LTA Summer Showcase: Teaching that Connects
LTA Summer Showcase - Teaching that Connects
The Learning, Teaching & Assessment (LTA) Team and Sustainability Education are delighted to announce a Summer Showcase in TU Dublin Tallaght. This event features a keynote from Virna Rossi on connecting with your students. This is followed by a hands-on LTA Workshop on steps you can take to foster trust, belonging, accountability, and engagement in your classes. There will also be a sustainability scavenger hunt and the opportunity to exchange ideas with colleagues in informal roundtable practitioner conversations.
Schedule
Venue: TU Dublin Tallaght Campus
Date: Monday 8 June 2026
Times: 10am to 3.15pm (inc. coffee on arrival from 9.30am, mid-morning coffee, and lunch)
- 9:30am – 10:00am: Registration and Breakfast
- 10:00am – 11:00am: Keynote from Virna Rossi: Connecting with Your Students
- 11:00am - 11.15am: Coffee break
- 11:20am - 12:30pm: LTA Workshop. Enhancing Students Participation in your Classes
- 12:30am – 1:15pm: Sustainability Scavenger Hunt
- 1:15pm – 2:00pm: Lunch
- 2:00pm – 3:00pm: Practitioner Conversations
- 3:00pm – 3:15pm: Overview of LTA events for 2026-27
- 3:15pm: Close
Keynote: Connecting with Your Students, Virna Rossi
Building Community and a Support Culture: Connecting with Students from the Start
In this keynote, Virna Rossi will explore what it really means to connect with our students in higher education, particularly in increasingly diverse and complex learning environments. Drawing on ideas and international case studies from Chapters 2 and 3 of her book Inclusive Learning Design in Higher Education (Rossi, 2023), Virna will discuss how connection begins before ‘content delivery’.
Using the lens of intentional hospitality, the presentation will explore how we can design inclusive starts to our modules through needs analysis, orientation and community-building practices. Virna will share practical ways academics can get to know who their students are, better understand their contexts and needs, and create a sense of trust and mattering from the outset.
Together, attendees will reflect on questions such as: How can we find out the needs of the students in our cohorts before and at the start of the course? How can we set up inclusive orientation activities to support transition into our courses? And what support systems can we put in place to build community and foster a culture of support and participation?
The presentation will draw on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) evidence base in these areas, but combine research, reflective practice and practical examples from different international contexts.
This keynote will offer ideas that you can adopt and/or adapt to your own professional contexts to enhance student sense of belonging, engagement, participation and ultimately their learning.
Speaker Biography
Virna Rossi is an Associate Professor and PGCert in Creative Education Course Leader at Ravensbourne University London. She is a PFHEA, a National Teaching Fellow and on the SEDA Roll of Honour. Virna has worked in education since 1999 across a range of settings and has been teaching and leading in teacher education since 2009. Her work focuses on inclusive learning design and assessment, supporting educators to translate inclusive values into practical choices that help diverse students succeed. She is the author of Inclusive Learning Design in Higher Education, and her latest Routledge book, Designing Impactful PGCert in Higher Education Courses: A Practical Guide for Staff Development, is due to be published in June 2026.
Workshop: Enhancing Student Participation in your Classes
Agreeing Expectations for Learning, Participation and Classroom Culture
Delivered by LTA Academic Developers Conor Mellon and Dolores McManus
The opening weeks of a module often shape how students participate, engage, and understand their place in a learning community. This interactive workshop explores how lecturers can set the scene for learning in ways that are clear, relational, and inclusive.
Drawing on work around relational pedagogy, we will consider how expectations around learning, participation, communication, and classroom culture can be collaboratively articulated. Through discussion and practical activities, participants will reflect on how small choices in the early stages of a module can help foster trust, belonging, accountability, and engagement.
By the end of the session, participants will have:
- Reflected on how early interactions shape the tone and culture of a module.
- Explored relational approaches to discussing learning, participation, and classroom expectations.
- Considered practical ways to foster trust, belonging, and shared responsibility with students.
- Identified small changes they might make in the opening weeks of teaching.
Sustainability Scavenger Hunt
Do you know about all the interesting and unusual sustainability initiatives on the the TU Dublin Tallaght campus? This scavenger hunt will see small teams traversing the campus to find out what's available and perhaps to learn more about sustainability generally along the way. There will be a prize for the first team home!
Practitioner Conversations
These round-table-based discussions provide an informal and easy opportunity for TU Dublin staff to discuss any aspect of their teaching, learning and assessment practice; their areas of interest for future innovations; and the challenges with which they feel they need support.
We are asking all staff to come along to the showcase to contribute to these conversations. There is no need to prepare any slides or present to the whole room. You will be assigned to a table where you will share your experience, or simply listen to the experiences of others.
Consider, for example, the following:
- You might have made a point of knowing your students' names and welcome them to your lecture, and you've noticed that this helps to engage your class.
- Maybe you have instituted a new approach to group work or peer assessment or active learning and would like to share your experiences.
- Perhaps you feel you need advice on how to encourage students to work collaboratively.
- Maybe you and your students are enjoying using one of the University’s licensed tools (Vevox, MS-Whiteboard, Adobe Express etc) to create connection?
- Perhaps you're concerned about how your students are using GenAI rather than engaging with each other, or with you as their lecturer.
- What about sustainability? Do you have advice for colleagues on how you embed this important topic (and TU Dublin Graduate Attribute) into your teaching?
We want you to use this opportunity to share your practice, your experience, your ideas and your concerns in our table-based conversations. You will not need to present to the whole room, only speak in your group. You do not need to prepare any slides.
Register to Attend
When registering, please indicate how you would like to participate in the Practitioner Conversations session. Do you have something you'd like to share (no slides needed), or would you just like to join the conversation?