Bio
Dr. Mary-Ann Winkelmes is the Founder, Director, and Principal Investigator of the
Transparency in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education project (TILT Higher Ed), which
promotes direct conversation with students about methods of teaching, learning, advising, and
mentoring and helps educators to choose practices grounded in evidence about students’
learning shared across institutions and countries on six continents. The impact of this project on
students’ learning and persistence in college has been the focus of Winkelmes’s publications in
the National Teaching and Learning Forum, Project Information Literacy, the National Education
Association’s Higher Education Advocate, and the AAC&U’s Liberal Education and Peer
Review, as well as interviews and podcasts, book chapters, peer reviewed articles, and the
book Transparent Design in Higher Education Teaching and Leadership. Her work to improve
higher education learning and teaching, especially for historically underserved students, has
been recognized nationally by the Chronicle of Higher Education and the POD Network’s Robert
J. Menges Award for Outstanding Research in Education Development.
Dr. Winkelmes has provided hundreds of keynote addresses and invited workshops at colleges,
universities, philanthropic institutions, and learning organizations in the U.S. and abroad,
working with students, instructors, staff, and leadership to support small, evidence-based
changes to education and institutional planning that yield significant success.
Dr. Winkelmes has held senior leadership roles in the campus teaching centers at Harvard
University, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, the University of Nevada Las
Vegas and Brandeis University. She has offered instruction as a member of history and art
history departments at most of those institutions. She has consulted and provided professional
development programming and analyses for the Lilly Endowment’s higher education grant-
making and teacher-training programs, and for teaching centers and learning organizations in
the U.S. and abroad. She has also served two terms as a senior fellow of the Association of
American Colleges & Universities, and as an executive board member of Nevada Humanities,
an elected member of the Board of Directors of the Professional Organizational Development
Network in Higher Education (POD), and chair of its Research Committee.
Winkelmes has also published on the history of art and architecture in Renaissance Italy,
Benedictine church design and decoration, acoustics, and religious architecture. She has
received numerous teaching awards as well as grants for her research from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, Kress, Delmas, and Mellon foundations.
Winkelmes holds a PhD from Harvard University.
Session Abstract
How Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) Advances Student Success
Transparency in learning and teaching (TILT) involves direct communication among educators
and students about the methods of teaching and learning. It has demonstrably increased student
success and instructor satisfaction at hundreds of institutions of higher education in the U.S. and
abroad. Data from foundational studies identifies transparent instruction as a small, time-efficient,
equitable teaching intervention that significantly enhances students’ sense of belonging,
confidence, retention, metacognitive awareness of skill development, and workplace readiness
(Calkins & Winkelmes, 2018; Gianoutsos & Winkelmes, 2016; Winkelmes et al., 2015/2016;
Winkelmes et al., 2019). This interactive keynote session introduces participants to transparent
instruction and engages them in small groups to apply transparent design principles to sample
assignments that will be provided from TILT research projects. Participants will leave with:
– an understanding of how and why TILT works
– examples of what TILT looks like in practice
– experience applying TILT to provided examples.
