ViRC: Focused Work Sessions 🗓

Have you been pushing a task back on your to-do list? 

Do you benefit from “study hall” sessions where colleagues quietly work on individual projects in a shared space? 

Try out a Virtual Research Cave (ViRC)! 

ViRCs are focused working sessions, scheduled about once per month, offered via zoom for Pratt faculty and staff. At the beginning of these three hour deep work sessions, we each share what we’d like to accomplish and what we won’t let ourselves get distracted by. Then we all turn off our cameras, zone in, and get sh*t done! Twice during the session, the CTL facilitator will invite everyone back on camera for a short game or stretch to revitalize us before we dive back into our tasks. 

RSVP for this semester’s ViRCs: 

Frequent attendees of ViRCs say… 

As a regular attendee of the ViRCs I can attest to their value as focused work opportunities. The format, brief introductions and short breaks interwoven with intense work sessions is ideal. I always get more done in a ViRC than I ever manage when left to my own devices of time management. Highly recommend them!

The Virtual research Cave allows for focused commitment to projects that are otherwise easily derailed by distractions. Its strength lies in its collective intent to fully focus during three work sprints and to regenerate during two short breaks.

The virtual caves are a gift; they are both freeing and disciplining in all the right ways. They offer an opportunity to focus on the projects or work that often fall to the bottom of the list as they either seem less “urgent” or demand more focus and to do this work with a deep breath and with the support – and joy – of community.

The sessions worked for me, here’s why. The online environment created by CTL is above all inclusive, all voices are welcomed into the cave’s virtual space. A scheduled time helps build a healthy routine practice. Individual ideas and projects benefit from such a proposition. Opportunities present themselves when participants take their time to focus on one aspect over multiple aspects of a proposition, and particularly in the breakaway room’s challenging, sometimes provocative discourse that punctuates the solitary periods. The cave offers a unique opportunity to gain clarification eg in a premise’s intentionality or re which direction to take etc.

Scheduled Announcements

Upcoming events at the CTL:

Imagining a University for the Common Good: Higher Education and Its Values Reading Group
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Scheduled ical Google outlook
Announcements
This reading group, starting in early March, invites faculty to engage deeply with urgent questions about the purpose and future of higher education in times of intersecting global crises through critical engagement with the book Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis: A University for the Common Good.
Creative Accommodations: Spring 2026
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Scheduled ical Google outlook
Announcements
The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), in collaboration with the Learning/Access Center (L/AC), will offer the Creative Accommodations self-paced series again this Spring semester, punctuated with online synchronous Zoom conversations. The goal of this series is to support faculty as they respond effectively and appropriately to students with accommodations.

see all events

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