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.

To see our current offering of Working Groups, click here.

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?

Spring 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.

1/30/08 - Course Design 101 (a Teaching Workshop)
Facilitators: Rebecca Chapman, Graduate Teaching Fellow, CFT; Laura Taylor, Graduate Teaching Fellow, CFT

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.

2/7/08 - Assessing Oral Competencies (a Conversation on Teaching)
Part of the Assessing Student Learning Series
Facilitator: Patricia Armstrong, Assistant Director, CFT
Panelists: Nathalie Dieu-Porter, Senior Lecturer, Department of French & Italian; Sanjiv Gokhale, Professor, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering; Virginia Scott, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of French & Italian

Many foreign language and communications classes help to develop students’ oral communication skills while other courses across the university include oral presentations in addition to essays, projects, and exams to determine what students have learned.  Many instructors thus face the task of assessing students’ oral competency without necessarily having been trained to do so.  How do we prepare students to give a presentation?  How do we know that a presentation is effective?   What constitutes oral proficiency?  These questions are relevant not only for individual instructors but also for departments that have identified oral communication skills as learning outcomes for their departmental assessment plans.  The panelists for this workshop will present how they developed rubrics and criteria for oral proficiency in individual courses and for department-wide assessment purposes, and then will answer questions from workshop participants.

2/13/08 - Teaching in a Digital Age: How Should Technologies Shape Our Learning Space and Pedagogical Practices? (a Conversation on Teaching)
Part of the Technology, Values and Teaching Series
Co-sponsor: Center for Ethics
Facilitators: Charles Scott, Director, Center for Ethics
Panelists: Patricia Armstrong, Assistant Director, Center for Teaching; Jay Clayton, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English; Matt Hall, Assistant Vice Chancellor for ITS

Click here for a Podcast of this discussion.
Click here for a video of this discussion available on YouTube.

According to a recent YouTube video, a student today will read 2300 web pages and 1281 Facebook profiles this year, and 8 books.  She will write 42 pages for class assignments this semester, and over 500 pages of email. Having grown up immersed in technologies such as the Internet, iPods, PDAs, and cell phones, most of today’s undergraduates are “digital natives” and so enter our classrooms with different experiences, expectations and learning styles than previous generations of students.

This workshop will explore some of the challenges and opportunities provided by technology and the students who use it.  Many of today’s web technologies can be powerful tools for creating effective, engaging learning environments, yet some argue that the use of such technologies in the classroom is problematic in various ways. For example, handling different levels of technological expertise or different access to technological devices on the part of different students may be challenging, as may a faculty member’s own skill and comfort level with various technologies.  To what extent are faculty responsible for learning about and using these new technologies, and to what extent should they (or should they not) coax students away from technology for certain purposes, such as increasing their attention spans, introducing different modes of learning, or just simply reading pages from a  book?  Join us for a lively discussion of these and other issues around the use of digital technologies in the classroom.

2/26/08 - Advanced Classroom Lecturing: Engaging Students in Discussion (a Teaching Workshop)
Facilitators: Allison Pingree, Director, CFT; Michael Risen, Graduate Teaching Fellow, CFT

Student engagement is a crucial component in effective teaching and learning. What are strategies for engaging students and their own understanding, even within a large group context?  Building on the “Presenting with Confidence” session held at gradSTEP on January 19th , this workshop will focus on deepening an instructor’s interactions with students within a lecture or presentation format. The workshop will also provide an opportunity for individuals to practice and receive feedback on techniques and approaches they’ve learned. Participants in this workshop are encouraged, but not required, to attend the prior gradSTEP session. 

3/12/08 - Podcasting: What Is It and Why Would You Want To Do It? (a Teaching Workshop)
Facilitators: Jeff Johnston, Assistant Director, CFT; Michael Risen, Graduate Teaching Fellow, CFT; Melanie Moran, Assistant Director for Web Communications, Vanderbilt News Service; Brian Smokler, Manager of Instructional Systems, Peabody College

Podcasting, the act of creating audio and video programs and then posting them so that they can be automatically downloaded from the Internet onto a computer and an MP3 player, such as an iPod, has become very popular in today's culture. Whether for purposes of news, entertainment, or education, one can subscribe to a podcast of just about any topic desired.  In fact, a variety of Vanderbilt content, including course materials and media stories, is now available via podcasts through iTunesU.

Why is podcasting becoming increasingly popular among educators and why should you think about doing it? How can you use podcasts to engage your students in new and exciting ways?  From distributing lecture archives for student review, to delivery of supplemental materials and content, to creating assignments for student-created podcasts, there are many ways to incorporate podcasting into your course. This workshop will introduce you to podcasting and give you the opportunity to think about it in the context of the courses you teach.  We will also discuss the important intellectual property issues and connect you with the Vanderbilt resources you need to get started.

4/1/08 - The Mediated Classroom: Ways That Computer and Other Technologies Are Transforming the Space of Communication and Relationships (a Conversation on Teaching)
Part of the Technologies, Values and Teaching Series
Co-sponsor: Center for Ethics
Facilitators: Charles Scott, Director, Center for Ethics ; Susan Schoenbohm, Program Coordinator, Center for Ethics
Panelists: Jonathan Gilligan, Senior Lecturer, Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences; John Sloop, Associate Dean, College of Arts & Science and Professor, Department of Communication Studies

New computer technologies are profoundly changing the ways in which we communicate and relate to one another.  Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and wikis, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, and virtual worlds such as Second Life enable us to create communal spaces and connect with like-minded individuals a world away.  Yet we also may risk losing certain dimensions of communication and community if fewer of our exchanges are actually face to face.  How can we make the most of these synchronous and asynchronous technologies and still maintain a true community of scholars?  What are the implications of these changes on our classroom teaching?

4/7/08 - Teaching-as-Research: A Roundtable Discussion with Carl Wieman for Scientists, Engineers, and Mathematicians (a Conversation on Teaching)
Co-Sponsors: Department of Physics and Astronomy, Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) at Vanderbilt

University scientists, engineers, and mathematicians routinely investigate new and interesting problems in their disciplines, leveraging their disciplinary training and experience.  These faculty members’ research skills and ways of knowing can also be used to investigate student learning—and the teaching that leads to it—in their own classrooms.  How can we help our students meet our learning objectives?  How can we collect and analyze evidence of student learning to determine if those learning objectives are met?  How can the results of such an analysis not only improve our teaching but benefit others teaching in and out of our disciplines?  If you have been thinking about these questions—or would like to begin doing so—come join our discussion.

Our guest is Carl Wieman of the University of British Columbia and the University of Colorado, Boulder.  Professor Wieman is a 2001 Nobel Laureate in physics and director of the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative at the University of British Columbia.  For an overview of Professor Wieman’s approach to science education, see his 2007 Change Magazine article, “Why Not Try a Scientific Approach to Science Education?”

Professor Wieman also delivered the Guy and Rebecca Forman Lecture on Monday, April 7th.  His talk was titled “Science Education in the 21st Century: Using the Tools of Physics to Teach Physics.”

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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