The CFT was fortunate to have Kimberly as one of its Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows in 2010-11.  During her fellowship we came to know of her deep and abiding commitment to community-based research and teaching, which is evident in the work that she and her students have done to aid community-based efforts for childhood health and education in Nashville.

With her students, Kimberly evaluated the Martha O’Bryan Center’s “Tied Together” program, a parent education initiative, where they found significant gains made by parents in knowledge related to child development.  She also advised and researched Nashville Promise Neighborhood, an effort to link schools, students, and parents with local social services.  In this capacity she provided research support awarded to the O’Bryan Center for a planning grant from the U.S. Department of Education, one of only twenty organizations across the nation selected for such funding.

Congratulations to Kimberly for this award!  It is a well-deserved recognition for her exemplary practices of community engagement in Nashville.

Enhancing Learning Through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: The Challenges and Joys of Juggling

Read a review of this book by CFT Assistant Director Nancy Chick

From the publisher…
There has been growing demand for workshops and materials to help those in higher education conduct and use the scholarship of teaching and learning. This book offers advice on how to do, share, and apply SoTL work to improve student learning and development.

Written for college-level faculty members as well as faculty developers, administrators, academic staff, and graduate students, this book will also help undergraduate students collaborating with faculty on SoTL projects. Though targeted at those new to the field of SoTL, more seasoned SoTL researchers and those attempting to support SoTL efforts will find the book valuable. It can be used as an individual reading, a shared reading in SoTL writing circles, a resource in workshops on SoTL, and a text in seminars on teaching.

Available in the Center for Teaching library.

Vanderbilt’s four Fellows for 2011-12 are (L to R) Mike Myers, Mechanical Engineering; Elizabeth Adolph and Margarita Pietro, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; and Tamara Carley, Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Tamara Carley’s project involved EES 225, Earth Materials, with instructor Guilherme Gualda. Students were asked to use Prezi to create a comprehensive, cohesive, and organized representation of knowledge gained throughout the semester in the style of an interactive concept map with zooming capabilities. Special emphasis was placed on recognizing and representing the relationships between the micro‐, macro‐and megascopic aspects of Earth Materials. This project, which need not be geologically-specific, will be implemented again as the investigators found it valuable for teaching and learning the mastery of multi-scale concepts. View the poster for Tamara’s project.

Fluid momentum has proven to be one of the toughest concepts to grasp in fluid mechanics. Mike Myers and his course instructor, Haoxiang Luo, hypothesized that by using challenge-based learning along with a hands-on demonstration, students would develop a deeper and richer understanding of fluid momentum concepts in ME 224, Fluid Mechanics. The challenge-based approach included a short video clip of a fire hose moving out of control from a firefighter’s grasp during a training exercise and a hands-on demonstration involving 250 ml squeeze bottles filled with water. Survey results indicated the challenge question involving a real-world firefighter problem engaged the students from the start and helped connect the material as the students were learning. Mike presented a paper on his project at the national meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. View the paper about Mike’s project.

The project of Elizabeth Adolph, Margarita Pietro and instructor Scott Guelcher involved cooperative learning and its effects on the academic achievement and interest level of major and non-major students in an introductory engineering course, ES 140. All the engineering first-year students take this class, and they choose 3 modules to take during the semester to learn about 3 different engineering fields. In the classroom, three different cooperative learning strategies were implemented: (a) allowing students to self-select their working teams, (b) grouping chemical engineering students together and non-chemical engineering students together (homogeneous groups), and (c) grouping chemical engineering students and non-chemical engineering students together (heterogeneous groups).  The investigators hypothesized that the overall interest level and academic achievement of students working in heterogeneous groups would be higher than that of the students working in homogeneous groups due to the exposure of the non-major students to the views and perspectives of the major students. Survey and quiz results indicated that there were no significant differences in scores from Modules 1, 2, and 3 or between chemical engineers and non-chemical engineers within each module. View Margarita and Elizabeth’s project poster.

CIRTL is funded through the Division of Undergraduate Education of the National Science Foundation.

Nancy is eager to hear from those of you who’ve been involved with the group in the past. She’ll be contacting group members individually to request a brief conversation in the next couple of months, but feel free to email her in the meantime if you have ideas or suggestions. Look for an email and more information from Nancy soon, gauging interest in a leisurely summer reading group as a way to (re)connect with each other and with various contemplative practices and possibilities.

If you’re interested in learning more about contemplative pedagogy or would like to be added to the contemplative pedagogy mailing list, contact her at nancy.chick@vanderbilt.edu. You can also view the Center for Teaching’s materials on contemplative pedagogy if you’d like to know more on the topic.

Cynthia approaches her teaching with a spirit of experimentation and innovation.  She helped develop and assess a series of inquiry-based labs for her genetics course, and published this work in the journal CBE—Life Sciences Education.  She has collaborated with colleagues from several disciplines, including philosophy, computer science, and dance, to develop interdisciplinary content to integrate into biology courses.  And she’s been an active member of the Centenary College faculty, having served on committees tasked with revising the college’s core curriculum and the department’s biology major. Cynthia has also mentored over a dozen students in undergraduate research experiences.

Cynthia’s experience teaching biology, as well as her expertise in inquiry-based teaching, curriculum design, undergraduate research, and other topics will enhance the CFT’s ability to support science teaching at Vanderbilt.  We look forward to introducing her to colleagues across the campus this summer and fall.

