The Provost’s Inclusive Teaching Fellowship (PITF) is a year-long program that supports CMU faculty as they implement inclusive teaching techniques into their course(s). Through regular meetings with Eberly Center consultants and a cohort of other PITF instructors, fellows will enhance the diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging of a course they’ll teach in AY 2024-2025. Fellows will be assigned a team of Eberly Center colleagues to help design, implement, and assess the outcomes of  a PITF project. There are many ways instructors can increase the inclusion, equity, and diversity of their courses. Some ideas, but certainly not all, include integrating:

• theories that are less mainstream (such as feminist, critical race, post-colonial, postmodern approaches) or voices of underrepresented scholars in your discipline (such as women or Black, Indigenous or People of Color),
• diverse, accessible assignments, activities, or examples that reach more students,
• diversity, equity, or inclusion into learning objectives, especially in courses traditionally without this focus, and
• inclusive teaching strategies and learning activities to increase students' sense of belonging in the discipline.

If you are thinking of applying but not sure where to start, for inspiration, please consider our websites on creating an inclusive classroom climate and how to center DEI in teaching. We also encourage you to schedule a meeting with an Eberly Center colleague to discuss your course and ideas for enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in course design and delivery. 

The program begins on May 1, 2024 with a three-hour event and continues until early May 2025.

PITF fellows are expected to attend monthly meetings facilitated by the Eberly Center. These meetings are a chance to talk to other PITF fellows and to discuss different inclusive teaching strategies. These cohort meetings will be one hour every month from June 2024 to May 2025. The first meeting in May 2024 will be much longer, at 3-4 hours. Most monthly meetings will have light pre-work and a short personal reflection after each meeting.

In addition to monthly meetings, fellows are expected to meet regularly with their Eberly Center consultant team. The summer often has relatively frequent meetings with your team, depending on the project, up to once a week. These meetings will begin with discussing the course as a whole and then later will focus on the specifics of implementing your PITF project intervention and assessing its impacts on the student experience and/or learning.

As part of your individual consultation meetings, you will collaboratively design assessments of your PITF project, with Eberly Center support, to find out whether (and how) your project was successful at being more inclusive for students. The type and goal of this assessment are up to you and your team to decide! 

As part of the assessment of your project and course, the Eberly Center will facilitate an Early Course Feedback focus group with your students, to provide you with formative feedback to inform potential mid-course adjustments. 

PITF Fellows will also have an opportunity to have Eberly Center student partners observe class sessions and provide feedback on the implementation of inclusive teaching techniques in your classroom. The Eberly Center will recruit and train these student partners as part of a “student co-creation” pilot project in AY 2024-25  to help center student voices and DEIB in our work. Your Eberly Center colleagues will help you get the most out of student feedback in addition to the other outcomes assessments appropriate to your project goals. 

• CMU faculty members of any rank, discipline, employment track, and teaching experience are eligible. The faculty must have a continuing teaching appointment at CMU, and must teach the targeted course during the academic year 2024-2025.
• The course can be undergraduate or graduate level, occurring at the Pittsburgh, Qatar, Africa, or Silicon Valley campuses of CMU.

• To see the diversity of topics and approaches from past PITF fellows, look through the past PITF projects.

• Download the PITF Proposal Template. Answer each question by typing directly on your copy of the template.
• Submit your application, including a completed template, on this Google Form: https://bit.ly/PITF2425 (email submissions will not be accepted to facilitate de-identified reviews) 
• Do not include identifiers (your name or email) in the template or in any field of the Google form beyond name and Andrew ID.
• We encourage you to set up a meeting with us to discuss your project and proposal. Email eberly-assist@andrew.cmu.edu to set up an appointment to talk about your PITF idea or to brainstorm some possibilities with us. We are here to support you!

• Your proposal for the PITF program should be detailed enough that we have an idea of what your project would entail, but it doesn't have to include all the details. Your proposal is not a contract that we will hold you to. It’s a project idea that gives us an idea of your inclusive goals and how you intend to achieve those goals. Eberly Center consultants help awardees finalize the scope and nature of their project designs and assessment plans.
• We are looking for fellows that have a project idea that is both manageable in the time frame, seems likely to increase diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in your class, and that we can help support.
• The PITF Proposal Template includes suggestions for answering each question, often indicating what we’re looking for.
• We encourage you to set up a meeting with us to discuss your project and proposal. Email eberly-assist@andrew.cmu.edu to set up an appointment to talk about your PITF idea or to brainstorm some possibilities with us. We are here to support you!

Assessment is any way to find out how effective some change was. This can take many forms, such as a survey on student attitudes and beliefs, comparing student work across semesters, getting student feedback, or directly tracking student behaviors. As these examples suggest, the focus is primarily on how your course impacts students, since the PITF program aims at increasing inclusivity and belongingness for students. One member of your assigned Eberly Center consultant team will be an expert at assessment and will help you craft quantitative and/or qualitative assessments of things that matter most to you and your students. What you assess is largely determined by your project, but some ideas include measuring any change in students’ sense of belonging across the semester, asking students what parts of the course are helping them succeed best, and comparing exam scores across semesters to see whether under-supported students are being better served by the course changes you’ve made.

Monthly meetings are typically an hour long, on Zoom. Individual consultations are often about an hour and can occur as frequently as weekly or as infrequently as monthly. The Summer of 2024 will likely involve more frequent meetings with your consultant team, especially if you are teaching in Fall 2024. Depending on the project, you will have to make changes to your course that may take significant effort and time. Your consultant team will help you scope your project so that it is a manageable set of tasks that aligns with your vision and timeline. 

Yes. Doing an Early Course Feedback is a required part of the PITF program. Your Eberly consultant will come to your class midway through the semester (or mini) and run a series of focus group activities to elicit feedback from your students about the course. You can then use this feedback to shape the remainder of your course, aligned to your goals. It’s also a great way to see how your PITF changes are being received by students.

Ideally, every fellow attends every monthly meeting. However, just like with a course, we understand that life can get in the way. Additionally, while we try to accommodate the most fellows for our monthly meetings, we know that the schedules of a dozen faculty do not align easily. Our hope is that every PITF fellow plans to attend and finds flexibility in their schedule to do so. Exit interviews with PITF alumni have consistently shown that both the monthly cohort meetings and the individual consults contribute equally to the PITF experience and inclusive teaching growth. 

The times of these meetings are between 9am and 4pm Pittsburgh time. If you are in a different time zone (e.g. in Doha or Kigali), we recognize that this may not be convenient for you. While we make every effort to include all campuses in the PITF program, we expect there will be monthly meetings outside of normal office hours. We hope you’ll find the flexibility to attend nevertheless. 

Unfortunately, we only fund new projects. Our fellowship structure involves regular individual meetings with a team of consultants to support the implementation of your project - this usually involves helping you focus on specific options for implementation. If you’ve already implemented your project, our help is no longer needed. The PITF can support continuing and developing projects of inclusive teaching, especially those that would benefit from Eberly support both at the pedagogical and the assessment level.

Faculty working at CMU-Q, CMU-Africa, or CMU Silicon Valley are eligible to apply for our PITF program. Please note that the monthly meetings with the cohort might be held before or after work hours since they are scheduled during Pittsburgh work hours. We try to accommodate everyone but cannot guarantee that meetings will take place during work hours.