Combating Stress and Burnout: A Workshop Example

If you are anything like me, you may be feeling stressed, tired, and perhaps even burned out after years working and living through a pandemic followed by years of transitions and figuring out a new normal. Your experiences and feelings are shared by many in higher education (and more broadly). During this workshop, we will come together to share our experiences and feelings as well as the strategies that we are using to cope with stress and to combat burnout. After we all share, I will provide a few strategies from the literature that have helped others, including caring for your students, self-compassion, and practicing self-care.

What makes workshops work? Workshops are common forms of dissemination and faculty development, but there is limited discussion around how to design these to make them most effective. This seminar seeks to start this conversation in a fun and interactive way that highlights key workshop design strategies that can apply to any topic or stakeholder audience – including the Combating Stress and Burnout Workshop example. Creating engaging and interactive workshops (or any dissemination experience) helps the audience to learn about the topic, think about how it can relate to their personal practice, and inspire future adoption. I hope this workshop can help to encourage participants to think about dissemination as a more active and engaging process over traditional presentation lectures. 

Dr. Stephanie Cutler holds degrees in Mechanical Engineering (BS from Virginia Commonwealth University), Industrial Engineering (MS from Virginia Tech), and a PhD in Engineering Education (Virginia Tech). Dr. Cutler currently works as the Director of Assessment and Instructional Support/Associate Research Professor in the Leonhard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education at Penn State. Her research interests include the peer review process, the faculty and graduate student experience, as well as educational development, including the adoption of evidence-based instructional practices in the engineering classroom.