‘STEM teaching’
Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt: Chad Carpenter and Multi-Step Class Problem Solving
Apr. 6, 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. In teaching quantitative courses, it can be easy to fall into the trap of creating plug-and-chug problems for students. However, Chad Carpenter,...
Teaching labs remotely
Apr. 3, 2020—by Cynthia Brame, CFT associate director As we start to prepare for teaching summer courses online, some instructors are making the shift toward teaching labs online. As many lab courses are designed to be about learning from hands-on, messy, real-world exploration, this shift can be a challenge. Use your goals as your guide One of...
Town Hall: Branches from the Same Tree: The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Science, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education
Jan. 30, 2020—On Feb 4th in the Student Life Center, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and Vanderbilt University will hold a Town Hall – Branches from the Same Tree: The integration of the humanities and arts with science, engineering, and medicine in higher education. The town hall will be held on Feb 4th with a...
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,...
Student motivation journal club: If it’s bigger than you, the boring is worth it: the power of self-transcending motivation on menial tasks
Oct. 28, 2019—By Faith Rovenolt, CFT undergraduate intern, and Heather Fedesco, CFT Assistant Director Unfortunately, it’s hard to avoid the boring in learning. Inevitably, even in the most exciting fields, students need to learn and do a boring, menial, or repetitive task. In STEM, this is especially true. You can’t learn to plot the path of a...
Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt: Garrett Tate, Lily Claiborne, and student analysis of real-world data
Sep. 30, 2019—By Faith Rovenolt, CFT undergraduate intern It’s pretty hard to not find volcanoes exciting. That’s part of the reason why I think a new active learning activity in EES-1510: The Dynamic Earth: Introduction to Geological Sciences, is so cool. The other reason I think it’s amazing is that it represents a great example of an...
Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt: Dana Kan and Low-Stakes Retrieval Midterms
Sep. 3, 2019—By Faith Rovenolt, CFT undergraduate intern I love interviewing professors for this blog series; every time I do it, I learn something new. Speaking with Dr. Dana Kan, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, I learned that classroom acoustics constitute an important aspect of the...
Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt: Neil Kelley, Jennifer Bradham and Class Simulations
May. 27, 2019—By Faith Rovenolt, CFT undergraduate intern Neil Kelley teaches EES 1030L: Oceanography Lab, assisted by his TAs, Michaela Peterson and Jennifer Bradham. I was able to speak with Kelley and Bradham about a specific lab that, quite frankly, made me want to take the course just so I could be a part of it. And...
Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt: Mary Lauren Pfieffer, Anna Richmond, and Pediatric Simulations
May. 13, 2019—By Faith Rovenolt, CFT undergraduate intern Teaching Advanced Practice Nursing in Primary Care of the Child is a challenge: students need to understand a range of concepts for caring for children and adolescents across a large developmental spectrum, building knowledge that has cognitive, psychosocial, and motor components. Mary Lauren Pfieffer, Instructor in Nursing, and Anna...
Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt: Ravindra Duddu and Cyberlearning Tools
Apr. 15, 2019—By Faith Rovenolt, CFT undergraduate intern I had the privilege to sit down with Dr. Ravindra Duddu, an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering who recently won an NSF CAREER grant that focuses on understanding Antarctic ice sheet fracture. To understand this phenomenon of iceberg calving, the grant proposes applying engineering tools and techniques...