Spring 2007

Workshops & Working Groups

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

See below for our upcoming workshops and working groups. 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.

January

1/16/07 Teaching Certificate Information Session
4:10pm – 5:30pm, Calhoun 117
(for graduate students, professional students, and post-docs only)

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 the program.

1/19/07 Teaching Interdisciplinarity, Teaching Interdisciplinarily (Conversation on Teaching)
12:00pm – 2:30pm, Curb Center Conference Room (Buttrick Hall 125)
Co-Sponsored by the American Studies Program and the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture

Facilitator: Sherry Linkon, Professor of English and American Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Working-Class Studies, Youngstown State University

In this session, Sherry Linkon will draw on examples from both American Studies and Working-Class Studies to focus on two key questions:

• How do we define interdisciplinarity?
• How might we use concepts of incremental learning to create assignment sequences that help students move from simple tasks into the complexity of interdisciplinary work?
  

1/19/07 Engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (Conversation on Teaching)
3:10pm – 4:30pm, Calhoun 117
(for graduate students, professional students, and post-docs only)

Facilitators: Sherry Linkon, Professor of English and American Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Working-Class Studies, Youngstown State University; Derek Bruff, Assistant Director, CFT
Panelists: Katherine Fusco, Graduate Student, English; Jennifer Osterhage, Graduate Student, Biological Sciences

The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is a way of approaching one’s teaching that involves asking questions about student learning and the teaching activities that promote it and answering those questions by analyzing evidence of student learning.  The Teaching Certificate program, co-sponsored by the Center for Teaching and the Graduate School, requires participants to engage in such work, and in this session, two participants in the program will share their SoTL works-in-progress and invite feedback and discussion on their projects.

The session will be facilitated by Sherry Linkon, Professor of English and American Studies at Youngstown State University, who, as a Carnegie Scholar and elsewhere, has experience engaging in SoTL herself and mentoring others in this kind of work.  The session will be most useful to Teaching Certificate participants engaged in or looking ahead to their “Cycle 3” SoTL projects as a way to learn more about this approach to teaching.  However, all graduate students, professional students, and post-doctoral fellows are welcome to attend.

• More on Sherry Linkon
• More on the Teaching Certificate Program
• More on SoTL

1/27/07 GradSTEP 2007: Teachers as Learners: Navigating the Novice to Expert Continuum
8:30am – 2:30pm, Buttrick Hall
(for graduate students, professional students, and post-docs only)

Held on a Saturday, GradSTEP provides several workshops and discussions on teaching, learning, and professional development issues.  This year’s event features panel discussions among junior, senior, and emeritus Vanderbilt faculty members about what they have learned over the course of their teaching careers that would have been helpful to know when they first began teaching.

All graduate and professional students, as well as post-doctoral fellows, are invited to attend.  Lunch will be provided.  For more information, including a list of sessions, please visit the GradSTEP web page.

1/31/07 The Ethics of Teaching: Values at Work in Teaching (Conversation on Teaching)
12:10pm – 1:30pm, Alumni Hall 205
Co-Sponsored by the Center for Ethics

Facilitators: Patricia Armstrong, Assistant Director, CFT; Charles Scott, Director, Center for Ethics
Panelists: Carol Swain, Professor of Political Science and Law; Richard Haglund, Professor of Physics

What are the values that we incorporate into our pedagogical practices? What strategies do we use for articulating and communicating them to our students? To what extent do we encourage our students to reflect on, engage in, or take issue with the values that our teaching conveys, both implicitly and explicitly? Faculty panelists from different disciplines will be asked to use these questions as springboards for their remarks, which will be followed by a question-and-answer period.

February

2/6/07 Getting Students to Do the Reading (Teaching Workshop)
4:10pm – 5:30pm, Calhoun 117

Facilitator: Patricia Armstrong, Assistant Director, CFT

While we instructors recognize that students don’t always do the reading for our courses, do we actually know why they don’t?  Looking at data from a number of sources, we’ll consider the motivational and pedagogical reasons that students cite for not completing—or even starting—the reading assigned for their classes.  We’ll also consider the ways in which course structure and class activities can encourage students to read.  To end the session, we’ll work in small groups to develop discipline-specific strategies for motivating students to do more reading for our classes.

2/21/07 From Grade-Grubbing to Learning: Shifting Student Expectations about Tests, Grades, and Learning (Teaching Workshop)
4:10pm – 5:30pm, Calhoun 117

Facilitators: Derek Bruff, Assistant Director, CFT; Laura Taylor, Graduate Teaching Fellow, CFT
Panelists: John Stuhr, Professor of Philosophy and American Studies; Diana Weymark, Assistant Professor of Economics; Katherine Friedman, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences

Students are sometimes so focused on their grades that they lose sight of the learning goals their instructors have for them.   This clash between grades and learning often flares up around tests and other major graded assignments, making those assignments more stressful than they need to be.  It can also result “grade-grubbing”—begging for extra points on major assignments.
 
