Teaching Awards

Bauer Family Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award

Recognizes a faculty member for excellence in teaching at the undergraduate level.

Award recipients receive a  $500 award.

2024 Winner

Keith Green
Assistant Teaching Professor

A long-time adjunct professor who joined Illinois Tech in 2004 and who recently transitioned to assistant teaching professor, Keith Green has been and remains dedicated to the Illinois Tech student experience. He is unquestionably an exceptional teacher. His courses are the first to fill, they have the longest waitlists, and they lead to the most number of pleas for the humanities department to open up more seats. Green’s evaluations during this period put him in the top of the faculty in terms of
student opinion of his courses and of him as a teacher. Since becoming an assistant teaching professor, Green has also devoted his efforts to his teaching and department affairs. He’s played a role in curriculum development, program evaluation, and assessment.

Board of Trustees Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher Award

Recognizes a faculty member who has made exceptional contributions to the teaching of undergraduate students; who has generously shared time and talent with undergraduate students; and who has demonstrated special attention to the well-being of undergraduate students in and out of the classroom.

Award recipients receive a  $5,000 award.

2024 Winner

Michael Glynn
Associate Professor

Michael Glynn, a graduate of the College of Architecture and a successful architect and real estate developer, has been teaching in the college for decades—first on an
adjunct basis and now as a member of the teaching faculty and as the college’s first-ever professional development officer. For the last several years, Glynn has co-directed our second-year design sequence, which means he has co-developed the curriculum, co-manages more than 100 students and seven faculty, and teaches in the program. Glynn is a great teacher, because he brings his lived experience to bear in teaching. When his students work on a project in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood, which they do every fall in their second year, Glynn enriches the project with his deep personal knowledge of the neighborhood, in which he was raised. In the second year, our students learn the fundamentals of building construction. Again, from the multiple perspectives of his own background as a construction laborer, an architect, and a developer, Glynn is able to convey information and experience to students that other faculty simply can’t. And the students love him. Glynn routinely is one of our most popular instructors. Not only do they value his deep knowledge of all aspects of the design and construction industry, they remark on how clearly and engagingly he conveys the information; how he is able to translate complexity—whether in philosophy or construction methods—into clear, easily understood examples; and how energetically he approaches every subject. He is approachable, engaging, rigorous, challenging, and patient. And he goes above and beyond. Beyond writing curriculum, translating the language of architecture into English, and injecting students directly into the process of making buildings, Glynn is at his very best in the one-on-one, tutorial instruction that lies at the center of architectural education. He has a way of drawing students into the center of every story or problem statement, giving them purchase in a landscape of variables that can otherwise be intimidating. 

Michael J. Graff Award for Innovation in Teaching

The purpose of this award is to honor specific teaching and/or advising innovations. It recognizes teaching and/or advising practices that are designed to improve student learning and success. Examples of technologies that could be included in the criteria are artificial or machine intelligence, computer-assisted instruction, mobile learning, convergence, big data, online/cloud/web-based, multimedia, etc.

Innovative teaching is defined broadly and may include the use of new instructional technologies, the use of traditional technologies in creative ways, novel approaches to instruction, and new ways to engage students in the learning process.

The award is intended to recognize and disseminate teaching practices based on the:

• Originality of the teaching strategy or how it was implemented
• Impact on student learning and/or engagement
• Potential to adopt the teaching strategy (or key elements thereof) within or across disciplines

Innovative advising is defined broadly and is focused on the contributions that help students define and achieve their academic or research goals.

Examples of activities to be considered include but are not limited to:

• Advising on course selection
• Research focus and management
• Long-term career goals
• Personal development

Award recipients receive a $5,000 award; a $5,000 award to the winner's academic department, which is intended to encourage innovation in teaching and advising; and $2,500 to the award winner to enable the hiring of a student assistant to enable the implementation of the award winner's innovations.

 2024 Winner

Alexander F. A. Rabanal
Adjunct Professor

An adjunct professor, research fellow, and the associate director of Law Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, Alexander F. A. Rabanal has brought access to technology and justice together as a vital but overlooked area of legal education. Through his work, he teaches courses that introduce students to the multifaceted roles that technology plays in the legal world, helping students understand how to use technology to serve their future clients. He also supervises a group of Chicago-Kent students who offer assistance to self-representing litigants at the Self-Help Resource Center at the Richard J. Daley Center in Chicago and supports public-interest-minded students in the college’s public interest law certificate program. A thoughtful teacher, Rabanal is perhaps more attuned to our students’ views of the profession and their career hopes. His students speak of him as the person who kept them in mind for opportunities and who helped open doors for them.

