The Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching promotes university teaching that leads to meaningful student learning. Our offerings are available to any members of the Vanderbilt community interested in developing their teaching practices.
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?!”...
Course improvement grant spotlight: “Making Innovative learning videos for elementary Japanese classes”
Sep. 9, 2021—Nozomi Imai, lecturer of Asian studies, recently talked with CFT assistant director Julaine Fowlin about her Course Improvement Grant, “Making Innovative learning videos for elementary Japanese classes.” Last year when we had to shift to remote and hybrid learning, Nozomi created videos to allow her students to learn at their own pace and provide an...
Course improvement grant spotlight: “Restoration and rehabilitation of Vanderbilt fossil teaching collection”
Sep. 2, 2021—Neil Kelley, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, recently talked to CFT associate director Cynthia Brame about his Course Improvement Grant, “Restoration and rehabilitation of Vanderbilt fossil teaching collection.” Can you tell us briefly about your project and what inspired you to do this project? The project is a very long overdue project in...
Lessons from a Journal Club: Investigating Student Learning – Post 3: Reasons for doing systematic inquiry and final reflections
Sep. 1, 2021—by Leah Marion Roberts, Senior Graduate Teaching Fellow Welcome to the final post in this series on systematic inquiry in teaching and learning contexts. This spring, Cynthia Brame and I facilitated a journal club looking at different ways to investigate student learning. In this blog series, I’m sharing some highlights of our collective learning,...
One of these things was not like the others: Experiences with standards- and specifications-based grading
Aug. 30, 2021—This guest blog post comes from Richard F. Haglund, Stevenson Professor of Physics. The following comments are reflections after a year of fruitful dialogue with colleagues in an on-line learning community sponsored by the Center for Teaching, organized and led by Cynthia Brame. What I experienced about grading in 2020-2021 is a significant difference...