News Category
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....
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,...
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...
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...
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...
Come Work at the Center for Teaching!
Dec. 16, 2019—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...
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...