Fourth Annual Teach@ND Day Celebrates Teaching Excellence in All Its Forms

This semester alone, there are more than 3,000 courses—and nearly 5,500 total sections of those courses—being offered on the Notre Dame campus.

That’s a lot of teaching.

But while numbers can give a sense of the scope of this work, they don’t capture the commitment and myriad contributions of the instructors who make a Notre Dame education something special.

The fourth annual Teach@ND Day aimed to celebrate exactly that.

Hosted by Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence, this year’s event took place Friday, February 13, in the Morris Inn’s Smith Ballroom. It featured faculty lightning talks, a keynote address from a Kaneb Center faculty member who is a leading figure in the international teaching and learning field, and a showcase of faculty digital learning projects facilitated by Notre Dame Learning’s Office of Digital Learning.

Ron Metoyer, Notre Dame’s vice president and associate provost for teaching and learning, kicked off the program by echoing sentiments he shared at the event a year ago, acknowledging the importance of what instructors do as students navigate uncertainty in the larger world.

He focused in particular on the impact of AI in teaching and learning and highlighted takeaways emerging from the University’s first-ever Student and Faculty Voice Summit on AI in Education convened last fall, including the way intentionality in teaching can help instructors and students find common ground in their responses to change.

“I believe that pedagogical best practices are becoming more important than ever as we seek to build understanding, assess student knowledge, and break through the uncertainty,” Metoyer said.

Lightning Talks and a Keynote by Jim Lang

Following Metoyer’s opening remarks, 14 Notre Dame instructors representing a variety of disciplines delivered three-minute lightning talks about their teaching. Topics ranged from encouraging genuine curiosity in first-year robotics courses and raising the stakes in classroom discussions to asking students assignment exit questions and reimagining final projects in graduate classes.

This year’s Teach@ND Day was not only a celebration of teaching at Notre Dame but also the 10th anniversary of Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. Authored by Jim Lang, a professor of the practice at the Kaneb Center, Small Teaching is the biggest selling higher ed teaching and learning book of all time.

The host of Notre Dame Learning’s Designed for Learning podcast, Lang gave a keynote titled “From Small Steps to Lasting Change: 10 Years of Small Teaching.” It started with an interactive activity, in which he asked attendees to study an image of a professor sitting on a desk in a classroom full of students and then discuss what it told them about that course.

What was in the image itself and people’s reactions to it weren’t instrumental to the point he was making. Rather, Lang noted, his use of the photo was an example of a small teaching tactic that can make a big difference, in this case by crafting an opening strategy for a lecture (or class session) that helps students leave the world behind and bring their focus to the day’s material.

“This idea of having a kind of transition zone is important and sets people up for learning,” Lang said.

His presentation then dove into the three core principles at the heart of the small teaching philosophy, each of which he believes is as relevant as ever as we continue to think about ways higher education might evolve and change in response to AI and other factors.

• Knowledge: Helping students build memory of important facts and ideas
• Connections: Creating and expanding knowledge structures to support learning (e.g., connection notebooks that ask students to reflect on what they learned that week)
• Engagement: Eliciting students’ active participation in the learning process

“Every voice matters, and I want to hear it in the room,” Lang said in expanding on the principle of engagement while simultaneously identifying this as the overarching purpose of what he’s advocating for in the book.

Innovations in Digital Learning

New for this year’s Teach@ND Day was an afternoon showcase of digital learning hosted by the Office of Digital Learning (ODL). Following a poster session spotlighting innovative faculty initiatives serving both Notre Dame students in traditional classrooms and online audiences far beyond the University’s campus, Sonia Howell, director of the ODL, introduced a faculty panel.

The panel featured Dana Horgen, an associate teaching professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry; Wendy Angst, a teaching professor in the Department of Management & Organization; and Jason Reed, Wade Family Associate Teaching Professor of Finance.

Applications for the summer 2026 Digital Learning Sprints are open now. Learn more and apply at learning.nd.edu/sprints.

Moderated by KC Frye, the ODL’s director of academic media and XR, the conversation highlighted projects each of those faculty members pursued with grants and expert support awarded through the annual Digital Learning Sprints program.

Whether talking about implementing a flipped classroom model in a chemistry lab, leveraging extended reality to give students insight into life in Northern Uganda, or using AI to better prepare students for careers in finance, the panelists spoke to how the purposeful and thoughtful integration of technology can open up exciting new learning opportunities.

Student Thank You Notes

Teach@ND Day once again included a recognition of teachers beyond those in attendance at the event. Over the last couple of months, Notre Dame students were invited to write thank you notes to faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students whose teaching has made a difference in their lives. Hundreds of these notes were submitted to the Kaneb Center, which then distributed them to the instructors.

“Reading the thank you notes that students write to their instructors is a privilege and a joy,” said Kristi Rudenga, the director of the Kaneb Center, who introduced both the morning lightning talks and Lang’s keynote. “It reiterates what we see in our work, which is that there is excellent teaching happening across this campus every day. Setting aside a day to celebrate that excellent teaching is one of my favorite things we do in Notre Dame Learning.”

Originally published by ND Learning at learning.nd.edu on February 25, 2026.