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Center for Teaching

Services for Departments, Programs, and Schools

The Center for Teaching works directly with departments, programs, schools, and other units as part of our mission.  The CFT offers more than simply individual consultations for instructional or course development.  We have helped numerous departments and schools at Vanderbilt develop integrated curricula and shared teaching strategies that enhance student learning and faculty success, whether it is through group consultations, curricular design workshops, or other forums.

We welcome the opportunity to consult or collaborate with deans, department chairs, center directors, curriculum committees, course heads, and any others at Vanderbilt involved with teaching and learning design, implementation, assessment, evaluation, and research.  See below for some examples.

Teaching

  • Designing and implementing ways to evaluate teaching effectiveness
  • Facilitating peer observation within a department or program
  • Making sense of student evaluation of teaching (SET) data
  • Exploring and implementing research on particular pedagogies relevant to a department or program (e.g., team-based learning, service learning, alternatives to the humanities essay)
  • Reflecting on and adopting discipline-specific teaching practices (“signature pedagogies“)
  • Setting up teaching award systems and incentives
  • Designing and conducting workshops or course design institutes as needed

Learning

  • Designing for student learning in individual courses, curricular sequences, or larger programs
  • Facilitating research on student learning in a course, department, or program
  • Rethinking the effectiveness of learning spaces
  • Designing and conducting workshops or learning communities as needed

Curriculum

  • Serving on a department’s Committee on Undergraduate Studies
  • Developing or revising curriculum
  • (Re)designing a major/minor
  • Developing pedagogy courses for graduate programs
  • Facilitating collaborative development and/or assessment of specific topics, skills, or lessons
  • Creating and linking a department’s or school’s teaching objectives to course design, assignments, and teaching practices for individual instructors
  • Designing and conducting workshops as needed

Professional Development

  • Creating plans for teaching improvement (one-on-one consultations, small group analysis feedback from students, teaching observations)
  • Recruiting, hiring, and orienting new faculty
  • Mentoring junior faculty on their teaching
  • Fostering the professional development of graduate students as future faculty
  • Improving mentoring for undergraduate, graduate, and professional students and postdocs, as advising is a form of teaching
  • Designing and conducting workshops as needed

Our staff page will also point you to the CFT liaison for your department, program, or unit. For more information or to schedule a conversation, call the Center for Teaching at 322-7290.