Workshops & Working Groups

Throughout the school year, the Center organizes workshops and on a variety of teaching topics and issues for Vanderbilt faculty, graduate and professional students, post-doctoral fellows, staff, and others.

See also our list of related programs--relevant workshops, conferences and other events being offered by other organizations around campus. For information on past workshops, please see our workshop archive.

Interested in creating a workshop/working group or having a consultation?

Fall 2008 Workshops

Teaching Workshops

These workshops focus on issues particularly relevant to first-time teachers. Drawing on research-based approaches, workshop facilitators will enable participants to identify and address common challenges and opportunities in their teaching practice. 

Conversations on Teaching

Conversations on Teaching focus on emergent pedagogical issues in an informal, roundtable format.  Typically co-sponsored with other campus partners, these sessions often begin with perspectives from panelists, and then open up to a larger group discussion.

Junior Faculty Teaching Series

The workshops in the Junior Faculty Teaching Series are designed to help tenure-track junior faculty members develop and refine strategies for effective teaching.  The workshops will feature award-winning senior faculty as facilitators and will be engaging, focused, practical, and relatively brief, providing a high return on the investment of your time.

Tuesday, September 16
Writing a Teaching Statement (a Teaching Workshop)
Facilitator: Erin Rehel, Graduate Teaching Fellow, CFT

What is a teaching statement?  What purpose does it serve on the job market and beyond? How to create such a statement?  In this workshop, participants will identify core teaching values and determine how those values influence their teaching practice (current or anticipated) so that they can produce engaging teaching statements.

Wednesday, September 17th
Designing and Delivering Effective Lectures (Junior Faculty Teaching Series)
Co-Facilitated by Marshall Eakin, Professor of History and Derek Bruff, Assistant Director, CFT

Designing and delivering lectures that are well-prepared, well-organized, communicate ideas clearly, and engage students is no easy task.  Given the role of lectures in university teaching, however, it is an important one.  In this session, we’ll discuss elements of effective lecturing, including preparation, public speaking skills, adding interactive elements to lectures, and the proper use of PowerPoint.

Tuesday, September 23
Conversations on Evidence-Based Teaching: Teaching and Evidence (a Conversation on Teaching)
Co-sponsored by the Center for Ethics

Panelists:
Jeffrey Schall, Ingram Professor of Neuroscience
Mitchell Seligson, Centennial Professor of Political Science
Arleen Tuchman, Professor of History and Director, Center for Medicine, Health and Society
Moderator:
Patricia Armstrong, Assistant Director, CFT

This session will invite faculty and other participants to discuss what constitutes evidence in a variety of fields of inquiry.  Panelists will open the session by addressing the following questions: How do you approach students whose beliefs are directly challenged by some of the evidence in the field? What kind of assignments do you give to students to help them develop their understanding of the nature and use of evidence?  What do you consider to be some of the most controversial evidence that our fields are producing? Following a short presentation by each of our panelists, the conversation will be open to those attending.

Thursday, September 25
Discussion Leading (a Teaching Workshop)
Facilitator: Maria Ebner, Graduate Teaching Fellow, CFT

Effective discussions can provoke profound learning, yet they are particularly challenging to create and sustain. This workshop will pursue strategies for getting discussion going and for keeping it lively.   Questions to be considered include:

• How can I ask good questions? 
• How can I respond to students in a way that encourages their further discussion?
• How can I encourage students to share diverse viewpoints with both respect and candor?
• What can I do if discussion seems to fall flat or fall apart?
• What can I do about students who dominate or withdraw from discussion?

Tuesday, September 30th
Constructing and Grading Effective Assignments (Junior Faculty Teaching Series)
Co-Facilitated by Malcolm Getz, Associate Professor of Economics and Derek Bruff, Assistant Director, CFT

How can you create assignments for your students that help them develop important skills and knowledge?  How can you establish grading criteria that enable accurate, fair, and efficient grading?  And how can you help your students engage with your assignments in productive ways?  In this session, we’ll discuss ways to construct and grade effective, engaging assignments that align with goals for student learning.

Wednesday, October 1
Teaching Certificate Information Session
Facilitator: Patricia Armstrong, Assistant Director, CFT

The Teaching Certificate program, co-sponsored by the CFT and the Graduate School, is designed to help graduate and professional students and post-docs develop and refine their teaching skills.  This information session will provide an introduction to the program and give attendees a chance to ask questions about how they might begin.

Wednesday, October 8th
Gathering and Responding to Mid-Semester Student Feedback (Junior Faculty Teaching Series)
Co-Facilitated by Georgene Troseth, Associate Professor of Psychology and Derek Bruff, Assistant Director, CFT

Why wait until the end of the semester to gather feedback from your students about their experiences learning in your courses?  Now is the time to find out what aspects of your course are helping your students learn and what aspects might be changed to enhance their learning and to make “course corrections.”  In this session, we’ll discuss strategies for gathering and making sense of mid-semester student feedback.

