Applications for New Round of Internal Teaching Grants Now Available
Sep. 23, 2021—The Office of the Provost established two internal funding programs in April 2021, the Educational Advancement Fund and the Course Improvement Grant, designed to support excellence in the classroom through continued pedagogical advancement and long-term educational transformation. The deadline to submit for the upcoming second round of funding is October 15. Read More . . . . .
Course improvement grant spotlight: Choral Library Modernization
Sep. 23, 2021—Tucker Biddlecombe, associate professor of choral studies and director of choral activities, recently talked with CFT assistant director Julaine Fowlin about his Course Improvement Grant, “Choral library modernization.” The Vanderbilt library has a collection of choral music that has been kept for many years by a student organization chorus called the concert choir; this goes back...
Join Queer Teaching, Queer Thriving: A Learning Community on Inclusive Teaching for All Educators
Sep. 23, 2021—The Center for Teaching and the K.C. Potter Center for LGBTQI Life are proud to offer a 2021-2022 learning community about ways campus educators may help LGBTQI students to thrive academically and socially. Open to all faculty, graduate students, and staff of any background, the learning community will discuss a wide variety of issues: the...
Want to help your students avoid cheating? Consider this guide.
Sep. 22, 2021—The folks at EduMed have developed a guide to help students understand and avoid plagiarism and cheating. The title focuses on online students, but the breakdown of different forms of academic dishonesty and how to avoid them can be useful to all students. The descriptions of self-plagiarism, paraphrasing plagiarism, and mosaic plagiarism may be particularly...
Join the Learning Assistant Instructors Learning Community
Sep. 21, 2021—Learning assistants, or LAs, are undergraduates who serve as peer educators in courses that they have previously taken. Supported by training in pedagogy, they extend the reach of faculty members implementing active learning components in a course and help provide personalized experiences that increase students’ sense of belonging. In this learning community, faculty who are...
CFT Opens New Digital Media Lab to Support Faculty
Sep. 20, 2021—The Digital Media Lab in the Digital Commons building at 1101 19th Avenue South provides guidance, instruction, and resources to all faculty, regardless of technology experience, who want to create and use digital media in their teaching. The digital media specialists at the DML can help faculty learn about video production, audio production, graphic design, and web design....
Course improvement grant spotlight: “Incorporating student feedback in introductory biology to increase learners’ sense of belonging”
Sep. 16, 2021—Jessica Gilpin, senior lecturer in biological sciences, recently told us about her Course Improvement Grant project, “Incorporating student feedback in introductory biology to increase learners’ sense of belonging.” Can you tell us briefly about your project and what inspired you to do this project? As you know, the title of my project is, “Incorporating...
Spotlight Event: Teaching with Wikipedia
Sep. 16, 2021—Wikipedia is home to over 55 million articles. The website is a valuable source for information, but it also has systematic knowledge gaps, as well as biases toward historically privileged perspectives. Vanderbilt political scientists Brooke Ackerly and Kristin Michelitch have been working to correct these gaps and biases by engaging their students as Wikipedia contributors. Students are, in...
From the Executive Director
Sep. 14, 2021—by Derek Bruff, executive director, Vanderbilt Center for Teaching Vanderbilt’s return to the classroom this fall isn’t going exactly as we might have predicted or hoped back in June, given the changing conditions of the pandemic. However, between Vanderbilt instructors’ experience with adaptive teaching last year and an impressively high vaccination rate for the Vanderbilt...
Lessons from a Journal Club Blog Series
Sep. 13, 2021—Assessment of student learning is a familiar and essential component of teaching. As college instructors, we constantly ask ourselves questions like: “Are my students learning?” “What do they still not understand?” “Do students feel they can approach me with questions or concerns?” or, “That cool new thing I tried this semester — did it work?!”...