Information for Faculty about Kite and Key

We are now rostering Kite and Key instructors for next year.  

Faculty interested in learning more about these exciting courses will find full details in our Resource Hub for Instructors, including a recent Zoom video recording of reflections on the Kite and Key teaching experience. Here is what two of them had to say: 

“Teaching Kite has been one of the most rewarding teaching experiences I've had in recent years. ...It forces you to ask new questions instead of relying on the ones you've asked a hundred times before…. Kite reminds both students and instructors that learning is not a fixed body of knowledge we possess, it's an ongoing practice.” 

On tech-free classrooms: “Students have embraced it far more enthusiastically than I expected. I almost never see phones. I don't see computers. It turns out that when people don't have their screens in front of their faces, they talk to each other, they listen to each other.” 

      – Javier Samper Vendrell (FIGS) 

“The thing I dislike about teaching is writing tests, giving tests, grading tests, arguing about the grades, and that has been cleared out of my teaching life for this semester completely. I'm focused entirely on the pedagogy of conveying ideas, coming up with fun ways to illustrate them in physical examples, … sending individual tables up to the board [to] work a problem. …Those kinds of things have occupied my thinking. And … when a student shows up in my office hours, … it is because they actually want to know something.” 

     – David Brainard (Psychology) 

Faculty should speak with their department chairs about participating in the teaching team of Kite or Key, and reach out to Andi Johnson, Director of the First-Year Experience, or Jed Esty, College Curriculum Lead, with any questions.