TILL Teaching Innovation Award
The 2025 application period is now open! Learn more and submit your application by October 19, 2025.
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This annual award honors the University of Louisville's outstanding instructors who demonstrate a commitment to student engagement and learning through their work on one or more innovative teaching practices.
The TILL Teaching Innovation Award highlights the TILL's goals of (1) implementation and promotion of evidence-based teaching practices and (2) fostering student engagement, learning, and success.
Are you someone who successfully innovates in your teaching? Have you worked to engage students through creative methods or cutting-edge teaching practices? Have you experimented with a new teaching method and found it increased student learning? If so, please consider applying for the TILL Teaching Innovation Award.
Complete information, including award guidelines and requested application materials, is provided in the accordion tabs below.
The award recognizes the importance of teaching excellence among UofL instructors and offers individual recognition to those who explore new methods for fostering learning and improving teaching. Award winners each will receive a $500 cash award. The 2025 TILL Teaching Innovation Award will include innovations implemented during the 2024-2025 academic year.
The TILL Teaching Innovation Award Committee will evaluate the applications based on the strength of evidence of the following criteria:
- The application materials should provide sufficient evidence to demonstrate the significance and effectiveness of the nominee’s innovations.
- The application materials should provide a clear explanation of how the teaching innovation met a need or addressed a challenge in learning.
- Additional consideration will be given to applications who demonstrate the following:
- Creativity in the teaching innovation and/or its implementation
- High potential for other instructors to adopt the teaching strategy (or components of it) within and across diverse academic disciplines
- Extent the instructor has shared the innovation with others (SoTL research submissions or publications, internal or external presentations, etc.)
- The TILL Innovation Award is open to all eligible faculty, staff and graduate student instructors regardless of race/ethnicity, national origin, gender, social class, sexual orientation, age and disability.
- All UofL instructors of record (tenured, tenure-track, non-tenure track, part-time lecturers, and graduate student instructors) employed at UofL are eligible.
If a team applies rather than an individual, the team will split the cash award. The team should submit a single application and submit all CVs as a combined PDF.
Winners of the TILL Teaching Innovation Award for the past five years are not eligible to win the TILL Teaching Innovation Award.
For questions regarding this award, please contact John Whitney, Program Coordinator, Sr., john.whitney@louisville.edu via email or 502-852-7623.