TILL Teaching Innovation Award
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.
2025 TILL Teaching Innovation Award Winners
Devin Burke, School of Music
Devin’s teaching innovation reimagines how music history is taught through a multimedia, global timeline that centers music as an embodied and culturally situated human practice. Using an open-access digital platform, Devin created a resource that integrates audio, video, images, maps, and historical context to invite students into a broader and more inclusive understanding of music history.
This project challenges traditional narratives by encouraging students to explore music across time, place, and lived experience. It supports active learning, critical reflection, and empathy, while offering a flexible resource that can be adapted across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.
Sarah Fauque, College of Arts & Sciences
Sarah’s work in Principles of Ecology addresses a challenge many faculty recognize: student frustration and disengagement when quantitative models feel inaccessible. Her innovation reframes ecological equations through an active, multimodal workshop series that combines pre-class videos, visual animations, guided inquiry, and collaborative problem solving.
By breaking complex models into conceptual components and connecting them to real-world ecological processes, Sarah transformed a traditionally intimidating topic into one grounded in curiosity and confidence. Her approach supports quantitative literacy while strengthening students’ conceptual understanding of ecology, and it offers a framework that can be adapted across many disciplines.
Karen Turner, School of Nursing
Karen developed Student Centered Interactive Learning Stations, or SCILS, to support graduate nursing students as they build advanced clinical decision-making skills. This innovation uses coached simulation experiences, guided by experienced faculty, to create psychologically safe learning environments where students can practice, ask questions, and receive formative feedback.
SCILS addresses real challenges in healthcare education, including limited clinical placements, while maintaining high standards for patient-centered care. Karen’s work demonstrates how thoughtful simulation design can promote confidence, competence, and equitable learning experiences, with clear potential for adoption across health sciences and beyond.
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.
Guidelines
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.