Performances + Events
Over the past year and a half at New England Conservatory, several faculty initiatives have served to identify curricular challenges and surface forward-thinking opportunities and solutions. Most recently, in the Fall 2025 semester, a 10-member Faculty Innovation Cohort was assembled “to empower faculty-driven curricular innovation with the goal of enriching the learning experience of our students,” Richard Giarusso, NEC’s Dean and Chief Academic Officer said.
Members of the cohort, a professional-development experience that was made possible through NEC’s Impact Investment Fund, worked on individual projects related to their interests and expertise, received feedback on that work from their peers, and participated in workshops led by Giarusso, expert instructional designers, and guest speakers. Cohort members’ projects, which were individually proposed in Summer 2025, explored a range of areas, from neurodivergent learning to student empowerment through self-assessment and several that examined pedagogical uses of AI.
Don Tracia, an instructional designer from Suffolk University School of Law, is one expert who worked with Giarusso and the cohort. The workshops Tracia helped lead focused in part on “small teaching,” an approach conceived by James M. Lang, a professor at the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Notre Dame. Tracia’s related work focuses on asking, “What is it that you want your students to learn or know?” and “Where does this fall on the spectrum of learning?”
“Backward design” is a way to understand instructional design, Tracia said, adding that effective teaching and learning involves the assessment of the practices themselves. “You don’t have to discard everything to make some really important adaptations in your course,” he said. “Small changes make a big difference in how you communicate with the students.”
Giarusso has recently seen “backward design” in action. In October, for instance, he, NEC President Andrea Kalyn, and the Conservatory’s Senior Director of Strategy, Juliana Jordan, visited the University of Minnesota, Rochester, where the faculty begin with outcomes and work backward from there in the classroom and laboratory. That approach has helped faculty reimagine the way they think about their work — with meaningful results.
The goal of NEC’s Faculty Innovation Cohort was about perspective as much as it was about faculty members’ individual projects. Each participating faculty member benefitted not only from the workshops Giarusso and guest experts led, but from the constructive feedback they received from one another.
“My experience with this accomplished group of thinkers led to two major shifts in my perspective,” Faculty Innovation Cohort participant Andrew Schartmann, who teaches in NEC’s Music Theory Department, said in his final presentation. Schartmann, whose project focused on cognitive foundations for harmonic hearing, came away with “a renewed understanding of innovative pedagogy as the design of learning experiences that align with how the mind works, and a rethinking of the syllabus as a reflection of the cognitive structures those experiences aim to build.”
Molly Gebrian ’06 MM, ’08 GD, a faculty member in NEC’s Community Engagement and Professional Studies Department, focused through her project on “developing resources on how to better support autistic, ADHD, and AuDHD (autism + ADHD) students in the classroom.” At the conclusion of the cohort’s work, Gebrian wrote: “Over the course of the semester, I constantly looked for new opportunities to utilize the principles of ‘small teaching’ we discussed,” and, “I took a lot of inspiration from hearing how my colleagues in the cohort were thinking about and incorporating these ideas in their teaching.”
“All the projects evolved very significantly from the proposals,” Giarusso said.
“It was a master class in collaboration and sharing,” Tracia said, adding that the projects’ development was furthered by “the pedagogy we were presenting to them” in the workshops.
The work of the Faculty Innovation Cohort, along with other recent initiatives — including a group that focused on AI in pedagogy in Spring 2025 and another that, in Fall 2024, explored course design and pedagogical innovations in academic and performance areas — will help inform the continued evolution of instruction at NEC. Members of the Faculty Innovation Cohort will share their work and their evolving perspectives on teaching at NEC in a series of “Lunch & Learn” presentations during the second half of the Spring 2026 semester.
“Through these initiatives,” Giarusso said, “we now have a core group of faculty who are primed for this sort of work. There are a lot of ways in which the projects themselves will be useful to the NEC community.” Overall, this and the other initiatives were undertaken “for faculty to refine their teaching in alignment with our institutional priorities.” Those priorities, of course, center on the student experience.
“Richard is doing something that is very pioneering,” Tracia said. “He knows instinctively what good teaching is all about,” and, “what he’s doing, without a doubt, is really pushing the envelope.”
