
Teaching and Learning Design Studio
About the Studio
The Teaching & Learning Design Studio (TLDS) at Elizabethtown College is a hub for enhancing teaching methods and supporting faculty and staff. The Studio offers a variety of services, including professional development, coaching on using educational technologies, and personalized support for course design. It's a resource aimed at improving teaching effectiveness and helping faculty engage students more deeply in their learning journey.
The Studio promotes and supports a relationship- and learner-centered culture of instruction, guidance, and scholarship, with a focus on evidence-based pedagogies from the scholarship of teaching and learning that foster student academic engagement, advance the College’s mission, and cultivate innovative teaching.

Contact Us:
Nicarry 114 | studio@etown.edu | 717-361-1192
One-Page Teaching Guides
Connecting With Students
Teaching in Large Classes: Engagement
Teaching Non-Majors
Balancing Affirmation with Critique
Creating Accessible Canvas Sites
Resources for Self-Care
Teaching in Large Classes: Grading
The Microsoft Accessibility Checker
Applying Design Thinking to Mentoring
Flexible Assignment Deadline Policies
Design Thinking Stage I: Research
“New Quizzes” in Canvas
Approaches to Teaching History
Zoom or Microsoft Teams?
Assessing Participation
Midterm Feedback
Instructor Clarity
To Grade with 0 or To Not Grade with 0
Open Education Resources
Library Resources for Faculty
Additional Teaching & Learning Resources
Meet The Team

Dr. Kathryn Caprino
Director of the Teaching & Learning Design Studio
Dr. Caprino is an Associate Professor of PK-12 New Literacies in the Education Department and the Director of the Teaching & Learning Design Studio. She is passionate about supporting and coaching faculty in their teaching and enjoys developing meaningful professional development opportunities that help instructors best meet their students' needs.
Prior to earning her doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. Caprino taught middle school and high school English in Virginia and North Carolina. She has taught first year composition at Durham Technical Community College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before joining the faculty at Elizabethtown, she co-coordinated the English Education program at the University of Florida. She is a trained reading specialist and instructional coach.
She lives in Lancaster County with her husband and two little boys.

Dr. Sharon Birch
Assistant Director of the Teaching and Learning Design Studio and Instructional Technologist
Dr. Sharon Birch is an instructional designer and instructional technologist with twenty-five years of experience in the small college environment. Her professional interests include digital literacy, statistical literacy, and critical digital pedagogy. Sharon holds a BA in sociology from Southwestern University and a MA and PHD in Sociology from Bowling Green State University where she specialized in social demography. After stints as a researcher for the state of Texas and for the US Census Bureau, she returned to higher education as an instructional technologist specializing in quantitative social science pedagogy and tools. She has taught undergraduate sociology courses and first year seminars regularly throughout her career and enjoys using these classes as opportunities to experiment with technological and pedagogical ideas.
Design Fellows
Learning Design Fellows collaborate with the Studio to get personalized coaching, support, and feedback they need to complete their projects. They attend periodic Studio meetings to give updates on their projects and are asked to disseminate their projects and serve as campus resources after their fellowship ends.

Matt Bergman
Assessment & Curriculum Coordinator for the School of Graduate and Professional Studies
Bergman’s project aims to harness the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in conjunction with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles. The project intends to develop an AI implementation framework and a toolkit of resources and best practices for using AI in different learning environments. The objective of Bergman’s project is to disseminate the tools among faculty and staff to foster an accessible and engaging learning environment and to help faculty become more comfortable using AI in the classroom.

Sara Noveral
Assistant Teaching Professor & Lab Coordinator
Noveral plans to work with the Studio to incorporate hands-on modeling and diagramming into introductory biology (Bio 111) lab classes to increase the connection between lecture and lab content and improve student understanding. By incorporating hands-on models, students can explore what is happening in their experiments on a molecular and cellular level. Noveral will put together a portfolio of hands-on student activities that can be completed in short segments with discussion questions that can be used by herself, other instructors, teaching assistants, and tutors.