‘Active Learning’
Tweaking research presentations to foster community and knowledge construction: A focus on peer review
Nov. 10, 2021—by Cynthia J. Brame I recently got to watch a class session that taught me a new and very effective way to help students build their science identity by building a scientific community. It was awesome, and I can’t wait to figure out how to adapt it to one of my classes. Here’s the setting:...
Making the most of clinical conference courses: Adding a “pair and share” element to prompt student engagement and reflection
Nov. 4, 2021—by Cynthia J. Brame I recently had the opportunity to watch Janelle Delle, Assistant Professor of Nursing, run one of the clinical conferences that she has with small groups of students every week. The point of a clinical conference course is to help students make sense of and learn from their ongoing clinical experiences, a...
Join the Learning Assistant Instructors Learning Community
Sep. 21, 2021—Learning assistants, or LAs, are undergraduates who serve as peer educators in courses that they have previously taken. Supported by training in pedagogy, they extend the reach of faculty members implementing active learning components in a course and help provide personalized experiences that increase students’ sense of belonging. In this learning community, faculty who are...
Active Learning Online: Five Key Principles with Stephen M. Kosslyn
Mar. 22, 2021—Active learning leads to substantially better learning than occurs with traditional lecturing. This workshop will review the nature of active learning and explain why it is so effective. The workshop will focus on five fundamental principles drawn from the science of learning; these principles range from Deep Processing (the more mental effort one expends when...
Overcoming the “busywork” dilemma
Jan. 11, 2021—by Julaine Fowlin, CFT assistant director What is the busywork dilemma? The busywork dilemma is where students perceive that assigned learning activities or assessments are not meaningfully contributing to their learning. Instructors put a lot of effort and time into the design and implementation of these activities, which can be very frustrating. Sometimes activities are...
Adaptive Teaching at Vanderbilt
Jul. 9, 2020—During the university’s June 24th faculty town hall, CFT director Derek Bruff presented several strategies for adaptive teaching and active learning that faculty and other instructors might find useful as they plan their fall courses. While some instructors will be teaching fully online this fall, others may find themselves teaching in classrooms where some students are...
Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt: Derek Bruff and Cryptography Escape Rooms
Mar. 9, 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. I heard about Dr. Derek Bruff’s teaching innovation before I started working at the CFT from my freshman RA. She had been in Bruff’s...
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...
Science Teaching Lunch on more inclusive active learning classrooms: How groups of students are differentially impacted by active learning
Nov. 18, 2019—Join Professor Sara Brownell at a Science Teaching Lunch as she discusses her lab’s work investigating some “off-target” effects of active learning. Professor Brownell writes, “To what extent do students experience college science classrooms differently because of their social identities? How has transitioning traditional lecture courses to active learning spaces impacted students? What can instructors...
Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt: Chris Candelaria and Poster Sessions
Aug. 19, 2019—By Faith Rovenolt, CFT undergraduate intern For the first time in this blog series, I was able to go and see the teaching innovation I would write about. During 2019 Spring semester, I visited the end-of-semester poster sessions held for HODE 3225: Introduction to Public Finance of Education, which is taught by Chris Candelaria. Candelaria...