From the Director
My daughters and I spent a few days in Washington, DC, this summer. One highlight of the trip was watching my nine-year-old explore the National Building Museum. She likes to build dollhouses out of cereal boxes and craft sticks and hot glue, so a museum devoted to the built environment was her happy place. It was a joy to see the smile on her face as she learned about Frank Lloyd Wright and the Burj Khalifa and timber construction. Not all of the students in our courses this fall will bring the same kind of enthusiasm my daughter brought to the National Building Museum. Sometimes, a student just has to take statistics. However, there is a kind of deep learning that can happen when we help our students see themselves and their interests in the courses we teach. As you plan your fall courses, I encourage you to take advantage of CFT programs and services to help you design deep learning experiences for your students. The CFT’s Just-in-Time Teaching Conference on August 18 and 22 offers workshops on inclusive teaching, syllabus design, and creative assignments, among other topics. On September 5 and 6, the CFT is organizing Open Dores: Two Days of Teaching Visits to provide members of the Vanderbilt teaching community the opportunity to observe and discuss each other’s teaching. The CFT also offers a range of individual Teaching Consultations for instructors interested in reflecting on and refining their teaching practices in particular courses. And we are available to provide Teaching Workshops for departments, schools, and other units on particular teaching topics upon request. Technology often plays a role in supporting student learning at Vanderbilt, and we have a busy fall planned for our educational technology resources. The CFT supports Brightspace, Vanderbilt’s new course management system, as well as Top Hat, our new classroom response system. We will soon launch Season 3 of Leading Lines, the podcast on edtech we produce with a few partners around campus. And I would like to welcome Erica Brandon, our new Instructional Technologist, to the CFT. She comes to us from the University of Colorado-Boulder and will help provide Brightspace support in the afternoons and evenings. August is always a busy time of year. I hope you’ll take a few moments this month to consider the kinds of learning experiences you would like your students to have this fall. And let us know if we can help! Derek Bruff, PhD
Director, Vanderbilt Center for Teaching
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It’s never too late to make a good decision, right? Although planning fall courses starts long before the start of classes, we recognize that many instructors are still making course design and implementation decisions right up to the wire. That’s why we’re offering a variety of teaching workshops for Vanderbilt instructors on August 18th and 22nd, right before the first day of the fall semester. Topics at the CFT’s Just-in-Time Teaching Conference include: Top Hat Drop-In Sessions
Date: Friday, August, 18th
Times: 11:00-1:00pm and 1:00-3:00pm
Location: Center for Teaching
Facilitator: Kara Dingboom, Enterprise Account Manager at Top Hat NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED
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Teaching Inclusively to Diverse Groups Date: Friday, August 18th
Time: 11:30am-1:00pm Session includes lunch
Location: Center for Teaching Classroom
Facilitator: Joe Bandy, CFT Assistant Director
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| Intro to Brightspace Course Management System Date: Friday, August 18th
Time: 2:00-3:30pm Session includes refreshments
Location: Center for Teaching Classroom
Facilitator: Lee Scarborough, Instructional Technologist
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What’s in Your Syllabus? Date: Tuesday, August 22nd
Time: 9:00-10:30am Session includes breakfast
Location: Center for Teaching Classroom
Facilitator: Cynthia Brame, CFT Assistant Director
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Presentation Renovation: Choosing The Right Tools Date: Tuesday, August 22nd
Time: 11:30am-1:00pm Session includes lunch
Location: Center for Teaching Classroom
Facilitator: Rhett McDaniel, CFT Educational Technologist
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Small Changes, Big Results Date: Tuesday, August 22nd
Time: 1:30-2:45pm Session includes refreshments
Location: Center for Teaching Classroom
Facilitator: Vivian Finch, CFT Assistant Director
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Students as Producers Creative Assignments for Deep Learning Date: Tuesday, August 22nd
Time: 3:00-4:00pm Session includes refreshments
Location: Center for Teaching Classroom
Facilitator: Derek Bruff, CFT Director
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| Vanderbilt has a NEW Classroom Response System
Top Hat is the first classroom response system to be adopted campus-wide at Vanderbilt. Top Hat will be available to faculty, students, and staff across campus starting July 2017. Instructors teaching with “clickers” are invited to consider Top Hat for in-class student polling. This virtual introductory session will get you up and running with the new system.
Introduction to Top Hat Webinar Date: Friday, August 11th
Time:10:00am
Location: An email with the link for you to join the webinar will be sent prior to the event.
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Teaching at Vanderbilt New Faculty Orientation At the beginning of every academic year, the Center for Teaching hosts “Teaching at Vanderbilt,” an orientation for junior and senior faculty new to Vanderbilt. The orientation features an introduction to strategies for launching a successful teaching career at Vanderbilt, with concurrent sessions on a variety of practical topics. Teaching at Vanderbilt is an opportunity for new faculty to meet each other and to learn how the Center for Teaching can support them throughout their Vanderbilt careers.