How can we help students shift their motivation from their grades to their own learning?  How can we help them understand our expectations for their learning—that we are asking more of them than just memorization and regurgitation—and help them study appropriately?  Join us for this session, in which a panel of faculty members will share methods they have used to answer these questions.

March

3/19/07 The Ethics of Teaching: The Effect of Economic Factors on Our Teaching (Conversation on Teaching)
12:10pm – 1:30pm, Alumni Hall 205
Co-Sponsored by the Center for Ethics

Facilitators: Patricia Armstrong, Assistant Director, CFT; Charles Scott, Director, Center for Ethics
Panelists: Kate Daniels, Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean, College of Arts & Science; Richard Pitt, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Assistant Dean, Graduate School

Many who pursue an academic career are quick to point out that money was/is not the primary motivating factor in that pursuit.  What, then, do we make of the fact that for many students, the desire to prepare themselves for a lucrative career is a major motivating factor as they move through college and out into the “real world”?  How do economic concerns color their—and their parents—attitudes toward the classes they choose, the majors they declare, and their expectations about grades? What tensions arise in the classroom and in faculty offices when those economic concerns clash with our pedagogical values?  How do graduate student instructors negotiate the deepening chasm between the stipends they receive and the salaries they’re likely to earn, and the financial reality and goals of their students?  Faculty panelists from several disciplines will be asked to use these questions as springboards for their remarks, which will be followed by a question-and-answer period.

3/27/07 Portfolio Grading (Conversation on Teaching)
4:10pm – 5:30pm, Calhoun 117

Facilitators: Roger Moore, Director of Undergraduate Writing; Patricia Armstrong, Assistant Director, CFT

This workshop will address the role of portfolio grading in the writing-intensive class. We will examine particular methods of portfolio grading and their impact on the quality of student writing.  Questions considered will include:  How do students respond to holistic evaluation of their work?  How does portfolio grading help instructors gain a deeper understanding of student writers than more traditional ways of evaluating essays?  Does portfolio grading place added pressures upon the instructor?   A panel of Vanderbilt instructors will share their experiences and a group discussion will be led by Patricia Armstrong, Assistant Director of the Center for Teaching, and Roger Moore, Director of Undergraduate Writing.

April

4/10/07 Confronting Our Own Privilege in the Classroom (Conversation on Teaching)
12:10pm – 1:30pm, Sarratt 189

Facilitators: Allison Pingree, Director, CFT; Lyndi Hewitt, Graduate Teaching Fellow, CFT
Panelists: John Sloop, Professor of Communication Studies; Barbara McClure, Assistant Professor of Pastoral Theology

Instructors seeking to be attentive to power relations inside and outside of the classroom are often interested in effective strategies for teaching controversial issues.  Typically, such approaches tend to focus on how to promote productive and respectful discussion with students on issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and power more generally. 

Discussed less often are the (sometimes uncomfortable) privileged positions inhabited by instructors themselves.  How should instructors deal with their own privilege (e.g., race, education level, class status, religious affiliation, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) in the classroom, particularly in the presence of students who do not share these privileged social statuses? 

In this session, panelists will discuss a wide range of experiences with confronting their own privilege, and then engage in a collective conversation with participants about the particular challenges and opportunities in such a project.

Working Groups

Working Groups are small cohorts who commit to meet regularly to discuss either a specific teaching practice or a more conceptual set of issues. Interested participants should register by January 24.

Course Design Working Group
(for faculty only)

What do you want your students to learn, and how do you really know if they have?  Our course design groups involve a small number of faculty who meet four times a semester to design a new course or rethink an existing course.

Course Design Working Group
(for graduate students, professional students, and post-docs only)

Whether you are creating or revising a course for your teaching portfolio or a course to teach in the near future, this working group will help you create a syllabus, determine learning goals for your course, select teaching strategies to meet those goals, and decide on assessment techniques.

Teaching and Learning Reading Group
(part of Cycle 2 in the Teaching Certificate Program)

Participants in this group will read and discuss selections from the established literature on teaching and learning in higher education.  Initial meetings will focus on core texts with broad, cross-disciplinary relevance.  Later meetings will offer participants the opportunity to focus on specific pedagogical topics, techniques, or methods related to their individual needs and interests. 

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Working Group
(part of Cycle 3 in the Teaching Certificate Program)

This working group is designed to support its members in engaging in scholarly projects on student learning.  The working group will provide tools and guidance in generating researchable questions, information on qualitative and quantitative methods for investigating student learning, resources for “going public” with results, and feedback from peers on projects at all stages of development.

Teaching Workshops
Led by CFT professional staff and graduate teaching fellows, this series features practical, applied workshops on basic teaching practices applicable in a variety of disciplines. Those interested in developing and refining skills for their current or future teaching are welcome to attend.

Conversations on Teaching
Conversations on Teaching are occasional, informal, and topical. Sessions typically begin with a panel offering brief remarks, followed by open discussion with session participants.

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