The University Teaching and Advising Awards process is set up to make sure we are rewarding the kind of teaching the university needs to see, which has meant asking for types of evidence of effectiveness that lines up with the research on learning that universities like FSU have done in recent years.
Everything needed for a submission is linked below. The responsibility for completing an application packet lies with the nominee. Nominations themselves are submitted by a person or persons, with no “auto-nominations” via student evaluations.
Below are details on the various parts of this process
Our amazing faculty make FSU an outstanding place to learn. To honor the remarkable teaching and learning that take place here, we request nominations for the following teaching and advising awards. We invite nominations from students, alumni, faculty, administrators, and community members. Self-nominations are also welcome. Regardless of academic department or rank, all full-time faculty who teach are eligible to be nominated (see below for specifics) in the following categories:
Foundational Course Excellence (undergraduate)
- Excellent introductory courses are essential for building strong foundations for the rest of our students’ education. Foundational courses are lower-division and usually have high enrollment in each section (or across many sections).
- This award honors faculty who effectively and consistently provide students with the tools they need to succeed in downstream courses and in their careers.
Outstanding Teaching in the Major (undergraduate)
- This award honors faculty who teach outstanding courses in which students develop disciplinary expertise in their major.
- Faculty teaching upper-division courses in any major are eligible.
Outstanding Undergraduate Advising
- This award honors faculty or A&P staff whose position consists mainly of advising undergraduate students.
Outstanding Graduate Teaching
- This award honors faculty who help graduate students develop their disciplinary expertise, whether in formal coursework or through advising theses, dissertations, recitals, etc.
Community Engaged Teaching (graduate and undergraduate)
- FSU is proud to hold a Carnegie Community Engagement Classification.
- This award honors faculty who teach exemplary courses in which students engage with the broader community through service learning, community writing, public scholarship, or similar. Community partners may also nominate faculty for this award.
Inclusive Teaching and Mentoring (graduate and undergraduate)
- This award honors faculty who teach courses in which the learning environment is explicitly designed to be inclusive and equitable so that all students can flourish. These faculty attend to both course design and classroom dynamics, leveraging students’ strengths and resources while reducing or eliminating opportunity gaps.
- This award may also honor faculty who serve as role models or mentor students beyond the classroom.
Innovation in Teaching (graduate and undergraduate)
- This award honors faculty who have invested considerable time and effort into transforming the learning experiences they provide for their students.
- Nominees should be able to describe the transformation of their course over time and provide evidence of improved course design and teaching practices that resulted in better learning experiences for students.
Excellence in Online Teaching (graduate and undergraduate)
- This award recognizes outstanding and innovative teaching in distance learning courses.
- To be eligible, nominees must have developed a distance learning course that has passed a Quality Matters review or been certified through the FSU Online Quality Initiative.
To be eligible for an advising award, undergraduate advising nominees must have advised at FSU for a minimum of one full year. To be eligible for a teaching award, faculty need to have taught at FSU for a minimum of two years and cannot have won a teaching award in the last five years. If you nominate someone who meets the eligibility criteria for a teaching award and has previously received a University Teaching Award in 2018 or before, they may also be eligible to apply for the Distinguished Teacher Award. A list of past award winners can be found on the University Teaching Award Recipients page.
Nominations are due by midnight, November 1st, 2024. Submit nominations.
Nominees will be contacted with instructions for application.
Below are the instructions that the nominee will receive if they are nominated for a teaching category:
The prize for this award is $2000 (less the standard deductions for income tax and social security). Please note that if you’ve won a teaching award in the last five years, you’re not eligible to apply at this time. You also must be in a full-time teaching position to be eligible. If you are nominated for more than one award, you may apply for only one award.
To apply, submit your one-page statement and supporting evidence, as outlined below, by 11:59 p.m. on January 26, 2025. Please submit all the documents as one pdf with a file name in the following format: Category_Year_LastName (e.g., InnovationInTeaching-Grad_2025_Diaz). The file can be electronic documents combined into one pdf or a scan of a hardcopy packet.
Submit your application PDF.
Application Submission Guidelines:
Create a title page with your name, department/school/college, and the award category for which you are applying (including whether undergraduate or graduate).
Statement: In one page, describe how your teaching is exemplary in the category for which you have been nominated. The following questions are meant to provide a starting place if you would like one, but they are not meant to limit the content of your statement.
- Foundational Course Excellence: How do you identify and help students to build the foundational knowledge and skills that they need to succeed in subsequent courses? How do you create a classroom environment that helps motivate students to learn?
- Outstanding Teaching in the Major: What kind(s) of disciplinary expertise and ways of thinking do you help students develop in your course(s)? How should they grow intellectually, professionally, and personally during the time they have with you? What methods or strategies do you use to help them develop in the ways you value?
- Outstanding Graduate Advising: How do you help students to become experts in the discipline during the time they have with you? What methods do you use to make your graduate courses effective? How do you help prepare students for, and help them to pursue, opportunities in their field? How do you mentor or advise them, including by supporting their success in writing and defending theses, dissertations, and/or other high-stakes graduate work (performances, internships, publications, etc.)?