The Center for Learning Innovation Digital Teaching Innovation Award

This award recognizes and celebrates faculty who demonstrate Illinois Tech’s commitment to its culture of innovation and excellence with digital innovation in the classroom. Using digital technology, recipients of this award provide an unparalleled inclusive student experiences that enhances student learning, promotes student engagement, builds community, and positively impacts teaching quality.

Any faculty member (full-time, part-time) who teaches or taught at least one course over the reviewing period is eligible. The course modality may be in person, hybrid, or online. The course must innovatively incorporate, use, or re-imagine digital technology including, but not limited to, proprietary technology or Open Educational Resources (OER) in such a way that demonstrably:

• Enhances student learning
• Promotes best practices in student engagement
• Contributes toward an inclusive community at Illinois Tech
• Positively impacts teaching quality

Award recipients receive a $1,500 award: $1,000 will go toward the budget to expand and improve the digital teaching innovation over the next fiscal year, and the remaining $500 is a personal cash award. Over the next academic year, the Center for Learning Innovation will promote the recipients on its website and nominees may work with the Center for Learning Innovation as a resource to disseminate best practices.

2024 Winner

Hannah Ringler
Assistant Teaching Professor

Hannah Ringler joined the Department of Humanities in fall 2020 as a writing tutor, and she transitioned to assistant teaching professor and director of Writing Across the Curriculum in 2022. Ringler is an innovative teacher, adapting her courses to include data and computational literacy and communication. She is an innovative practitioner, exploiting technologies to support new and scalable approaches to humanities disciplines. And she is an innovative administrator and thought leader through her work as director of Communication Across the Curriculum as well as generative artificial intelligence initiatives on campus. Ringler offers students the ideal background of rhetoric, computer science, and research design, and she has directed her expertise at fundamentally re-envisioning our writing-intensive HUM 200 courses. She has played a lead role in developing a set of HUM 200 courses explicitly tied to the area of computer science and rhetoric around the evaluation of large data sets. Traditionally, the course has been capped at 20 students because of the communication-intensive nature of it. However, Ringler has used online Canvas tools and innovative scaffolded group work that is digitally maintained to scale this course to 60-80 students with the addition of just one teaching assistant. The department plans to use her approach to HUM 200 as a model for designing other sections of HUM 200, including one based on design and another based on ethics, but all following the broad outline and approach that she designed for writing and rhetoric. With the advent of generative AI, Ringler served on the academic year committee to consider the policies and practices that would need to be developed for this new disruptive technology. She brought emergent research in this area as it applied to communication, pedagogy, and information literacy. When the committee completed its work in spring 2023, she took the initiative for form a summer working group to write a series of guidelines for faculty to consider in order to address, incorporate, and respond to generative AI in the classroom.

John W. Rowe Excellence in Teaching Award 

Recognizes a faculty member from a group that has been selected by their college or school to receive its college/school awards for excellence in teaching at either the undergraduate or graduate level.

Award recipients receive a $1,500 award.

2024 Winner

Joanne Howard
Industry Associate Professor of Public Administration

Joanne Howard has devoted her academic life to utilizing education to promote intergenerational mobility. She has taught an impressive number of courses that focus on management principles in the nonprofit sector. Her courses cover the basic principles of leadership, policy design, ethics and professional responsibility, social capital, and the community. Because of the increasing importance and relevance of institutions worldwide in supporting aging and growing populations, Stuart is convinced that public administration is an important growth area, and as such, has recently developed a STEM-version of the program. Howard is a significant contributor to this effort. And, most importantly, Howard’s teaching efforts are outstanding. Her average instructor rating and course rating are nearly 5/5. Howard is an excellent example of the type of professors Stuart aims to have educate its students: someone with excellent academic credentials combined with real world experiences in their field. She is currently serving as the Greater Chicago Chapter president of the American Society for Public Administration, and she has also served on a number of nonprofit boards. Her executive experience provides valuable content for her courses.

College Excellence in Teaching Awards 

Each college at Illinois Tech chooses a teaching award winner who was subsequently considered for the university’s Excellence in Teaching Award.

2024 Winners

• Armour College of Engineering: Javad Abbasian
• College of Computing: Matthew Bauer 
• Stuart School of Business: Joel Goldhar
• College of Architecture: Alphonso Peluso
• Chicago-Kent College of Law: Jenifer Robbins
• Lewis College of Science and Letters: Lindsay Sheehan
• Institute of Design: Martin Thaler