We have arranged for a coach bus that will leave at 9am from the Healy Front Gates and head to the Capitol Campus. If you would like to reserve a spot on the bus, you must add this session to your schedule. We will then be in touch with you to confirm.
Note: This session will be offered in person only. At a time of deep political polarization and declining trust across lines of difference, the ability to remain in conversation with those we disagree with has become both more difficult and more essential. Drawing from research-backed methodologies of Resetting the Table, this workshop invites participants to consider how disagreement can be engaged constructively rather than avoided or escalated. Through structured dialogue and guided exercises, participants will exchange perspectives and personal experiences, explore both shared concerns and meaningful differences, and practice foundational communication strategies for navigating moments of tension and misunderstanding. In doing so, the workshop aims to strengthen participants’ capacity to engage across differences of background, viewpoint, and generation while building relationships, trust, learning, and collaboration within the communities and institutions they are part of.
Calago Hipps is the Senior Faculty Developer at CNDLS, where he leads the Georgetown Dialogue Initiative. He also teaches graduate students through American University’s School of Education.
Note: This session will be offered in person only.
Even in an era of widespread AI, there are still many situations—including particular entire courses—where it’s beneficial to exclude this technology from the teaching and learning process. That said, teaching without AI has to mean something different from just doing what we used to do; we need to consider the situation students encounter outside the classroom, as well as ways that AI is shaping what they bring. This will be a practical, discussion-driven workshop for faculty members navigating community building, assignment design, and fostering a commitment to academic integrity in the new educational and technological environment. The session will focus on what learning science says about effective teaching strategies. We’ll cover guidance on AI policies and limitations and biases in detection tools, and provide space to reflect on how AI literacy fits into your teaching goals, even in courses where AI use is discouraged or restricted.
Digital Learning and AI Specialist, Georgetown University
Ella supports faculty at Georgetown by sharing resources and a frame of thought about the role of AI and other digital technologies in education. In her role as the CNDLS digital learning and AI specialist, she facilitates workshops, evaluates new tools and consults with faculty on... Read More →
Assistant Director of Graduate Student and Faculty Programming, Georgetown University
David Ebenbach is the Assistant Director for Graduate Student and Faculty Programming at CNDLS and is an instructor in the Center for Jewish Civilization and the Learning, Design and Technology Program, teaching literature, creative writing, and creativity. He works on a variety of... Read More →
Note: This session will be livestreamed. Over the last two decades, the age profile of U.S. graduate students has undergone a profound transformation, yet campus planning models often rely on outdated assumptions that graduate students are older, independent, and less campus-centered. This session introduces the Graduate Youth Index (GYI), a novel metric designed to measure the growing concentration of students aged 24 and under within graduate education. Using national IPEDS data from 2003–2025, the research demonstrates a significant downward shift in average age, driven by graduate students aged 24 and under. This new archetype often transitions directly from undergraduate study and engages with campus life more like an advanced undergraduate than a mid-career professional.
Participants will understand the macroeconomic, programmatic, and developmental drivers behind this demographic shift.
Attendees will learn how to apply the GYI to their own data to signal when inherited assumptions about space, housing, and services no longer match reality.
The session will provide actionable recommendations for shifting toward high-intensity, flexible learning environments and "age-aware" student support models.
Executive Director of Operations, Capitol Campus, Georgetown University
Nico Hohman currently serves as the Executive Director of Operations at Georgetown University's Capitol Campus in downtown Washington, D.C. Mr. Hohman is a graduate of the University of Florida’s School of Construction Management and a current Master's candidate at Georgetown University... Read More →
Motivation is a key driver of meaningful learning, influencing how students engage, persist, and apply new knowledge and skills. In health professions education - and more broadly across higher education - learners often encounter competing pressures such as grades, performance evaluation, and time constraints that can unintentionally shift attention away from effective learning processes. This session introduces an evidence-informed approach to designing learning environments that better support engagement, skill acquisition, and long-term retention. Grounded in principles from motivation science and attention research, the session translates theory into practical teaching strategies that faculty can apply across classroom and clinical settings. Rather than requiring prior familiarity with specific theoretical frameworks, the session focuses on three accessible, high-impact instructional strategies: 1) supporting learner autonomy, 2) enhancing learners’ confidence and expectations for success, and 3) structuring activities to promote an external focus on meaningful outcomes rather than self-monitoring. Together, these strategies can foster intrinsic motivation, improve performance, and create more effective and engaging learning experiences.
The presenter will share examples of how these strategies have been implemented in both entry-level and post-professional health professions education, including didactic coursework and clinical instruction. Participants will review sample teaching activities, discuss adaptations for their own contexts, and examine preliminary outcomes from pilot implementations, including learner engagement and perception data. This interactive session is designed for faculty, clinical educators, and instructional staff across disciplines who are interested in improving student motivation and learning outcomes. By the end of the session, participants will be able to identify key factors that influence learner motivation and attention in educational settings, apply three evidence-informed strategies to enhance engagement and performance, and adapt these strategies to their own teaching contexts. Participants will leave with concrete, adaptable tools to design more motivating and effective learning environments.
