Celebration of Teaching Spotlight – Teaching Certificate Graduates

Posted by Rhett Mcdaniel on Monday, April 26, 2010 in Events.

This year’s graduates of the CFT’s Teaching Certificate program (co-sponsored by the Graduate School) will be recognized at our Celebration of Teaching on May 6th. We have eight graduate students finishing the program this year, including students from the Graduate Department of Religion, Peabody College, and the basic sciences at the Medical Center. These students engaged in a structured set of professional development activities focused on developing and refining their teaching skills. They attended teaching workshops, met with CFT teaching observer-consultants, explored the teaching literature in reading groups, and engage in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL).

Hillary Hager Carter, graduate student in cell and developmental biology and one of the program graduates, will share some of her experiences in the program at the Celebration of Teaching. In her SoTL project, Hillary explored the effects of lecture and lab components in an graduate-level developmental biology course. She wanted to know if students learned more effectively when the lecture component comes before the lab component or vice versa. She designed and implemented a quasi-control group study as part of her project. Hillary found that students in her sample learned equally well regardless of the sequence of the two components, although they reported learning more from the first component, whichever one it was.