Date: Thursday, August 17th
Time: 1:00-5:00pm
Location: Buttrick Hall
See orientation page for details
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CFT Proudly Welcomes the
2017 Cohort of
Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows!
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Left to Right: Brett Byrum (Biomedical Engineering), Christopher Caldelaria (Leadership, Policy, and Organizations), Teresa Dunleavy (Teaching & Learning), Nicolette Kostiw (Center for Latin American Studies), Kanah Lewallen (Nursing), Shihong Lin (Civil and Environmental Engineering), Michiru Lowe (Asian Studies), Sara Mayeux (Law), Natasha McClure (Nursing), Marzia Milazzo (English), Mary Lauren Pfieffer (Nursing), Jannyse Starks (Nursing), Claudine Taaffe (African American Diaspora Studies), and Carol Ziegler (Nursing)
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The Junior Faculty Teaching Fellowship provides its recipients with a structured faculty development experience complete with consultations, course design seminar, peer education, and senior faculty mentorship. This program not only helps its fellows develop an understanding of best teaching practices across the disciplines, but also assists them in their professional growth by helping them hone their abilities to balance teaching and research, improve their materials for review, and build a collaborative culture of teaching at Vanderbilt.
Over the coming months, the CFT newsletter will highlight the work of this year's Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows. Each month two fellows will be featured discussing their teaching philosophies and interests.
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| Faculty Learning Community for Environmental Course Development
Proposals are invited from faculty who wish to participate in a learning community at the Center for Teaching in 2017-2018 focused on course design for new courses in the Environmental and Sustainability Studies minor. Our plan is to have five meetings over the course of the year, culminating in a final celebration of the minor with a speaker and a public presentation of the learning community’s course development work. This project builds on the experience we have supporting faculty in Environmental and Sustainability Studies via the Cumberland Project, but in a different form focused more on course design and on gaps we can fill in the ESS curriculum. We are specifically interested in proposals for upper-level (3000-level) courses that can count for the minor. Faculty who complete the learning community meetings and course development will receive $750 in support from the Program in Environmental and Sustainability Studies. Support can include travel to present an environmentally related paper at a meeting or to hire a current graduate or undergraduate student to help on the faculty member’s own environmentally related research and/or environmental course development (with expiration date of Aug. 15, 2018). Additional funding from the Program in Environmental and Sustainability Studies is also available for faculty who wish to bring in guest speakers for their courses or departments. Proposals for new environmental course development should come from tenure-line faculty or senior lecturers and may be from all schools; faculty should plan on submitting the new course proposal by the end of the spring semester of 2018. Please send a brief proposal (a paragraph is sufficient) that describes the course to be developed to Joe Bandy and Teresa Goddu by August 23, 2017.
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August Brightspace Workshops and Drop-in Hours
In these hands-on workshops, participants will learn about Vanderbilt’s new course management system, Brightspace. Bring your own laptop computer so you can explore and build content in our test course! You will learn to confidently navigate the different areas of a Brightspace course; post, edit, and copy content for students using a variety of tools; and communicate with students about important Brightspace tools.
Workshops topic include:
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| Vanderbilt Instructors Open Their Classoom Doors on
September
5th and 6th
Would you like to watch one of your colleagues teach to see how they manage the classroom, engage students, or address challenging subjects? Do you ever feel like you toil in private to learn how to teach? You’re not alone. Too often in higher education we instructors do not have the opportunity to watch and discuss each other’s teaching, and therefore we struggle in what Lee Shulman has called, “pedagogical solitude.” The Center for Teaching has long worked to change this isolation by creating occasions for pedagogical community. For a second year, we are proud to offer two intensive days of teaching visits. On September 5th and 6th, classes taught by some of the most well-respected and awarded teachers across Vanderbilt’s many disciplines will open their classroom doors to faculty and graduate students. A complete list of open classes will be announced mid August.
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CFT ANNOUNCES NEW GRADUATE TEACHING FELLOWS!
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| Left to Right: Sara Beck (Psychological Sciences), Justin Hubbard (History), Kylie Korsnack (English), and AmieThurber (Human & Organizational Development),
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| The Center for Teaching is excited to announce the Graduate Teaching Fellows for 2017-18. GTFs provide a variety of services for Vanderbilt’s graduate, post docs and professional students, including one-on-one consultations on teaching issues and professional development, syllabus and course design, interpreting and responding to student evaluations, writing teaching statements, and engaging techniques such as discussion leading, lecturing, and using technology in the classroom. To schedule an appointment with a GTF, please call 322-7290.
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