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Town Hall: Branches from the Same Tree: The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Science, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education
Jan. 30, 2020—On Feb 4th in the Student Life Center, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and Vanderbilt University will hold a Town Hall – Branches from the Same Tree: The integration of the humanities and arts with science, engineering, and medicine in higher education. The town hall will be held on Feb 4th with a...
Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt: Heather Fedesco and Consulting Groups
Jan. 27, 2020—By Faith Rovenolt, CFT undergraduate intern During Spring 2020, the Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt blog series will highlight teaching innovations that CFT staff have implemented and evaluated in their own courses. Most students can give an example from their own life from a group project gone wrong, but working in groups is often integral to...
Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt: Cynthia Brame, homework to highlight “real life” relevance, and flipped classes
Jan. 13, 2020—By Faith Rovenolt, CFT undergraduate intern During Spring 2020, the Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt blog series will highlight teaching innovations that CFT staff have implemented and evaluated in their own courses. Working at the CFT has been one of the best decisions I have made in college. It has afforded me many wonderful opportunities,...
Incorporating Games into TA Orientation
Jan. 8, 2020—By Cait Kirby, CFT Teaching Affiliate and Biological Sciences PhD student In my role as a Teaching Affiliate at Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching, I lead an orientation event for a group of Biological Sciences Teaching Assistants (TAs). This orientation serves to educate new TAs about their roles, Vanderbilt policies, pedagogical techniques, and the types of...
Grades as a necessary evil? How they affect student motivation and what we can do about it.
Dec. 19, 2019—By Heather Fedesco, CFT Assistant Director During the December meeting of the CFT’s student motivation journal club, we tackled the perplexing question of whether grades help or hinder student motivation. Chamberlin and colleagues’ paper titled, “The impact of grades on student motivation” gave us a great launching point to embark on this discussion. The authors...
New CFT Guide on Assessing Student Learning Now Available
Dec. 18, 2019—Student assessment is, arguably, the centerpiece of the teaching and learning process and therefore the subject of much discussion in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Without some method of obtaining and analyzing evidence of student learning, we can never know whether our teaching is making a difference. That is, teaching requires some process through...
Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt: Danielle Picard, Mary Anne Caton and Wikipedia Editing
Dec. 15, 2019—By Faith Rovenolt, CFT undergraduate intern We’ve all been told—or been the one telling people—to not use Wikipedia as a source. There’s a variety of reasons, of course, with the main one being the credibility of the information. Wikipedia is aware of this and has made a series of changes aimed at rectifying this. Their...
Is Your Gradebook Ready for the End of the Semester?
Dec. 10, 2019—The end of the semester is coming up quickly! Is your Brightspace gradebook set up correctly? While you are certainly not required to use the Brightspace Grades tool to track your students’ grades, it can be a big help. Especially if you are using Brightspace to collect assignments or giving quizzes and exams. Tips for...
Teaching Writing Workshop Series: Scaffolding Writing Across the Semester
Dec. 4, 2019—Over the course of the academic year, the Writing Studio leads a series of faculty workshops focused on different aspects of teaching writing. Workshops provide participants with current research, strategies for best practices, and a forum for discussing how these approaches might be adapted to teaching writing in their disciplines. The Teaching Writing Workshop Series...
Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt: McKanders and Refugee Policy Podcasts
Dec. 2, 2019—By Faith Rovenolt, CFT undergraduate intern In the spring of last year, three students from Professor Karla McKanders’s LAW 7620: Refugee Law and Policy course contributed podcasts to the Life of the Law Blog New Voices series. This amazing opportunity for students came about from a final project for the course. The course focuses on the...