- Community Engaged Teaching: How did you build mutually beneficial community partnerships through which students could engage in meaningful learning experiences? How did students develop through their work to benefit the community? How did you design the experience so that students could accomplish course learning goals through their work outside the classroom?
- Inclusive Teaching and Mentoring: What does it mean to you to practice inclusivity? How do you approach this practice intentionally in your teaching and/or mentoring? What impact have you seen on your students (and yourself)?
- Innovation in Teaching: How have you worked on improving your course over time to enhance student learning? How do you plan to keep improving/enhancing your course to help students thrive/learn?
- Excellence in Online Teaching: How have you prepared to teach online? What innovations in technology or course design specific to an online environment have you engaged in? How do you make connections with your online students?
Evidence: Create a packet of the following materials to support your statement. The entire evidence packet should be as concise as possible.
- The latest syllabus for one applicable course.
- A one-page description of your goals for student learning in that course, and an explanation of how you gather evidence of students' learning throughout the course.
- The learning goals can relate to knowledge, skills, students' personal or professional growth, etc. (Please don’t copy and paste the objectives from the syllabus.)
- The explanation of how you gather evidence can include both formal and informal methods that you use to observe, assess, or attempt to measure students’ learning and development.
- A one-page description of three activities, assignments, projects, or other learning experiences for students and an explanation of how each one supports your goals for student learning in the course where you use it. At least one of these three example activities must be from the course for which you provided a syllabus. After the description and explanation, please attach the relevant materials that students receive (e.g., assignment sheets, class activity handouts, fieldwork descriptions, experiment instructions, etc.).
- An explanation of how you have used feedback from students to adjust, enhance, or improve your course. This may be feedback they gave you directly, or feedback you gleaned from observing their performance and/or evaluating their work. After the explanation, you may attach your student evaluations (optional—see 4a and 4b below), and/or any other student feedback you would like to share (e.g., mid-semester feedback, survey results, students’ work, etc.)
- If you choose to include student evaluations, please limit it to no more than two semesters within the past three years. (So, for example, it would be fine to include evaluations from Fall 2022 and Fall 2021.) Include only the summary report, not copies of evaluation forms.
- If you choose to include student comments, please submit the full set of comments from the original report rather than a selection of comments.
Optional:
- Provide up to three testimonials/letters of recommendation from colleagues or community partners.
- Include a one-page explanation and, where possible, provide evidence of collaboration or wider influence. Are you helping others to enhance their teaching? Are you collaborating with colleagues to revise a course or otherwise improve learning experiences for students? Do you do classroom research or present at education conferences in your field?
Below are the instructions that the nominee will receive if they are nominated in the advising category:
The prize for this award is $2000 (less the standard deductions for income tax and social security). Please note that if you have won an advising award in the last five years, you are not eligible to apply at this time. You also must be in a full-time advising position to be eligible.
To apply, please complete the short survey and submit your required application materials, as outlined below, by 11:59 p.m. on January 26, 2025. Please submit all documents as one pdf using the following naming format: Category_Year_LastName (e.g., OutstandingUGAdvising_2024_Diaz). The file can be electronic documents combined into one PDF or a scan of a hardcopy packet.
Submit your application PDF.
Application Submission Guidelines:
Evidence: Create a packet of the following materials in support of your nomination. The entire evidence packet should be as concise as possible.
A title page with your name, department/school/college, and the award category to which you are applying.
In one page, provide an academic advising philosophy prepared by the candidate addressing each of the four following questions.
- Why am I an academic advisor?
- What advising approaches and/or theories do I use with students?
- How do I work to fulfill the stated mission and goals of my institution and academic unit?
- How do I know that I have made a difference in the lives of my students?
A narrative addressing the impact your academic advising practice (e.g., degree planning, course/major selection, etc.) has had on student experience and success.
- Must include evidence corroborating your narrative. Evidence can include direct feedback from students such as student satisfaction survey data, and/or qualitative information (e.g., personal notes, emails, etc.).
A narrative with evidence of the impact of student engagement outreach/campaigns including, but not limited to interventions with at-risk populations, enrichment for high-performing populations, academic skills workshops, career exploration/development, etc.
- Must include the campaign/initiative/program/event’s intent and design.
- Must include program evaluation/assessment, particularly evidence of an improved quantitative metric such as first-year retention, four-year graduation rate, lower D/F/W rates, lower excess credit hours/hours-to-degree, decreased number of map holds, lower attrition from major improving time-to-degree, etc.
A bulleted list of involvement and engagement within the FSU community (e.g., committee work, sponsorship of student groups, volunteering at campus events; etc.) and professional growth activities and/or academic advising scholarship (e.g., involvement in a graduate program, conference attendance, published research/articles/blogs, webinars, etc.). Include a brief one-to-two-sentence description for each item.
Up to three letters of recommendation from supervisor(s), colleagues, and/or campus partners.
If you have received a University Teaching Award more than five years prior to this year, you are also eligible to apply for the Distinguished Teacher Award. The successful nominee for the Distinguished Teacher Award must document continued excellence in teaching for the years since receipt of the original University Teaching Award.
