This Week for Graduate Students: Innovative Course Design Seminar: Applications due this week!

Innovative Course Design Seminar: Applications Due Friday! 

The Innovative Course Design Seminar allows participants to explore evidence-based, inclusive, and online instructional design practices and apply these concepts to create a learner-centered syllabus that meets the challenges of teaching today. Participants apply the principles of backward design and inclusive teaching to develop context-specific learning objectives, aligned and scaffolded assessments, and a range of engaging activities across formats and contexts within the context of a single course. Applications are due by October 15.

The seminar will run on Zoom from 4:10 pm – 6:00 pm ET on the following Wednesdays: Oct. 27, Nov. 3, Nov. 10, and Nov. 17.

This seminar counts towards completion of  the Advanced Track of CTL’s Teaching Development Program (TDP) for graduate students.

Advanced Topics in Teaching Workshops

Advanced Topics in Teaching (ATT) workshops are interdisciplinary opportunities for graduate students looking to acquire new pedagogical frameworks and to innovate their teaching. Upcoming workshops: 

Online Tools, In-Person Contexts
During the 2020-21 academic year, instructors and students were exposed to online teaching and learning practices adapted to the needs of learning during a global pandemic. From this experience, what might we learn about effective activities and strategies that worked for online and remote learning that could be adapted for the in-person classroom?
Date & Time: Tuesday, October 12, 2021, 2:40 PM – 3:55 PM
Location: 212 Butler Library and online (HyFlex workshop)
Register: Here

Making It Hard to Cheat
How can we design courses and assignments that discourage or make it difficult to cheat? At this session, we’ll explore the research on cheating in higher education and use it to devise strategies to reduce cheating and even improve students’ overall performance in our courses by fostering their own intrinsic motivations to learn deeply in our classes.
Date & Time: Thursday, October 14, 2021, 10:10 AM – 11:40 AM
Location: 203 Butler Library (In-person workshop)
Register: Here

Both sessions count as pedagogy workshops for the Teaching Development Program (TDP)

CTLgrads Learning Communities 

CTLgrads Learning Communities are interdisciplinary conversations about teaching and learning topics, designed and co-facilitated by CTL Senior Lead Teaching Fellows and other select graduate students. 

Upcoming Learning Communities: 
Pedagogies of Race & Oppression
The Pedagogies of Race and Oppression Learning Community is sponsored by the GSAS Office of Academic Diversity and Inclusion, in partnership with the CTL. In this learning community, participants collectively engage focused topics in pedagogy and practice – in this case, as they relate to race and marginalization, with particular emphasis on anti-racist and anti-oppression pedagogy.

This Learning Community designed and run by Tamara Heche (Latin American and Iberian Cultures) and Daniel Santiago Sáenz (Latin American and Iberian Culture.

• Part 1: Thursday, October 28, 2021, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM, 208 Butler Library
• Part 2: Thursday, November 18, 2021, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM, 208 Butler Library
• Part 3: Thursday, December 9, 2021, 4:00 – 6:00 pm – 208 Butler Library

Applications are due Friday, October 15th by 11:59 pm. Please contact CTLgrads@columbia.edu with any questions.

Interdisciplinary Classrooms & Diverse Student Learning Goals
Most classes, especially interdisciplinary ones, are academically diverse: students encounter the course on a wide variety of academic paths, and with a huge range of learning goals. It can be challenging to accommodate all of their different goals. Can you build each one into the course’s learning objectives? This Learning Community will explore ways of designing courses to accommodate this diversity by drawing on existing frameworks for teaching varied groups of students — especially Universal Design for Learning (UDL). 

This Learning Community designed and run by Senior Lead Teaching Fellows Jonathan Lambert (Earth and Environmental Sciences) and Andrew Richmond (Philosophy)

• Part 1: Thursday, October 21, 2021 2:40 PM – 3:55 PM, 212 Butler Library | Register  
• Part 2: Thursday, October 28, 2021 2:40 PM – 3:55 PM, 212 Butler Library | Register  

Participation in CTLgrads Learning Communities count towards completion of CTL’s Teaching Development Program (TDP) for graduate students.

Panel: Promoting Student Inquiry in Science and Engineering Lab Courses

Are you thinking of ways to redesign your Science and Engineering lab courses to promote student inquiry? How about supporting students in transferring their lab skills to design their own experiments? Join the CTL for our virtual faculty panel to hear from your Science and Engineering faculty colleagues who have designed their laboratory courses to prioritize student inquiry and provide students more agency to make their own scientific and engineering decisions.

Date & Time: Wed, October 13, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Location: Online
Register: here

Upcoming LTF Events

The 49 2021-22 Lead Teaching Fellows are running workshops and discussions in departments all around Columbia. These are generally advertised locally. Below are a few upcoming events that are open to participants beyond the LTF’s home department.

LTF events count towards track completion in the Teaching Development Program.

Unleash Creativity in the Language Classroom

This workshop will focus on the benefits of creative assignments in the language classroom and how to include them in your teaching. We will look at different examples of creative projects that were a success in the past and that can easily be replicated at all levels of language teaching (as well as in many literature courses). We will discuss new ideas of creative twists in syllabi and learn how to document personal innovative teaching approaches.

This event is led by Lead Teaching Fellow Jeanne Devautour Choi (French). It is primarily intended for instructors in language departments, though anyone who is interested in working with language is welcome. 

Date and Time: Wed, October 13, 2:30pm – 4:00pm
Location: Maison Française (Buell Hall)
Registration: Contact Jean Devautour Choi

Incorporating 3D Visualizations into Earth Science Teaching

Earth science instructors have new capacities to communicate 2D concepts in 3D. But finding these resources and incorporating them into your teaching effectively can be challenging. How can we train new scientists to manipulate these tools or create a visualization to best suit a topic? How can we measure if 3D visualization incorporations into lesson plans are effective? At this event, we will discuss some responses to these questions and gage the feasibility of incorporating 3D visualizations into our own teaching. 

This event is led by Lead Teaching Fellow Sarah Giles (Earth and Environmental Sciences). Graduate students and professors in fields related to earth science (ex. Chemistry, Biology, Physics) are welcome to attend.

Date and Time: Thurs, October 14, 1:00pm – 2:00pm ET
Location: Zoom
Registration: Sign up here to receive the Zoom link

Classroom Communities: Making the Most of Collaborative Work in the Classroom

Providing opportunities for students to collaborate in the classroom is a useful pedagogical tool that allows not only for community-building, but also affords students the means to participate in class discussions in a lower stakes environment, allowing them to build up their confidence and increase their knowledge base before coming together as a larger group. This workshop will focus on strategies for creating and facilitating group work and assignments, as well as best practices for encouraging student engagement.

This event is led by Lead Teaching Fellow Lauren Bernard (Music). This workshop is geared towards music humanities Core instructors, but is open to all.

Date & Time: October 20, 1:00pm – 2:00pm ET
Location: Ethnomusicology Center 
Register: please email lb3168@columbia.edu

Language Learning & Anxiety: Developing Strategies for a Stress-free Classroom

Anyone who has ever taken a language class has probably experienced performance anxiety, that lack of confidence and sense of unease about performing tasks in the target language. Although some anxiety is inevitable, this does not mean that learning a language should be a painful experience. How can we prevent this from happening? Are there ways to create an anxiety-free classroom? This workshop aims to investigate possible strategies to moderate students’ performance anxiety and make them feel more comfortable in the learning space.

This event is led by Lead Teaching Fellow Valeria Spacciante (Classics). The event is open to language instructors in any department.

Date & Time: October 25th, 4:15 pm
Location: 501 Hamilton Hall
Register: here