The Vice Provost for Academic Innovation and the Center for Teaching Innovation (CTI) invite Cornell faculty to apply for the 2025-2026 Creative Teaching Awards. This award series seeks to recognize and share innovative classroom methodologies and teaching implementations, with the goal of improving teaching through the sharing of new ideas, methods, and strategies. This year's theme highlights creative approaches to engaging students in local learning experiences outside the classroom, particularly in spaces or places on the Cornell campus, within Ithaca, or within New York State. 

2025-2026 Call for Applications

Students often recount some of their most memorable and impactful learning experiences as happening outside a classroom – on field trips or research sites, inside buildings such as museums, greenhouses, or work facilities, outside in natural areas, farms, or city streets, or meeting with people within a community. Have you found creative approaches to taking students outside the classroom, to learn within a different setting or with different people? Have you found ways to structure these experiences to be particularly effective, for example, through integrating projects or assignments? What approaches do you use to prepare students and help them get the most out of the visit? How do you connect classroom learning with the experiences they have outside the classroom? We are especially interested in creative ideas for teaching within our campus or nearby areas that other instructors could easily adapt. 

Up to five examples of creative practices will be selected to receive an award of $5,000 payable to a faculty research account. Award winners will collaborate with the Center for Teaching Innovation to document and share their experiences in online case studies for wider sharing and adoption by colleagues at and beyond Cornell, and will present their experiences at the Provost's Teaching Showcase scheduled for April 2026. 

Application deadline: January 20, 2026

Submit your application.
 

Eligibility and Requirements

• All full-time faculty members (tenure-track, tenured, and RTE faculty) are invited to apply. Applications can also be submitted on behalf of a course team that includes postdocs, graduate students, or professional staff.
• Applications should describe innovations that have already been implemented in at least one class at Cornell.
• The principal faculty member(s) will participate in the Provost’s Teaching Showcase event to share their teaching strategy with other faculty.
• Award winners will collaborate with CTI to document their teaching strategy in a case study for possible adoption by colleagues.

Application Process

Interested faculty are invited to share their creative teaching approach via an online application, which must include:

1. The context of the course(s) in which the teaching approach has been implemented (topic, number of students, learning outcomes).
2. A description of the learning experience outside of the classroom. What did you expect students would learn? Was it integrated into other components of the course (e.g., assignments, projects, discussions, reflections)? How did you help prepare students to get the most out of the experience? (200-400 words)
3. The impacts you observed in student learning, thinking, or growth as a result of this learning experience. (50-150 words)
4. Challenges you may have encountered and what might help overcome these challenges. (50-150 words)
5. Advice for other instructors who might adapt your strategies. (50-150 words)

Instructors are also encouraged to provide supporting materials such as assignment instructions or reflection prompts, images, quotations from student feedback, etc.