Director of Neurologic Physical Therapy Residency Program, Instructor of Rehabilitation Medicine, Georgetown University
Dr. Rachel Wilcox is the Director of the MedStar Health Neurologic Physical Therapy Residency Program and an Instructor of Rehabilitation Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center. She is a board-certified clinical specialist in neurologic physical therapy in the outpatient... Read More →
Introduction by Randy Bass, Vice President for Strategic Education Initiatives & Professor, English Department
What does it mean to teach "democracy" in the modern world of higher education? This plenary will encourage participants to reflect on the evolving relationship between educating students about democracy and adopting a democratic approach to education, addressing topics such as the rise of university civic centers, the role of authority in the classroom, and the meaning of democratic expertise.
Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the Department of Government and the Founding Director, Georgetown Initiative on Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Citizenship, Georgetown University
Mark Fisher is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the Department of Government and the Founding Director of the Georgetown Initiative on Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Citizenship (AIDC). His research focuses on the history and future of democratic thought... Read More →
Randy Bass is Vice President for Strategic Education Initiatives and Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he leads the Designing the Future(s) initiative and the Red House incubator for... Read More →
The Capitol Applied Learning Labs is a one-of-a-kind, customized semester that lets Hoyas into their future, now. CALL students live, learn, and work in Downtown DC, on GU’s Capitol Campus, integrating themselves into the city and community—all while cultivating new networks... Read More →
Join Carole Sargent for this interactive session where you'll have a chance to discuss what you're working on. You can practice writing a summary statement, and learn more about writing your short biographical description in such a way that it will actually change your life (!). We can brainstorm, problem solve, and more. Sargent will discuss why cura personalis may not mean what you think it means (adding historical dimension to the term), and how understanding it in an even more nuanced way can help you think about what you're trying to publish, and who you hope to reach. This session is suitable for both the unpublished and the well-published, and everyone in between. This also enhances teaching, because your students came here to work with faculty who are flourishing in their fields.
Applied Linguistics and Legal English Specialist and a lecturer at Georgetown University Law Center, Georgetown University Law School
Julie Lake, Ph.D., is a specialist in Applied Linguistics and Legal English and a lecturer at Georgetown University Law Center. She designs and delivers Legal English programming to multilingual, international law students. Her research interests include needs analyses and second... Read More →
Associate Teaching Professor, Georgetown University
Heather Weger is both Georgetown graduate and Georgetown faculty. As an Associate Teaching Professor, her work has centered around the educational experience of multilingual students from over 20 countries studying at Georgetown. Her first teaching position was on the Hilltop Campus... Read More →
For their final exam, students in a Firm Analysis and Strategy course in the Masters in Environment and Sustainability Management program will have participated in a three-hour competitive simulation. In this exam, students represented real firms in an interactive competitive exercise in which they formulated, presented, defended, and refined a firm’s business strategy. Students applied tools, frameworks, and concepts that they had worked with during the course.
This session will relate the experience of this assessment approach, and solicit participant feedback and suggestions for refinement. Core areas to be addressed are the effectiveness of authentic experiences as evaluation tools, ways to thoroughly assess students' mastery of course concepts (both in theory and practice), and how to make such assessment vehicles scalable across academic programs. Intended audience members include faculty members, program administrators, and curriculum designers who are interested in contributing to the critique and further development of this type of assessment tool.
Associate Professor and Academic Director, Masters in Management Program, Georgetown University
Dr. Kenneth Sawka is an Associate Teaching Professor in the McDonough School of Business. His academic and professional interests center on competitive and business intelligence, competitive strategy, and leader succession practices. Ken possesses more than 30 years of professional... Read More →
Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) is an educational approach where students engage with complex, real-world problems that lack predetermined solutions. There are pockets of challenge labs existing within Georgetown; however, how can we create the infrastructure to ensure that every Georgetown student will have at least one, significant challenge-based learning experience before they graduate? This conversation includes Amanda Lu (Policy Innovation Lab), Mark Fisher (Government), Tad Howard (Applied AI to Wicked Problems); and Noah Martin, Francine van den Brandeler, Mark Rupp (Earth Commons Impact Hub) who will feature their own thinking on how challenge labs foster capacities needed in the world today.
Randy Bass is Vice President for Strategic Education Initiatives and Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he leads the Designing the Future(s) initiative and the Red House incubator for... Read More →
Associate Research Professor of Design, Academic Innovation Network, Georgetown University
Previously design faculty and associate director of Ethics Lab, more recently supporting the Academic Innovation Network development of new initiatives. ***Are you leading or curious about challenge-based learning? Thinking about longer-term engagement between partners and student... Read More →
The goal of the workshop is straightforward but ambitious: we will collaboratively design a practical classroom exercise that faculty can adopt and adapt for their own intelligence studies curricula.
Please come prepared to share exercises that already work for you in a traditional format. These should be exercises that help students learn how to carry out core analytic tasks — from collection and synthesis to structured analysis and the production of intelligence briefings — while maintaining the tradecraft standards and critical thinking the profession demands.
Our students will enter a community where AI-augmented analysis is the norm, not the exception. Intelligence studies programs may lack a structured, tradecraft-grounded exercise for teaching students how to use these tools responsibly and effectively. We have an opportunity to fill that gap together.
Please sign up by adding this session to your schedule if you are planning to ride the coach bus back from Capitol Campus to the Hilltop at the conclusion of the conference.
Thursday May 21, 2026 3:15pm - 3:15pm EDT 500 1st St NW, Street Level500 1st St NW, Washington, DC 20001, USA
