Teaching in Tumultous Times
Despite our aspirations for our classrooms to be home to open inquiry and reasoned, informed debate, sometimes the intensely traumatic nature of current events can overwhelm us or our students. Whether it is recurring incidents of mass violence, the persistence of social or environmental crises, or polarized political debate in our public sphere, just to name three, students may experience deep-seated emotions that can lead to disengagement from the learning process or reactive conflicts that can be unproductive or harmful. We at the CFT know that the current moment is a particularly stressful time in which tensions are high, and all educators are in need of improving our strategies to help transform these reactions into moments of growth, individually and collectively.
Towards this end, we have several events and resources that will prove useful.
First, we will have the workshop mentioned below, “Transforming Classroom Conflict into Learning,” with Dana Nelson (English), Alan Wiseman (Political Science and Law), and Allison Anoll (Political Science), Monday, November 13th, from 12:00 to 1:15pm at the CFT (please register here).
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CFT Resources Spotlight
In the second half of the semester, you might be thinking about the most effective and efficient ways to assess the good work your students are doing. The CFT has guides to help:
CFT Teaching Guides: Writing Science Exams and Assessing Student Learning
These two guides provide guidance, ideas, and resources for instructors creating a range of different kinds of assessments.
Brightspace Resources: Grades and Rubrics
Take advantage of our collection of on-demand resources on the Brightspace grading tools. With a bit of investment in setup, these tools can help you give better feedback in less time. If you need some help figuring out which grading tools will work for you, email us at brightspace@vanderbilt.edu to chat!
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Brightspace Workshops
The Center for Teaching will be offering a workshop on grading and using the gradebook in your Brightspace course as the semester comes to a close. If you are interested in attending, please register here.
Date: Tues, November 14th
Time: 11:00 am- 12:00 pm
Where: Virtual - Zoom
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Giving Students Feedback
At this time in the semester when students are handing in an assortment of assignments, it is important to provide meaningful feedback to guide their growth. Effective feedback can come in a variety of forms, but students find it most helpful when it is educative about what they are doing well and not so well, when it is timely, when it is personalized as much as possible, and when it provides models or examples of improved performance. Given that effective feedback is often in tension with efficient feedback, and time is of the essence for faculty and students alike, there are several techniques that may make feedback timelier. These include using rubrics, possibly designed with students, that have pre-prepared language for different levels of performance on different criteria. One might also use self- or peer-feedback processes to both empower students in their own assessment, while also lessening the time faculty need to give to each assignment. Lastly, one might look for common concerns or suggestions across a class’s assignments and give it to the students as a group, rather than in multiple individual assignments. For more helpful advice on giving effective and efficient feedback you might review this guide from the MIT Teaching + Learning Lab.
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HIPS Workshops
The CFT’s High Impact Practices workshop series continues in November with the following events (in chronological order). Some are coming up quickly, so please register as soon as you can:
Developing Collaborative Assignments
Research indicates that collaborative assignments and projects can promote meaningful learning by inviting students to address complex problems while engaging the insights and perspectives of others. In this workshop, participants will develop an outline for a collaborative group project or assignment that they plan to deploy in the spring semester. Co-facilitated by Boni Yraguen (PhD, Mechanical Engineering) and Laura Carter-Stone (PhD, Teaching and Learning), participants will explore a broad range of possible formats and methods of assessment for assignments from STEM, Humanities, and Social Sciences-oriented classes. Participants will work in disciplinary peer groups to identify where this type of assignment would fit into their course, craft learning objectives, assessment methods, and other features of their collaborative project or assignment to support student learning. If you are interested in attending, please register here.
Facilitators: Laura Carter-Stone (Postdoctoral Fellow, CFT) & Boni Yraguen (Instructional Consultant, CFT)
Date: Tues, November 7th
Time: 1:00 – 2:00 pm
Where: Center for Teaching Classroom, 1114 19th Ave South, 3rd Floor
Transforming Classroom Conflict into Learning
In these times of political polarization and contentious dialogue throughout our society, it is not uncommon for educators across the curriculum to experience, or at least fear, student conflict in the classroom. Whether it is due to differences sparked by ideology, identity, or simple intellectual disagreement, student conflicts may stray beyond productive debate into highly reactive and harmful interactions. These moments hold the possibility of, at the very least, disrupting classroom cultures of trust necessary for critical learning, and at the very most, leading to traumas for students and faculty. This workshop will focus on strategies that educators may use, both to prevent unproductive conflict, and failing that, to resolve and transform them into developmental experiences for all. To help in this work will be faculty who have extensive research expertise and/or teaching experience in navigating contentious topics, Dana Nelson (Nancy Perot Chair of English and Professor of American Studies), Alan Wiseman (Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair in Political Science and Professor of Law), and Allison Anoll (Assistant Professor of Political Science). If you are interested in attending, please register here.
Facilitator: Joe Bandy (Interim Director, CFT)
Date: Mon, November 13th
Time: 12:00-1:15pm
Where: Center for Teaching Classroom, 1114 19th Ave South, 3rd Floor
Interdisciplinary Teaching
Are you teaching a subject that is inter- or multi-disciplinary and somewhat outside of your comfort zone? Are you team teaching a course with someone from another discipline and adjusting to their discipline’s ways of thinking or “signature pedagogies”? Are you hoping that your students develop a thoroughly multi-disciplinary understanding of a topic, but not sure how you might help them to do so? In this workshop, we will help you to define what interdisciplinarity means to you, and how you might structure it for your teaching context. We also hope to help you respond to these teaching challenges so that you, your teaching partners, and your students can benefit from a more dynamic multidisciplinary form of teaching. If you are interested in attending, please register here.
Facilitator: Elizabeth Meadows (Associate Director, Robert Penn Warren Center) and Joe Bandy (Interim Director, CFT)
Date: Wed, November 15th
Time: 12:00-1:00pm
Where: Center for Teaching Classroom, 1114 19th Ave South, 3rd Floor
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