This Week for Graduate Students: Sign up for Microteaching and LTF Events
Microteaching Practice
Want to practice a new in-class activity or just get some more practice before teaching in your classroom? Join peers in a Microteaching Practice session, in which small groups of graduate students take turns delivering short samples of instruction to each other, facilitated by a CTL Teaching Consultant. After each teaching sample, your facilitator and your peers will offer structured feedback to support your teaching. Whether you are currently teaching at Columbia or not, all graduate students looking to practice teaching are welcome to attend.
Microteaching sessions count for Teaching Development Program track requirements.
Date & Time: October 21, 10:00am–12:00pm
Location: 204 Butler Library
Register: here
HyFlex Practice Session
HyFlex (hybrid flexible) courses incorporate online and in-person elements, making class meetings and materials available multimodally so that students can access them online or in-person, during or after class sessions.
A key part of being able to teach HyFlex is the ability to teach to a group of student distributed geographically—some physically in the classroom and others tuning in synchronously online—a tricky skill to develop especially if one has never experienced HyFlex as a student. In this practice session, you will have the opportunity to experience interacting within a HyFlex environment. During the session participants will experience discussion between modalities, and identify practices to try whenever they have an opportunity to teach in a HyFlex mode. This session is HyFlex (participants may join in-person or online).
Attending this workshop and posting a reflection satisfies the Pedagogy Workshop requirement for participants in the Teaching Development Program (TDP).
Date & Time: October 19, 2:40–3:55pm
Location: 212 Butler Library
Register: here
Teaching and Learning Across the Disciplines with Geospatial Maps
Join Columbia faculty and the CTL for a panel discussion about how geospatial maps are used at Columbia to activate students’ critical thinking skills across diverse topics and disciplines. Faculty and research specialists who use mapping in their courses will discuss the learning process and the geospatial activities and technologies underpinning them.
Date & Time: October 25, 1:00–2:00pm
Location: Online
Register: here
CTL Teaching Development Program
Are you a doctoral student looking for a way to document and showcase your teaching development? CTL’s Teaching Development Program (TDP) allows Columbia doctoral students to cultivate, document, and articulate their teaching development across the arc of their graduate school career. Graduate students can participate in the TDP program on either of two tracks: Foundational or Advanced.
Completion of a TDP track earns a letter outlining track competencies and certifying completion from the Center for Teaching and Learning. Completion will also be noted on Columbia transcripts for doctoral students in Arts and Sciences, SEAS, Mailman, School of Nursing, and School of the Arts departments.
Student Spotlight: Niyati Shenoy, PhD Candidate in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies
“The thing I still enjoy the most about engaging with the TDP is being able to see how others think. Reading peers’ draft syllabi during the Innovative Course Design Seminar, for instance, and asking questions about them afterward, was very interesting—as was experiencing practice lessons or lectures from totally different fields during microteaching sessions. I got even more of this as a TDP Consultant, because I was reviewing workshop reflections and getting to know more about how fellow graduate students understood the work of teaching.”
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.
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
Smart Moves: Embodied Learning, Scaffolding, and Feedback
An in-person workshop on embodied learning and constructive feedback joining martial arts practice with a discussion of pedagogical strategies. “Smart Moves” interrogates and emphasizes the significance of “in-person” teaching and learning in the contemporary classroom. This workshop will begin with embodied practice: participants will learn self-defense techniques from Krav Maga. We will then join the physical and theoretical through applied analysis and discussion of lesson planning and classroom assessment techniques.
This event is led by Lead Teaching Fellow Elaine Wilson (Slavic Languages). It is open to all graduate students, regardless of discipline.
Date & Time: October 28th, 12:30–2:00pm
Location: TBD
Register: contact evw2110@columbia.edu
Working with an Inherited Syllabus
Whether as a TA or as a full instructor, we may occasionally (or often!) be tasked with teaching a syllabus that we did not make. These inherited syllabi can be outdated, reflective of decades old disciplinary approaches, and even implicitly marginalizing. Additionally, early career scholars often have little means to officially alter them. Together we will explore the possibilities and limitations of teaching with, against, and around problematic syllabi.
We will spend the first portion in groups generating possible ways to inflect an inherited syllabus both as an instructor and as a TA, and then convene all the attendees to share these methods, compiling them into a shared and shareable resource. Attendees will be expected to bring initial thoughts—either on the dilemmas posed by inherited syllabi, or strategies to overcome them—to the event.
This event is led by Lead Teaching Fellow Sam Stella (Religion).
Date & Time: October 28th, 2:40–4:00pm
Location: 80 Claremont Ave
Register: here
Integrating Technology and Online Teaching Practices into In-person Language Classrooms
Since the effectiveness of language teaching largely depends on diverse means of participation/communication and accessible visual/aural support, instructors often put a lot of effort into making class materials accessible and productive in the online environment and experimenting with new technologies and learning management systems. Similarly, the return to in-person teaching entails new challenges.
This workshop will provide a space for language instructors to share experiences and resources, troubleshoot issues, and reflect on the following questions: What are some tools, practices, and considerations related to participation and accessibility that you have incorporated into online teaching and plan to bring to in-person teaching?
This event is led by Lead Teaching Fellow Xiran Lu (Germanic Languages).
Date & Time: October 28th, 4:10–5:40pm
Location: Hamilton 313
Register: contact xiran.lu@columbia.edu