Course Design Resources
The CFT has produced a wealth of guides and resources that will help you prepare for the new semester. These two in particular will help you get your course off to a great start:
CFT Teaching Guide: Syllabus Design
This guide explores how to produce a syllabus and includes sample syllabus statements on a range of key topics such as inclusion, emergency preparedness, and academic integrity.
Course Development Resource: Assessing Student Needs in Your Course
This resources details how to use a survey at the beginning of the semester to get to know your students and ensure that you are meeting them where they are.
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CiCT
Heartfelt congratulations to the distinguished cohort of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars who successfully completed the Certificate in College Teaching (CiCT) this spring! This achievement signifies a remarkable dedication to advancing pedagogical proficiency within higher education. Throughout this program, CiCT participants immersed themselves in the multifaceted dimensions of teaching, blending artistry and scientific methodologies. They dedicated themselves to refining their instructional techniques and expanding their expertise in higher education. Their unwavering commitment to becoming effective and innovative educators is both admirable and inspiring. By actively engaging in this comprehensive certificate program, participants displayed an exceptional willingness to surpass expectations. They embraced novel pedagogical approaches, integrating them into their instructional practices, thus showcasing a profound dedication to pedagogical excellence.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Teaching and the Graduate School, the Certificate in College Teaching (CiCT) stands as a pivotal platform for Vanderbilt's graduate students and postdocs aspiring to acquire a more profound, active approach to teaching and learning in higher education. This program's emphasis on research on learning methodologies and exemplary teaching practices fortifies the university's ongoing pursuit of excellence in teaching and learning. Tailored for those seeking future careers in higher education teaching, CiCT offers an invaluable foundation to advance pedagogical prowess. For more details on the program, visit the CiCT webpage.
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Finalizing Grades in Brightspace
Starting this month, the Brightspace and Instructional Technology Support team will be posting a monthly blog post highlighting tools and resources that may be useful to our Vanderbilt community. This month, we discuss grades in Brightspace, link to useful guides we have on various frequently asked questions, and outline how to finalize grades at the end of the term. To read more about this topic, click here for this month's blog post.
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New Faculty Teaching Academy @ Vanderbilt program
At the request of Vice Provost Tracey George, a voluntary pilot program entitled the New Faculty Teaching Academy @ Vanderbilt program was piloted to provide comprehensive support to new tenure-track and full-time instructional faculty members as they embark on their professional journeys through broadening their pedagogical knowledge, enhancing their teaching acumen, and fostering a vibrant culture prioritizing student and personal success.
Throughout the fall, the NFTS@V welcomed our new faculty warmly and, via the Open Classroom, provided opportunities for them to meet and learn from the many master teachers on our campus. To further support the faculty, the NFTS@V also held a variety of workshops focusing on understanding Vanderbilt students' changing demographics and their concerns, goals, needs and expectations of faculty as well on ways to utilize principles of backwards design and scaffolding to create engaging, active and focused classes that will foster both students and their success. Lastly, to take some of the mystery out of the tenure and promotion process, we also discussed methods and approaches to creating teaching dossiers for tenure and promotion. In the upcoming spring semester, the NFTS@V will continue supporting our new faculty through workshops on assessment, difficult conversations, classroom management, and opportunities to review one another’s classes.
If any faculty would like to know about the NFTS@V, please feel free to contact Brian DeLevie at the CFT anytime!
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CHPP
This December, the CFT concluded the second year of our Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Program (CHPP) Course Design Seminar in collaboration with the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. In this course, the CFT’s Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Laura Carter-Stone guided participants through discussions on a variety of teaching topics salient for designing effective and inclusive Humanities courses. Among other themes, discussions centered around building content knowledge while developing students’ expertise as scholars and writers, equitable forms of assessment, and humanizing pedagogies responsive to political, social, and personal turmoil. In collaboration with Vanderbilt Writing Studio, participants explored effective approaches to writing instruction that support students through the processes of drafting, revising, and publishing creative and compelling work. Participants also workshopped their ideas for a variety of innovative course assignments, several of which include multimodal forms of public scholarship and digital humanities projects. In a concluding session of the Seminar, participants shared and gave feedback on the syllabi they designed according to the principles of backwards design for courses they will be teaching in Spring 2024. For our final meeting, Instructional Technology Consultant Michael Coley will host a workshop on best practices for designing an engaging and unique Brightspace course homepage. Thank you to the wonderful postdoctoral scholars of the CHPP for their thoughtful engagement this semester, the Robert Penn Warren Center, Vanderbilt Writing Studio, and everyone else who helped make the Course Design Seminar a success!
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Recent CFT Publications
As we hope you know, the CFT staff is dedicated to staying current with the scholarship on teaching and learning (SOTL) and using its many insights to inform our consults, workshops, and other programs. More, the staff is committed to advancing this scholarship and is actively engaged in professional communities that are at the forefront of educational development practice in higher ed. As you near the end of this semester and begin to reflect on teaching practice, we wish to highlight two recent publications by CFT staff and fellows that may be of interest.
The first, by Senior Faculty Fellow, Lily Claiborne (Senior Lecturer in Earth and Environmental Sciences) and her six co-authors, is an article entitled, “Common-sense teaching for the 2020s: Ungrading in response to covid-19 and beyond,” in the September 2023 edition of the Journal of Geoscience Education. The piece explores four approaches to ungrading in the geosciences – mastery and specifications grading, labor-based grading focused on revision, collaborative self-assessment and reflection, and partial ungrading – focusing on their positive impacts and challenges. Among other findings, they reveal the many ways ungrading strategies can support greater equity, inclusion, and belonging for underrepresented and marginalized students.
The second is an article by Interim Director, Joe Bandy (Principal Senior Lecturer in Sociology), and former Graduate Teaching Fellow and current Assistant Professor of Political Science at the U.S. Naval Academy, Brielle Harbin. The article, entitled, “Class Matters: Teaching about Class in Higher Education,” published in the September 2023 edition of Currents in Teaching and Learning, presents research on the many challenges higher education faculty confront when they teach about issues of class inequality in the U.S. and the various techniques they find useful in meeting them. They discuss both cognitive and affective strategies for teaching class, with some reflection on their respective benefits and limitations.
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