To arrange a meeting with a CIDR consultant, call 206-543-6588, or contact us by email to arrange an appointment. Let us know what your department is, what you would like to discuss, and what your preferences are for possible meeting times. We will use that information to determine who on our staff is best able to respond to your request, and that person will contact you to arrange an appointment.

If you already know a CIDR consultant, please feel free to contact him or her directly. Contact information can be found in our Staff Directory.

Before your meeting, you may find it helpful to review CIDR Resources related to your questions, and if you like, you are also welcome to email additional information or materials for CIDR staff to look over prior to the consultation appointment.

As a UW Center, CIDR provides customized, confidential services for UW departments, faculty, and teaching assistants who have questions related to teaching and learning. CIDR services are collaborative, grounded in research, and free to UW departments, faculty, and graduate students.

Consultations begin with the questions that you bring to CIDR. Starting with your questions, CIDR staff can help you explore the issues systematically, identify relevant resources, and assist you as you plan and assess your teaching. CIDR consultants are aware of the many demands on your time, disciplinary distinctions, and the importance of departmental contexts and requirements; we focus our time together on finding practical solutions that are tailored to your teaching context.

The extent of a consultation with CIDR varies in response to your needs. A consultation might entail a single meeting focused on a specific teaching or learning question, or it might be a quarter-long series of meetings revolving around a longer-term project such as creating a new course or revamping the department's curriculum.

Confidentiality is an important part of the way we work. If you ask a CIDR consultant to help you gather feedback from your students, for example, that feedback belongs to you and you alone. We do not report the names of faculty or TAs who request consultations, and we do not cite examples of faculty or TA work without permission. (Participation in some campus-wide programs such as the TA Conference and the ITA Program is documented so that graduate students can receive appropriate credit for participation.)

CIDR's approach emphasizes instructors' expertise and ownership of the courses they teach. CIDR consultants are investigators in a partnership with a particular instructor or program, attempting to find the answers to their instructional questions.

CIDR staff draw on insights gleaned from teaching and learning research, including more than 20 years of facilitating classroom-based research here at UW, to inform our consultations with UW instructors. Because we appreciate how busy you are, we distill the lessons learned from research on teaching and learning and highlight the strategies that are relevant to your needs and feasible in your teaching context.

We see ourselves as classroom researchers gathering data that will be useful for helping instructors make decisions about their teaching. This research perspective limits and describes our involvement. We are data collectors, analyzers, and interpreters; we are not classroom evaluators. We focus on helping instructors translate their concerns and data into concrete goals and strategies for change.

If you are interested in exploring teaching and learning questions on your own, you can start by viewing the Resources section of our web site, and you can also see what teaching and learning Events are coming up at UW.