Wednesday, October 15
Presenting with Confidence: Strategies for Effective Public Speaking (a Teaching Workshop)
Facilitator: Juan Rojas, Graduate Teaching Fellow, CFT

In our academic and professional lives, instructors are called on to give presentations in a variety of formats and for a variety of audiences: conference papers, class lectures, research presentations, lab overviews, etc.  In this session, participants will analyze what characterizes effective presentations, as well as the common challenges faced in giving them. Participants will also develop strategies and plans for upcoming presentations.

This event is designed for graduate and professional students and post-doctoral fellows.

Thursday, October 16th
Technology Open House

Drop in and learn about teaching with classroom response systems ("clickers"), tablet PCs, collaboration software that runs on student laptops, and flexible learning spaces. Brief presentations begin on the half-hour with discussion and hands-on demos following.

Wednesday, October 22
Teaching with Clickers (a Conversation on Teaching)
Facilitator: Derek Bruff, Assistant Director, CFT, author of Teaching with Classroom Response Systems

Classroom response systems ("clickers") are technologies that enable teachers to rapidly collect and analyze student responses to multiple-choice questions during class. These systems can be used to effectively engage and assess students, particularly in large classes. The Center for Teaching is interested in supporting faculty use of clickers in pedagogically effective ways. To that end, the Center will be conducting a workshop on teaching with clickers as part of Vanderbilt's "DigitalVU" month.

The 80-minute workshop is intended for instructors not using clickers or relatively new to using clickers and will be held in the Center's new location. The workshop will explore questions and activities that make the most of these systems, as well as solutions to common challenges involved in teaching with clickers. During a portion of the workshop, participants will share and discuss ideas for clicker questions and activities in discipline-based breakout groups, so if you've used clickers yourself, bring a few ideas to share with your colleagues.

Tuesday, November 4
Conversation on Feminist Pedagogy (a Conversation on Teaching)
Co-Sponsored by the Global Feminisms Collaborative

Panelists:
Katie Crawford, Associate Professor of History
Anastasia Curwood, Assistant Professor of African American Diaspora Studies
Susan Saegert, Professor of Human and Organizational Development
Nicole Seymour, Lecturer in English

The Global Feminisms Collaborative’s 2008-2009 Brown-bag Series calls attention to critical intersections among factors such as race, class, sexuality, and gender in both local and global contexts. At this session faculty from various disciplines will discuss tools that enable students to recognize these factors, which are always operative but too often go unnoticed. In particular, feminist pedagogy will be considered.  Panelists will discuss: What constitutes feminist pedagogy? What difference does it make in the classroom? How does it change aspects of teaching such as course design, assignment construction, and learning activities?

Monday, November 10
Fostering Critical Thinking (a Teaching Workshop)
Facilitator: Patrick Ahern, Graduate Teaching Fellow, CFT

Many educators agree that fostering "critical thinking" is one of the primary goals of college education. But what is critical thinking? Is it a general competency or discipline-specific? What challenges might we encounter in trying to encourage it in our students?

Wednesday, November 12
Conversations on Evidence-Based Teaching: Teaching Critical Inquiry (a Conversation on Teaching)
Co-sponsored by the Center for Ethics

Panelists:                             
Ellen Armour, Carpenter Associate Professor of Theology and Associate Professor of Philosophy
Houston Baker, Distinguished University Professor and Professor of English
Leonard Folgarait, Professor of History of Art
Moderator:
Charles Scott, Director, Center for Ethics and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy

As a follow-up to the conversation on teaching evidence, this session will invite faculty and participants in different disciplines to consider different approaches to teaching critical inquiry and evidence-based interpretation and how these approaches enable students to make defensible disciplinary claims.  Panelists will discuss the following questions: What are the major characteristics of a defensible claim in your discipline? How do you prepare students to address conflicting claims? How do students learn to distinguish between substantiated and unsubstantiated claims? Following a short presentation by each of our panelists, the conversation will be open to those attending.

Interested in creating a workshop/working group?

The Center for Teaching designs tailored workshops or working group for individuals or departments on a variety of topics, including (but not limited to):

• course design
• classroom dynamics
• diversity in the classroom
• motivating students
• teaching with technology
• cooperative learning activities
• assessing student learning
• grading
• interpreting student evaluations
• the scholarship of teaching and learning
• documentation of teaching effectiveness

In addition to workshops and working groups, the CFT offers the following services for individuals and groups:

• consultations with departments or other administrative units
• consultations with individual instructors, based on

• observations of instructors in the classroom
• video recordings of instructors teaching
• feedback from students via focus groups

Contact the CFT at 322-7290 or via our web site www.vanderbilt.edu/cft/contact.php.

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