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...
Adobe Creative Cloud Pilot Program
Jan. 21, 2020—The Adobe pilot program is designed to help faculty incorporate digital design tools into course activities and assignments in order to deepen and enhance student learning. This “Students as Producers” approach to course and assignment design is intended to help foster critical-thinking, creative problem-solving, multimodal learning, and creative collaborations opportunities that promote digital literacy skills for their students....
Junior Faculty Spotlight: Allison Leich Hilbun
Jan. 14, 2020—Each year, the CFT Newsletter highlights the work of our Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows. This month, Allison Leich Hilbun, Biological Sciences, talks about some of the most useful lessons she has gotten from the Fellowship. Participation in the JFTF program has been exceedingly enlightening. I am excited about what I have learned regarding prior knowledge; although coming into...
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,...
Celebration of Learning 2020: An Exhibition of Students as Producers
Jan. 13, 2020—On February 13, 2020, the Center for Teaching will hold a Celebration of Learning, an exhibition of students as producers. The event will feature students from all over campus sharing what they have learned, created, designed, and discovered, providing the Vanderbilt community with a picture of deep learning across the colleges and schools. We are inviting faculty...
Faster grading for free response assignments? Yes, please!
Jan. 10, 2020—Gradescope is an online, FERPA compliant grading tool that professors can use to grade handwritten exams, typed homework assignments, lab reports and more. Gradescope works well for many types of questions: paragraphs, proofs, diagrams, fill-in-the-blank and true/false to name a few. If your students can upload a pdf of their work, you and your team...
Come Work at the Center for Teaching!
Jan. 9, 2020—Each year the Center for Teaching (CFT) hires a number of graduate students as part of its efforts to mentor and train graduate students, including those serving as teaching assistants or instructors of record here at Vanderbilt as well as those interested in developing teaching skills for future faculty careers. The CFT has several types...
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...
Journal club: Understanding good practices for fostering undergraduate research
Jan. 7, 2020—Many faculty consider undergraduate research to be the pinnacle of an undergraduate career, and departments across Vanderbilt provide opportunities for students to pursue a variety of research. As Immersion Vanderbilt matures, this commitment is only likely to grow. How do we foster productive research experiences for our students? What are good practices for helping students...
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...