement concrete steps to create a welcoming space for those students.  

What Is the Value of a Seminar?

It just made me feel happy about how much good work is being done in the classroom at Penn and how much people care about pedagogy.
Professor Emily Wilson, School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania
Emily Wilson
School of Arts & Sciences

As a final gesture to the seminar format, it’s worth pausing to reflect on the larger question that both a faculty teaching seminar and a college course have to address: What do the people in the room get out of the experience? 

Here is where the wide range of perspectives once again yields a more dynamic range of answers. 

First, there’s fun. “Consider the possibility,” Schwarz says, “that it might just be genuinely fun to connect with other faculty about things that are on your mind about teaching.” 

Then, there’s inspiration. In a de-centralized university, the chance to meet and learn from people all over campus who care about teaching was, for Wilson, an energizing experience.  “It just made me feel happy about how much good work is being done in the classroom at Penn, and how much people care about pedagogy.” That dialogue across disciplines, Bourjolly says, also inspires new ideas for your own teaching.  

There’s also the protected time and space for thinking about difficult things.  Wood says the seminar “was a really efficient way to improve the quality of my classes.” While she could have done the work on her own, “I wouldn’t have gotten to the same place, and it would have taken me forever.”  

And then, there’s the impact. Wood is excited about how the changes she’s made to her teaching are “going to be good for all students, wherever they’re coming from, but they may have a disproportionately large impact on students with less prior exposure to the material.” 

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