The CFT acknowledges these
junior faculty who participated
in the JFTF program this year!
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| Left to Right: Leon Bellan (Mechanical Engineering), Sophie Bjork-James (Anthropology), Brandon Byrd (History), Joshua Caldwell (Mechanical Engineering), Ashley Carse (Human and Organizational Development), Susan Douglas (Leadership, Policy and Organizations), Issam Eido (Religious Studies), Uttam Ghosh (Electrical Engineering & Computer Science), Kejia Hu (Owen), Taylor Johnson (Electrical Engineering & Computer Science), Neil Kelley (Earth & Environmental Sciences), Yolanda McDonald (Human and Organizational Development), Brenda McKenzie (Leadership, Policy and Organization), Sara Safransky (Human and Organizational Development), Elizabeth Self (Teaching & Learning), Sarah Suiter (Human and Organizational Development), and Yuankai Tao (Biomedical Engineering)
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| Junior Faculty Spotlight:
Susan Douglas
Each month, the CFT Newsletter highlights the work of our Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows. This month, Susan Douglas, Leadership, Policy, and Organizations, talks about her teaching philosophy and interests.
I have been in a teaching role at Vanderbilt University since 2014. I started as a part-time assistant professor of the practice in the Psychology and Human Development department from 2014 to 2017 and transitioned to a full-time position when I joined the Leadership, Policy and Organizations department in 2017. In addition to teaching at the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels, I also direct the master’s program in Leadership and Organizational Performance. My approach to teaching and mentoring students is informed by my experience collaborating with researchers, leaders, and practitioners to use training and feedback interventions to improve health and behavioral health care by supporting clinical decision-making and client-centered communication. Specifically, I believe that great teaching can happen through strong partnerships, meaningful linkages between theory and application, and providing actionable feedback. First, to build strong partnerships, I believe we must be willing to be wrong, to take risks, and to experiment in order to connect with students. I also believe it is through those connections that we inspire and motivate students to not only engage with new concepts or theories, but also to grow in their own willingness to experiment, make mistakes, and learn from feedback. Second, because successful innovation requires a strong background in theory, I want my students to be armed with both theory and skills to sustain their evidence-based practice after encountering the everyday realities of working in the professional world. Third, I make frequent use of case-based examples and simulation through role plays, with the goal of creating opportunities for real-time feedback in the classroom. I ask my students to notice and reflect on not only their thoughts but also their feelings in relation to class content, to help them surface any potential limitations to their engagement with the material. I encourage them to stretch beyond a siloed understanding to integrate and synthesize information from a variety of sources and disciplines.
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| Top 3 Brightspace Improvements of the 2018-2019 School Year
Every month, Brightspace will release new features and updates. You can get a comprehensive view of the updates here, but we also compiled a year-end-round-up blog post will give you a quick overview of what’s new on Brightspace in the last year.
The three recent updates that we think might be most useful for you are:
1) Rubrics Grading and Feedback in User Progress
2) New Assignment Types
3) Student Syllabus Downloads
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This May, our Blended and Online Learning Design (BOLD) Fellows shared their projects with the Vanderbilt community in a celebration at the Center for Teaching. Fellows from fields as diverse as mechanical engineering, hearing and speech sciences, psychology, and women and gender studies presented the results of their evaluations of online modules they created to address a teaching problem in a course taught at Vanderbilt. As a result of some of these projects, students were able to watch instructional videos about velocity, participate in web-based chats about school policy, create websites about non-profits, practice differentiating between commonly confused vowel sounds, and learn APA style. The Fellows’ evaluations indicated that often, students were more engaged, more confident in the material, and more knowledgeable. To learn more about their project, see the
BOLD gallery.