• Learn from senior colleagues about successful teaching practices and how to better balance the many demands of work and life.
• Learn to integrate more fully your teaching and research.
• Design and refine courses.
• Add to your repertoire of teaching skills.
• Develop abilities to analyze and improve your teaching over time.
• Enjoy a teaching community of peers and mentors at Vanderbilt.
• Develop and improve materials for review and tenure processes.

These opportunities will take place in a structured set of activities that include teaching visits, dinners, working groups, course design projects, one-on-one consultations, and an end-of-the-year workshop.

Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows will also receive $500 in research funds.

For more on the program or to apply, visit the CFT website, or the article, “Teaching Well,” in the Vanderbilt View.

In this episode we join CFT Director Derek Bruff as he reports on-location from the floor of the poster session at the School of Engineering’s Senior Design Day. He talks with chemical and mechanical engineering students about what they learned while collaborating on their senior design project, one that resulted in a spinach-powered solar cell. The project has earned the team a Marketplace Innovation Award and $90,000 of development funds from the EPA. For more on the team’s projects, see the School of Engineering’s recent press release.

http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/files/cftpodcast/ep30_spinach.mp3 [MP3, 6 min 55 sec]

That’s student Paul McDonald on the left, one of the members of the spinach-powered solar cell team, showing off his periodic-table tie.

For more perspectives on project-based learning, see Derek’s ProfHacker post, “Motivating Students with Application Projects and Poster Sessions” and listen to podcast episode 17, “Guil Gualda on Student Projects in Google Earth.” And stay tuned to the podcast throughout the summer for more on-location reports on student learning.

• Elizabeth Adolph, Chemical Engineering
• Robert Brucker, Biological Sciences
• Angela Cowser, Graduate Department of Religion
• Wenyue Du, Biological Sciences
• Menghun Goh, Graduate Department of Religion
• Jenna Gorlewicz, Mechanical Engineering
• Beth Koontz, Anthropology
• Ebany Martinez-Finley, Pediatrics
• Kathryn McEwen, German & Slavic Languages
• Michael Myers, Mechanical Engineering
• Abigail Olena, Biological Sciences
• Margarita Prieto, Chemical Engineering
• Kate Pride-Brown, Sociology
• Jessica Riviere, German & Slavic Languages
• Kimberly Scott, Masters of Liberal Arts & Science
• Rebecca St. Clair, Psychology

Each of our recipients completed activities intended to build a teaching foundation, put theory into practice, and engage in the scholarship of learning and teaching. These activities and the capstone research project wouldn’t have been possible without the support of mentors and advisors in their departments and programs. So “thank you!” to the deans and department chairs, the directors of graduate studies, and the individual faculty whose teaching experience, knowledge, and resources have served as guides and inspirations.

Each fall the Center offers two orientations:

• Teaching at Vanderbilt, an orientation for faculty of all ranks who are new to Vanderbilt, sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Center for Teaching.  This event will provide new faculty with an opportunity to meet with some of Vanderbilt’s best teachers, as well as get to know other incoming faculty colleagues. This event will be held from 3 to 5 p.m. on Wednesday, August 15th, 2012, at the CFT. Those interested in attending can RSVP by August 8^th by Registering Online or by calling the Center for Teaching at (615) 322-7290.
• Teaching Assistant Orientation (TAO) offers effective strategies for the varied teaching duties assumed by Teaching Assistants and provides information on campus resources available to TAs. Participants at TAO also receive an opportunity to practice their teaching skills and receive feedback on their teaching from experienced teachers. This orientation will be held from 9 to 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, August 16th, 2012, in Buttrick Hall. TAs interested in attending should register for this event.

Additionally we encourage the teaching community here at Vanderbilt to use this site and the Center’s other resources over the course of their careers at Vanderbilt.   We look forward to seeing you at the Center for Teaching and wish you a most enjoyable fall semester.

Welcome to Vanderbilt!

The CFT, in conjunction with the Graduate School, invite you to join us

The celebration includes remarks by:

• Richard McCarty, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
• Dennis Hall, Vice Provost for Research and Dean of the Graduate School
• John Sloop, Senior Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences (read the blog post about the CFT’s Campus Collaborations)
• Emily Nacol, Political Science, Junior Faculty Teaching Fellow (read the blog post highlighting Emily’s experience with the JFTF program)
• Jessica Riviere, German, Teaching Certificate Recipient (read more about Jessica and her experiences in the Teaching Certificate Program in this recent blog post)

We’ll celebrate 2011-2012 highlights and achievements of the Vanderbilt teaching community including:

• Participants in the CFT’s Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows program
• Recipients of the Teaching Certificate program
• Graduate Teaching Fellows
• Teaching Affiliates
• Panelists featured at this year’s CFT events
• Teaching as Research Fellows
• CFT Advisory Board
• CFT’s campus partners
• Faculty who have received awards for their teaching accomplishments

Celebration of Teaching Program

4:00-4:30 Reception & Posters

4:30-5:00 Welcome by Richard McCarty, Acknowledgments by Derek Bruff, Featured Speakers, Awarding Teaching Certificates by Dennis Hall

5:00-5:30 Reception & Posters