GradSTEP 2006: Making Learning Happen

January 21, 2006 8:30am-3:00pm
Featheringill Hall
Plenary Speaker: Dennis Jacobs, Vice President and Associate Provost, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Notre Dame

Jacobs, a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry since 1988, is Vice President and Associate Provost for undergraduate studies at the University of Notre Dame. Selected as the 2002 U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities, he has garnered a national reputation for innovative pedagogy in the classroom and for significant contributions to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.  Dr. Jacobs earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University and two B.S. degrees from the University of California at Irvine.  While sustaining a dynamic laboratory research program, he brings the same investigative spirit into the classroom – a place where reflective examination of student learning informs teaching practice.

Registration - 8:30am - 9:00am

Session I – 9:00am-10:15am

Motivating Non-Majors in Introductory Courses
Facilitator: Derek Bruff, Assistant Director of the CFT
How can you motivate your students to learn in your discipline, particularly students who are taking your course as a requirement and may not be that interested in your discipline?  To what extent can we as teachers motivate our students, and how much responsibility do we have for doing so?  What strategies can we employ to motivate our students, and in what ways do we inadvertently de-motivate our students?  In this session, we will attempt to answer these questions by learning what educational research tells us about student motivation and by hearing from a few teachers who have had success in motivating their students.

Learner-Centered Course Design
Facilitator: Kat Baker, CFT Graduate Teaching Fellow
Whether you are creating a course for the first time, or are interested in revising a course you are currently teaching, this workshop will help you understand how to focus on student learning as you plan a course.  It will provide an overview of the basic elements of course design, with an emphasis on creating learning goals for your students.  We will also consider how to choose teaching strategies and learning activities that will move students toward meeting those goals, and what type of assessments will demonstrate that the goals are being met. 

Talking about Teaching in Academic Job Interviews:
Facilitator: Patricia Armstrong, Assistant Director of the CFT
While graduate students receive ample opportunity and encouragement to present their doctoral research in forums such as departmental colloquia or national conferences, they rarely talk about teaching and pedagogy in such public settings. As a result, many graduate students lack the preparation for speaking about their teaching in compelling terms when it counts the most: the job interview.  This workshop, designed for those currently on the job market or soon to be so, will give participants the chance to begin--or refine--that preparation and provide tools and resources for continuing that preparation up to the campus visit. 

Learning by Discussing
Facilitator: Susan Crisafulli, CFT Graduate Teaching Fellow
Effective discussions can provoke profound learning, yet they also are particularly challenging to create and sustain, no matter what your discipline is or how long you have been teaching.  We will use videotaped examples of discussion classes as case studies to explore such questions as: How can discussions promote student learning?  How can I get a good discussion going, and keep it going?  What can I do if a discussion falls apart?  How can silence be productive?  How I do I keep students who dominate, or withdraw from, discussion from negatively affecting the learning of their classmates?  How can I assess whether my students are learning anything in discussion?

Plenary (10:30pm - 11:45pm):
"Seeing the Classroom through a Different Lens - Engaging in a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning"
Dennis Jacobs, Vice President and Associate Provost, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Notre Dame

Session II – 12:30pm - 1:45pm

Power, Privilege and Learning in the College Classroom
Facilitators: Linda Manning, Director, Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center; Allison Pingree, Director, Center for Teaching
This session will explore the following questions:  What is privilege, and how does it shape the kinds of learning that occurs (or doesn’t occur) in the college classroom?  What kinds of inclusion and exclusion emerge in the dynamics of our classes (across a variety of disciplines), and what are their costs and benefits?  What are concrete strategies for creating more inclusive and equitable forms of teaching and learning?

Assessment of Student Evaluations
At the end of the semester, student evaluations can be a valuable self-assessment tool for the instructor. They can also seem like an oblique mass of comments and criticisms with little beneficial information. This session will highlight skills helpful for organizing, analyzing and employing evaluation forms as insights into student learning. These techniques will help instructors identify effective teaching skills, adapt future course goals, and write self-evaluations for course administrators, teaching portfolios, or department chairs.

Engaging in a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Facilitators: Dennis Jacobs, Vice President and Associate Provost, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Notre Dame
Effective teaching is elusive without investigating the student learning that ensues.   The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) invites all instructors to consider their students’ learning as a subject of inquiry – appropriate for study and discourse.  In this workshop, participants will explore how a SoTL investigation can be designed around a compelling and generative question within their own discipline.

Laboratory-Based Learning
Facilitators: Davon Ferrara, Graduate Student, Physics and Astronomy, Jennifer Osterhage, Graduate Student, Biological Sciences, Susan DeSensi, Graduate Student, Chemistry and Jeff Johnston, Assistant Director of the CFT
Panelists: Ken Schriver, Senior Lecturer, Physics and Astronomy, Steve Baskauf, Senior Lecturer, Biological Sciences, and Adam List, Senior Lecturer, Chemistry
Laboratory classes are an important part of most science courses at Vanderbilt in providing an opportunity for students to explore course material in a “hands-on” way. Leading a lab session has particular challenges and opportunities that differ from those in a classroom setting.  Join us for an informal conversation with faculty and graduate students interested in improving learning in laboratory based courses. Topics for discussion will include designing labs to identify student misperceptions, coordinating the instructional team (faculty and TAs), grading, learning from course evaluations, and more. We intend this workshop to be interactive, so bring along your problems and ideas.  For graduate students and post-docs in science and engineering of all experience levels, who are looking to make the most out of teaching and learning in the laboratory setting.

Session III - 2:00pm - 3:00pm

Why Learning Styles Matter
Facilitator: Patricia Armstrong, Assistant Director of the CFT
In this interactive workshop, we'll not only look at a variety of different learning styles rubrics, but also discuss the ways in which learning styles might have an impact on our classrooms.  How do different learning styles manifest themselves in student work, in and out of the classroom?  Once we know more about our students' learning styles, what changes do we need to make to how we teach?  Should we try to teach to all learning styles or ask students to adapt the way they learn to the way we teach?  We invite all GradSTEP participants who are currently wondering or who've ever wondered why their students "aren't getting it" to explore these questions with us.

Teaching Effectively while Dissertating
Facilitator: Susan Crisafulli, CFT Graduate Teaching Fellow
Writing a dissertation and teaching are both so time-consuming that it is often difficult to do them well simultaneously.  What strategies are there for “making learning happen” both for our students and for ourselves?  In this session a multidisciplinary panel of those who have managed to balance teaching and dissertating will share their experiences and perspectives.

Teaching from Someone Else’s Syllabus
Facilitator: Jeff Sheehan, CFT Graduate Teaching Fellow
Early in their careers, faculty and graduate students often inherit syllabi from predecessors or supervisors.  These documents can help a new teacher to situate a class relative to departmental expectations, but they can also become obstacles to student learning when someone else’s syllabus conflicts with your efforts to help your students learn.  In this session, we will converse about strategies for resolving these conflicts in ways that foreground the importance of student learning.

Using Problem Sets in Quantitative Disciplines
Facilitator: Derek Bruff, Assistant Director of the CFT
Problem sets are assigned in a variety of disciplines, including mathematics, economics, engineering, and any discipline with a quantitative component.  How can problem sets be used to help students learn disciplinary content and more general problem-solving skills?  How can problem sets help us determine whether our students are learning what we want them to?  In this session, we will see how grading rubrics and other techniques can help us be more effective at creating problem sets, helping students complete problem sets in office hours and other settings, and grading problem sets. 

For information on upcoming events, please see gradSTEP. For information on past events, please see our gradSTEP Archive.

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