Here is the information to add to your application packet to apply for the Distinguished Teacher Award:
- Make sure you list both the initial award you are applying for on your title page (e.g. Foundational Course Excellence, Outstanding Teaching in the Major) PLUS “Distinguished Teacher Award.”
- Make the answers to the following questions #5, unless you are answering one or more of the questions in the Optional Section. In that case, the Distinguished Teacher Award information should be #6 or #7. (If your initial award choice is the Outstanding Teaching in the Major Award, these will be the same questions, so we ask that you elaborate on your original answers.)
- What kind(s) of disciplinary expertise and ways of thinking do you help students to develop in your course(s)?
- How should they grow intellectually, professionally, and personally during the time they have with you?
- What methods or strategies do you use to help them develop in the ways you value?
- The answers for the above questions should be no more than one page in length.
- You may also add separate information to this section up to a length of five pages. However, this is not required.
Teaching & Advising Awards Committee
Originally, the Teaching and Advising Awards were the result of Legislation outlined in Chancellor’s Memorandum #95-01 and CM-C-01.00-04/96 which included the University awards allocation and instructions for an annual report.
The University Teaching and Advising Awards Committee is appointed by the Provost. Members of the committee must be prior recipients of either a university teaching award or university advising award. Appointment to the committee is for a three-year term. The Provost appoints the committee chair for a one-year term. The committee chair may serve additional terms as chair. The committee should preferably be composed of at least 11 faculty members and four students. The four students would ideally be comprised of two undergraduate students and two graduate students. The committee should be appointed in September and functions year-round with primary responsibilities during Spring Term. Awards are given at the Faculty Awards Ceremony held in April of each year. The Provost presents the awards.
Funding for these awards consists of $59,500 made up of 26 awards at $2,000 each covering undergraduate teaching and advising (18 total) and graduate teaching (8), and one Distinguished Teacher Award of $7,500.
The committee determines the criteria and procedures for selection of recipients.
Timeline and Awards Process
November 1, 2024, midnight
Deadline for Nominations
TBA, via Zoom
Preliminary University Committee Meeting/Orientation
January 26, 2025, midnight
Deadline for Nominees to make submissions to the University Committee
Mid-January to mid-March, 2025
Committee members read and evaluate submissions
Mid-March, 2025
Recipient Notification
April 22, 2025
Faculty Awards Ceremony
Award Details
The following list of colleges and schools represent individuals who have received a Distinguished Teacher Award. To be eligible for this award, the faculty member must have received a University Teaching Award at least five years prior to being nominated for the Distinguished Teacher Award. The successful nominee must document continued excellence in teaching for the five years since receipt of the original University Teaching Award. This honor includes a $7500 award funded by Florida State University.
The University Teaching Awards program recognizes faculty for excellence in undergraduate and graduate teaching. Recipients must be outstanding in the many aspects of teaching which contribute to successful teaching and learning. This is a student-oriented award with nominations submitted by students and alumni. Each recipient receives a $2000 award. Contact the Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs for additional information.
Recipients of University Undergraduate Advising Awards have been nominated by students who have been beneficiaries of their services. These individuals dedicate their time to insuring that students receive the best possible advice related to their courses and their career choices. The recipient receives a $2000 award. Contact the Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs for additional information.
The Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor award is the highest honor faculty can bestow on a colleague. To be eligible for this award, the faculty member must be a tenured professor, have been at the University for at least ten years, and have achieved true distinction nationally and/or internationally in his discipline or profession. Although scholarly distinction is the primary qualification, emphasis is placed on the evidence of quality teaching including the directing of graduate research, and service to the University and academic community. Contact the Office of the President for additional information.
The Developing Scholar Awards are given to mid-career, associate professor level faculty to support their research programs. The recipients receive a one-time award of $10,000. Contact the Office of the Vice President for Research for additional information.
The Distinguished University Scholar Awards program is open to non-tenured or non-tenure seeking employees who are actively engaged in research and/or scholarly activity. A one-time award of $10,000 and the distinction of using the title, Distinguished University Scholar, while at Florida State University is presented. Contact the Office of the Vice President for Research for additional information.
The Distinguished Research Professor Awards acknowledge outstanding research and/or creative activity at the professor level with a one-time award of $10,000 and the distinction of using the title, Distinguished Research Professor, while at Florida State University or until that honor is surpassed by a higher university award, such as the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Award. Contact the Office of the Vice President for Research for additional information.
The Honors Thesis Mentor Award recognizes a faculty member who has been outstanding in his service to the students in the Honors Program. Contact the University Honors Program office for additional information.
The Graduate Faculty Mentor Awards recognize faculty members who have been outstanding in their service to graduate students. Contact the Graduate School for additional information.
The Undergraduate Research Mentor Award recognizes faculty commitment to undergraduate research. Recipients, nominated by students, demonstrate a substantive and long-term involvement in undergraduate research. One award is reserved for faculty participating in the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP). Winners receive a $2,000 award funded by the FSU Student Foundation. Contact the Office of Undergraduate Research for additional information.