About the event
The CU.til Louvain Teaching Innovation Days offer a series of immersive, hands-on workshops that go beyond traditional presentations and lectures. These active learning experiences combine practical tools, peer exchange, experimentation, reflection, and learning by doing — giving participants the opportunity not only to discover innovative approaches, but to apply them directly through concrete activities, simulations, collaborative work, and guided practice.
Topics covered
Workshops address key dimensions of contemporary higher education teaching, including:
- Student engagement and motivation
- Problem-based learning
- Visual communication through sketchnoting
- Facilitation of dialogue around sensitive topics
- Inclusive and anti-racist pedagogical practices
Who should attend
The event is designed for educators who wish to refresh their teaching methods, develop new facilitation skills, foster student engagement, or explore innovative pedagogical approaches — and who value actionable ideas and professional exchange over theoretical discussion alone.
How to participate
Participants may choose to attend individual workshops or combine several sessions to create their own personalised professional development pathway.
Onsite workshops at UCLouvain
14 September - 14:00 - 17:00
Are you concerned about declining student attendance, limited engagement, or the challenge of preparing students for increasingly complex professional environments?
Problem-Based Learning (PBL) offers a powerful alternative to traditional lecture-based teaching by placing students at the centre of the learning process. Through authentic problems and collaborative inquiry, PBL can increase motivation and engagement while helping students develop essential professional skills such as teamwork, communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
This highly interactive workshop combines theory and practice. Participants will first explore key tutoring and facilitation techniques through simulations and practical exercises, learning how to guide discussions, foster engagement, and support student autonomy. In the second part, participants will learn how to design effective PBL cases and begin developing their own materials with support from peers and facilitators.
By the end of the workshop, participants will have the tools and confidence to facilitate a PBL session and design a problem-based learning activity adapted to their own teaching context.
Speaker: Viktoria Nagy, UCLouvain
15 September - 13:00 - 16:00
Would you like to captivate your students? Make them more motivated? Then explore the sketchnoting, an inventive method that combines sketch and notes.
From simple illustrations, reinforce key messages, stimulate the memorization process, encourage your students to participate and simplify complicated concepts. No need to be an artist! Sketchnoting is accessible to everyone, where the idea prevails over the perfection of the drawing. A fast, practical and fun must-see workshop!
No prerequisites are required to attend this training, including knowing how to draw.
Participants who wish to draw on a tablet are asked to bring their own. By the end of this training, you will be able to:
- Dare to draw and create simple object sketches;
- Use various lettering, banners, and other elements to enhance your visuals;
- Highlight your drawings;
- Use visual metaphors;
- Utilize basic features for digital sketchnoting.
Speakers: Benoît Raucent, Justine Fromentin, UCLouvain
16 September - 09:00- 13:00
This interactive session introduces Dialogue as a practical and relational approach to supporting difficult conversations in higher education classrooms. While "dialogue" is often referenced in teaching, it is not always clearly defined. In this session, participants will explore dialogue as a way of communicating that goes beyond monologue or debate, creating space for different perspectives to be heard and explored.
Drawing on ongoing work in this area at King’s College London, the session will introduce core dialogic practices, including listening, respect, suspension and voice, to consider how these can support more inclusive and constructive classroom dynamics. Participants will have the opportunity to experience dialogue first-hand through a facilitated activity focused on a contemporary issue relevant to higher education.
The session is designed to be participatory and reflective, offering practical strategies for those interested in embedding dialogue in their own teaching contexts.
Speaker: Emma Taylor, King's College London
16 September - 14:00 - 17:00
In increasingly ethnolinguistically diverse educational settings, there is an ever greater need for academic teaching staff to develop racial literacy in order to create spaces that are welcoming, inclusive and culturally responsive.
Becoming racially literate involves developing an understanding of race as a social construct and an understanding of power, privilege and bias within and beyond educational settings, an awareness and understanding of institutional racism and the impact on racialised students and staff. It also involves developing the language to talk about race and racism and to challenge racist practices.
This interactive session will revisit and build on some key concepts and theories introduced in the CU Til Staff training series session in June 2026 to explore Critical Whiteness Studies, Critical Race Theory in more depth.
Through reflective tasks and activities, participants will be encouraged to interrogate their own privilege and biases, to consider the implications for their own teaching and how to develop anti-racist pedagogies and practices within their educational settings.
Speaker: Christina Richardson, King's College London
Ready to join?
The CU.til Staff Development Festival
This event is part of the CU.til staff development festival, which brings together a series of interactive workshops designed to support university teachers, educational developers, and academic leaders in addressing key challenges and opportunities in higher education.
