Professional services
At The Discussion Project, our team knows that improving instruction requires risk-taking, practice, and feedback. We provide customized and supportive instructional consultation and coaching to help you improve your instruction and your students’ learning.
Improve teaching and learning through coaching and feedback.
Instructional coaching
One-on-one coaching for designing discussion plans and implementing them successfully.
Improvement in any skill comes with practice and feedback. Every top-flight athlete has a coach. Trying out new discussion pedagogy techniques can be challenging. That is why The Discussion Project offers support through instructional coaching. A typical coaching cycle with a professional instructional coach includes co-planning a discussion, a classroom observation, and a feedback session. We help you design and implement discussion, and then reflect to improve over time.
Team consultation & coaching
Embedded professional development, and customized learning for teams and departments.
Often instructional teams or entire departments choose to work on pedagogy together and need expertise, support, consultation, and facilitation. The Discussion Project’s curriculum and instruction experts can work with your group to customize professional learning opportunities and facilitate collaborative sessions. This offers personalized support directly aligned with your team and departmental needs, but can also grow and evolve as the team’s needs change over time.
Collaborative classroom visits
A supportive system for improving discussion in your institution’s classrooms.
The Discussion Project team, through a non-evaluative system of classroom observation and feedback sessions, can provide your instructors and leaders with expert guidance on how to improve discussions. Collaborative Classroom Visits (CCV) also create a culture of open practice and collegiality around teaching and learning. The process involves training on how to provide non-evaluative feedback and is responsive to the requests of the colleague being observed.
TESTIMONIALS
What our professional learners say

Carey McAndrews
Professor, Urban Planning, UW-Madison

Rhonda Reinholtz
Psychology, UW-Madison
“I would recommend the CCV to anyone interested in improving their teaching! For me it had two primary strengths: For one thing, just knowing that observers would be in my classroom and then going through the experience led me to new insights about my teaching — it was a sort of catalyst that caused me to think about my class not only through my own eyes, but also through the perspective of someone in the class. I also realized more clearly what my own goals were and the ways in which I was and wasn’t meeting them. In addition to gaining a sharpened perspective on my own teaching, I gained the observers’ perspectives on the class — they were able to notice and document aspects of the students’ engagement and experience that I would not have seen without their feedback and they provided me with their own reactions which also enriched what I learned from the process. I would honestly characterize the CCV as an enlightening experience of my teaching and I can’t imagine anyone not benefiting significantly from going through it. “
Ready to have a discussion?
Submit your information for a personalized course walk-through with The Discussion Project team to better understand how it can support the growth of your instructors, departments, and institution.