This was Year Two of responding to the pandemic, and it continued the CTI focus on providing timely information to faculty as they adjusted to a consistently inconsistent learning environment. Sharing course materials with students in quarantine, pivoting to online final exams for all students, and continually re-socializing what it means to teach and learn at Cornell shaped our work throughout the year. We also strove to transcend the pandemic-driven reactive nature of our work, to again think proactively about how our work should evolve to best meet the needs of the community. 

That meant launching a New Faculty Teaching Academy to both accelerate new faculty’s development as teachers and to help them find community and support in their first years at Cornell. It meant working with individual faculty to emphasize how fostering community and connection could create a more inclusive learning environment. On a slightly larger scale, it meant working with academic departments to consider where diversity, equity, and inclusion informed their curriculum.

Most consistently, it meant meeting the myriad challenges of the year (and they were challenging!) with a persistent spirit of innovation and experimentation. During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt said, “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” That spirit of bold, persistent experimentation characterized teaching these last couple of years. Keeping that spirit, and learning from those experiments, will focus our work in the year ahead.

“The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

Franklin Roosevelt