Resource Category
Lessons from a Journal Club: Investigating Student Learning – Post 2: Affective/Cognitive Inquiry and Qualitative/quantitative approaches
Aug. 25, 2021—by Leah Marion Roberts, Senior Graduate Teaching Fellow Assessment of student learning is an essential practice in teaching. As mentioned in the first post in this blog series, asking questions and collecting data about our classes systematically can deepen our knowledge of student experience in our classrooms, and hopefully lead to improved teaching practices. ...
Lessons from a Journal Club: Investigating Student Learning – Post 1: What is vs. what works?
Aug. 18, 2021—by Leah Marion Roberts, Senior Graduate Teaching Fellow 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...
Want to signal inclusion to your neurodivergent students? Use this syllabus statement
Jul. 29, 2021— In 2020-2021, a group of faculty met throughout the year to consider ways to promote equity and inclusion in their courses and programs (you can see a brief description of how they got started here). Keivan Stassun, professor of physics & astronomy, committed to developing a statement that faculty can use in their course...
Learning Online with Social Annotation
Jul. 26, 2021—This spring CFT executive director Derek Bruff experimented with the social annotation tool Perusall in his first-year writing seminar. Perusall allowed him to share a variety of course materials with students, including news articles, podcast episodes, and YouTube video, and to invite students to annotate those texts collaboratively. He used the tool in several different...
The CFT Thanks Our Graduate Teaching Fellows!
Jun. 23, 2021—L to R: Abena Boakyewa-Ansah (History), Amanda Brockman (Sociology), Leah Roberts (Human & Organizational Development), and Mohammad Meerzaei (Religion) We want to thank our 2020-2021 Graduate Teaching Fellows for their leadership, commitment to teaching values, and completing their 12 months fellowship. As we faced an unprecedented year with new teaching challenges, our incredible Fellows created various resources and...
CFT Celebrates Certificate in College Teaching Graduates
Jun. 22, 2021—Congratulations to all the 54 graduate students and postdocs who completed the Certificate in College Teaching this spring! The Certificate in College Teaching (CiCT), co-sponsored by the Center for Teaching and the Graduate School, prepares Vanderbilt graduate students and postdocs who wish to develop and refine their teaching skills. The certificate focuses on the research...
CFT offers new guide for writing science exams
Mar. 26, 2021—Are you a scientist who uses timed exams in your course? Would you like to know some research-based recommendations for making your exams more valid, effective, and equitable? If the answer to both those questions is yes, check out our new guide for writing science exams. Put together by a learning community of scientists striving...
Never Going Back: What Online Teaching in the Times of COVID Can Add to Our Teaching Toolkits – Diana Heney
Mar. 18, 2021—by Mohammad Meerzaei Teaching Students, Coaching Thinkers: Diana Heney, Assistant Professor in Philosophy Dr. Diana Heney joined the Department of Philosophy in Fall 2019. Having been a coach before starting her teaching career, her teaching has been formed around the idea of helping people discover their potentialities and ways to actualize them. In an interview...
New Blog Series Asks Faculty to Share What Practices They Will Carry Forward in Post-pandemic Teaching
Mar. 15, 2021—With the outbreak of COVID-19 and the resulting shift to alternative modes of instruction, faculty and other instructors had to practice a form of adaptive teaching to meet the learning needs of their students. As the fall semester came to a close, CFT graduate teaching fellow Mohammad Meerzaei interviewed faculty members from across the campus...
Transform your teaching with Perusall with Eric Mazur
Mar. 10, 2021—Learning is a social experience — it requires interactions and interactivity. The coronavirus pandemic has been a good opportunity to rethink our approach to teaching. Moving some tasks to an online format suggests that many activities that have traditionally been synchronous and instructor-paced, can be made asynchronous and self-paced. Through Perusall, we will demonstrate how...