The CFT thanks the presenters and their faculty mentors:
Pietra Bruni
(working with David Schlundt)
Janine Christiano
(working with Sara Safransky)
Nathalie Covington
(working with Rima Abou-Khalil)
Chelsey Dyer
(working with Stacy Simplican)
Amberly Dzieskinski
(working with Will Doyle)
Brandt Gibson
(working with Simon Darroch)
Andres Martinez
(working with Kenneth Frampton)
Ian Morton
(working with Melanie Schuele)
Lam Pham
(working with Xiu Cravens)
Cara Singer and Dillon Pruett
(working with Robin Jones)
Finally, we offer a special shout-out to outgoing BOLD graduate teaching fellow Robert Marx!
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| Science Teaching Essentials, a New Book by the CFT’s Cynthia Brame
We are excited to announce a new book from CFT associate director Cynthia Brame, associate director here at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching. Science Teaching Essentials: Short Guides to Good Practice (Academic Press, 2019) provides research-based strategies and resources for addressing common teaching challenges in the sciences, health professions, and engineering. Written for current and future faculty, Science Teaching Essentials features short, stand-alone chapters on topics such as inclusive teaching, course design, active learning, group work, lecturing, writing exams, and rubrics. Whether you’re just getting started teaching in the sciences, revising a course you’ve taught for years, or interested in adopting evidence-based pedagogies, you’ll find Cynthia’s book a practical and easy-to-use guide.
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Cynthia Brame is an associate director at the Center for Teaching and a senior lecturer in biological sciences. Her work at Vanderbilt focuses on helping faculty and graduate students identify, adopt, and develop evidence-based teaching practices in and out of the classroom. She leads our Blended and Online Design (BOLD) Fellows program and the Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows program, and she’s the CFT’s liaison to the sciences, nursing, and engineering. Cynthia is active in the scholarship of teaching and learning, regularly writing teaching guides for the CFT’s website, publishing studies and literature reviews in discipline-based educational research, and editing for the journal CBE—Life Sciences Education. Her new book builds on and is informed by all of this work, and I’m really proud to share it with our campus and the larger higher education community.
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| Conversations on Teaching Digital Literacies
How can we prepare students for a world where they both consume and produce media in a variety of digital forms? During the past academic year, the CFT hosted a learning community that explored ways to teach digital literacies, the skills and competencies students need to thoughtfully learn, participate in, and contribute to our digital and multimedia culture.
Thanks to Chelsea and to our 18 thoughtful panelists for a rich set of ideas and examples for teaching digital literacies.
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| Blog Series on Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt
The CFT recently launched a blog series called Teaching Innovations at Vanderbilt, authored by CFT undergraduate intern Faith Roven. Faith interviews faculty members about interesting approaches they use in their teaching, providing useful ideas and a bit of student perspective. Check out the posts on the nine instructors—Corbette Doyle, Allison Leich Hilbun, Sarah Suiter, Ravi Duddu, Daniela D’Eugenio, Mary Lauren Pfieffer, Anna Richmond, Neil Kelley, and Jenn Bradham—who have been featured this spring, and look for new posts when the series resumes in August.
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| Day of the Documents: Spend the Day Creating Your Academic Job Market Materials
The Graduate School and Center for Teaching invite Vanderbilt graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to attend a day-long event to help participants prepare for the academic job market. A series of mini-workshops focusing on important job markets documents will be followed by time to draft these materials and/or to make edits to existing drafts. Participants will also be able to engage in one-on-one consultations to get immediate feedback on these documents. In addition, a panel of new Vanderbilt faculty fresh off the job market will occur during lunch to talk about their experiences on the job market and give helpful advice.
The Center for Teaching will provide mini-workshops covering how to write your teaching philosophy statement, diversity statement and teaching effectiveness document. The Graduate School will provide mini-workshops covering how to format your C.V. and write your cover letter and research statement. Continental breakfast, lunch, and snacks will be provided throughout the day.
Open to Graduate Students and Postdocs
Date: Thursday, August 15, 2019
Time: 8:30-4:30 pm
Location: Heard Library Community Room
Space is limited! Please REGISTER HERE for some or all of the event.
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