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 2009 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.

Tuesday, January 13
Interpreting and Making Use of Student Evaluations (a part of the Life on the Tenure-Track series)
Co-Facilitated by Kathleen Hoover Dempsey, Associate Professor of Psychology, and Derek Bruff, Assistant Director, CFT

At the end of each course, student evaluations provide a potentially useful source of feedback on our teaching.  In this session, we’ll discuss when and how to read student evaluations, how to identify themes and patterns in student feedback, and how to make productive use of student feedback in subsequent courses.  We’ll also discuss ways to encourage students to provide more useful and constructive feedback on evaluation forms,  as well as a former department chair’s perspective on the various roles that student evaluations play.

Tuesday, January 20 - THIS WORKSHOP WAS CANCELLED
Teaching Non-Majors(a part of the Life on the Tenure-Track series)
Co-Facilitated by Sandra Rosenthal, Professor of Chemistry; Jonathan Hiskey, Associate Professor of Political Science; and Derek Bruff, Assistant Director, CFT

Students with diverse academic experiences and varying motivations for taking a course can make teaching challenging.  In this session, we’ll discuss effective strategies for teaching non-majors, including students taking a course to satisfy general education requirements, first-year students “shopping” a major, and more advanced students taking courses outside of their majors.  How might we motivate such students to engage meaningfully in course material?  How might we turn their relative lack of experience in our disciplines into an advantage in our courses?  And what strategies might we use for teaching “bimodal” classes consisting of majors and non-majors?  In this session, we’ll hear from senior faculty addressing these tough questions.

Monday, January 26
Online Collaborative Learning (Teaching Workshop)
Facilitator: Juan Rojas, CFT Graduate Teaching Fellow

This workshop will explore exciting new technologies that allow team members to create, modify, and share documents, files and presentations in real-time no matter where each of the members are located. These new tools come with many innovative functionalities, such as enabling the user to embed a document in a web page or a video in a presentation.  We will also consider new technologies that help the user visualize data in ways that bring it to life for students, for example, displaying changes over time.  These tools are cutting-edge means of promoting community learning.  

Monday, February 2
Writing a Teaching Statement (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.

Monday, February 9
A Conversation on Globalizing Your Curriculum (Conversation on Teaching)
Co-Sponsored by the Global Feminisms Collaborative

Panelists: Terrie L Spetalnick, Lecturer, Sociology; Tiffany Patterson, Associate Professor, African American Diaspora Studies and American Studies; Greg Barz, Associate Professor, Ethnomusicology and Anthropology; Centurio Balikoowa, Ugandan Musician; Lyndi Hewitt, PhD Candidate, Sociology

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, co-hosted by the Center for Teaching, faculty from various disciplines will discuss tools that educators can use to include often marginalized perspectives in their courses.  Panelists will discuss: Why globalize the perspectives in a course? (How is it similar and different from attending to difference and diversity?) How to include global perspectives in a course? What difference does it make? How does it change learning goals and outcome measurements? What are some key texts for different disciplines? After each panelist’s short presentation, the conversation will open to those in the audience.

Wednesday, February 18
Addressing Student Misconceptions (Part 1) (Conversation on Teaching)
Facilitator: Patricia Armstrong, Assistant Director, CFT

Faculty Panelists: Kathy Friedman, Assistant Professor, Biological Sciences; Ann Kindfield, Senior Lecturer, Department of Teaching and Learning

Students frequently come into our classrooms with certain misconceptions regarding the subject matter we teach.  These misconceptions can serve as obstacles to student learning and frustrate faculty attempts to foster that learning. While some of these misconceptions may be of a relatively simple and naive sort that can be dispelled easily, others are more deeply entrenched and complex, and require a more mindful and direct intervention. In this spring’s Conversations, we’d like to explore methods of fostering conceptual change in our students, particularly when students may tend to resist that change because of cherished misconceptions based on earlier education or other influences. 

Panelists will be asked to address, among others, the following questions: What kinds of resistance have you encountered among students to the subjects that you teach? How do you address entrenched pre-conceptions that you view as obstacles to student learning in your discipline? To what extent do you address them, and why? 

Thursday, February 19
Teaching Challenging Topics (Teaching Workshop)
Facilitator: Patrick Ahern, CFT Graduate Teaching Fellow

Panelists: Melissa Snarr, Assistant Professor, Graduate Department of Religion; Brian Griffith, Assistant Clinical Professor, Human & Organizational Development; Tiffiny Tung, Assistant Professor, Anthropology; Vanessa Beasley, Associate Professor, Communication Studies

Do you teach topics that may challenge your students’ beliefs and opinions?  In this workshop, we will discuss how to assess the worldviews, knowledge and experience your students bring with them to class, and then how to build on their pre-existing foundations by exploring new perspectives.  How can new, challenging information be presented so that it engages rather than thwarts students’ learning process?

Tuesday, March 10
Course (Re)Design (a part of the Life on the Tenure-Track series)
Co-Facilitated by Anita Mahadevan-Jansen, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Derek Bruff, Assistant Director, CFT

Interested in designing a new course, or refining one you’ve taught before? 

This workshop will provide an overview of the course design process:  setting learning goals for your students, identifying strategies and activities to move students towards those goals, and assessing what and how your students have learned.  We’ll also hear about a senior faculty member’s experience in designing effective courses through focusing on student learning.

Wednesday, March 11
Addressing Student Misconceptions (Part 2) (Conversation on Teaching)
Facilitator: Patricia Armstrong, Assistant Director, CFT

Faculty Panelists: Jack Sasson, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible & Professor of Classics; Susan Hylen, Mellon Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

Students frequently come into our classrooms with certain misconceptions regarding the subject matter we teach.  These misconceptions can serve as obstacles to student learning and frustrate faculty attempts to foster that learning. While some of these misconceptions may be of a relatively simple and naive sort that can be dispelled easily, others are more deeply entrenched and complex, and require a more mindful and direct intervention. In this spring’s Conversations, we’d like to explore methods of fostering conceptual change in our students, particularly when students may tend to resist that change because of cherished misconceptions based on earlier education or other influences. 

Panelists will be asked to address, among others, the following questions: What kinds of resistance have you encountered among students to the subjects that you teach? How do you address entrenched pre-conceptions that you view as obstacles to student learning in your discipline? To what extent do you address them, and why? 

Thursday, March 12
Learner-Centered Teaching Strategies (Teaching Workshop)
Facilitator: Maria Ebner, CFT Graduate Teaching Fellow

In a learner-centered classroom, the teacher's role shifts from instruction of content to facilitation of learning.  Therefore, content becomes a tool for developing learning skills-the teacher guides students in an individualized process of discovery and meaning-making.  In this workshop, we will consider how to create a learning-centered class, including learning goals and teaching strategies (such as peer assessment) that foster students' capacities for self-directed learning.

Monday, March 23
Course Design for Student Learning (Teaching Workshop)
Facilitator: Erin Rehel, CFT Graduate Teaching Fellow

This workshop will examine course design from the perspective of student learning.  Workshop activities will help you determine learning goals, consider assessments to measure students’ progress toward those goals, and choose learning activities that provide students with a chance to practice the knowledge and skills you want them to gain in your course.

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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