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Grants in Higher Education

TEAGLE FOUNDATION GRANTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION
March / MAY 2010

FRESH THINKING
GRADUATE SCHOOL TEACHING IN THE ARTS AND SCIENCES

Grants to Research Universities

Columbia University
The Teagle Teaching Scholars Program: Transforming the Way that Doctoral Students are Trained to Teach
Project Leaders: Jan Allen and Steven Mintz

$35,000 over 14 months to develop an integrated and comprehensive training program for PhD students in the arts and sciences. Fifteen students—Teagle Teaching Scholars—will participate in a year-long seminar on the science of learning; take part in a pilot course, "Fundamentals of College and University Teaching," which will serve as the basis for a mandatory for-credit graduate school course; engage in a series of developmental activities, including teaching observations, mentored teaching experiences, and preparation of a teaching portfolio; teach an undergraduate course of their own design; and serve as "lead" teaching fellows in their home departments, a role that includes coordinating disciplinary-based teaching instruction and conducting classroom observations of teaching fellows within their department, as well as helping to creating "teaching toolkits" with discipline-based instructional materials and classroom-tested activities.

Cornell University
Cornell University Graduate Teaching Certificate Initiative
Project Leader: Richard Kiely

$34,700 over 17 months to design and implement two enhanced graduate teaching certificate programs: (1) a university-wide program, and (2) two discipline-specific programs, one in the sciences and one in the social sciences. A systematic assessment will be conducted to compare how well and in what ways each type of certificate program improves graduate student teaching and enhances undergraduate student learning.

Harvard University
A Meta-Seminar on Designing the "Course of the Future": How Assessment, Cognitive Science and New Technologies are Changing Learning and Strategies for Teaching
Project Leader: Terry Aladjem

$35,000 over 13 months to develop a graduate student teaching seminar that addresses fundamental questions of course design, especially as they are challenged by current research on assessment, cognitive development, and technology. Areas of inquiry will include how today's students learn, how teaching effectiveness can be assessed, how teaching can be more effective, and what the "course of the future" might look like.

Northwestern University
Northwestern Initiative for Teaching and Learning by Graduate Students
Project Leader: Rachelle Brooks

$35,000 over 14 months to improve the educational experiences and learning outcomes of undergraduate students in discussion sections of large lecture courses by providing graduate student teaching assistants (TAs) with a working knowledge of the latest research on teaching and learning. TAs in three disciplines (biological sciences, political science, Slavic studies) will form a "community of practice" and participate in a two-day workshop focused on developing learning objects for their sections, aligning those objectives with appropriate methods of instruction and asessment, and learning about and evaluating teaching methods. TAs will also be expected to conduct structured observations of peer's teaching, prepare a statement of teaching philosophy, and draft a narrative evaluation of their teaching experience in their sections for their teaching portfolios.

Princeton University
Effective Teaching and Learning in a Research-Based Environment
Project Leader: Carol Porter

$35,000 over 14 months to create a year-long fellowship program that will help prepare graduate students for their teaching careers. How undergraduates learn the unique assumptions and conventions of disciplines across the curriculum will serve as the primary focus of this program, which will involve a range of departments in the arts and sciences, including anthropology, English, life and natural sciences, and engineering. The program will also include the participation of faculty from these departments.

Stanford University
Graduate Student Teaching in the Foreign Literatures
Project Leaders: Russell Berman and Jenny Bergeron

$35,000 over 15 months to establish a working group of faculty and graduate students from five foreign literature departments that will focus on improving undergraduate curricula and teaching. One faculty member and two graduate students will be drawn from each department. The working group will meet weekly during the first quarter to discuss liberal education today, assessment, cognitive science and its implications for undergraduate learning, and the structure of the literary humanities in higher education. During the second quarter, each departmental team will examine learning goals in their department and the adequacy of the curriculum to meet them. Finally, each team will plan an appropriate undergraduate teaching strategy that will be tested in a course during the third quarter. Graduate students will be expected to develop portfolios of their work on the project.

University of California at Berkeley
Graduate Student Teaching Certificate at UC Berkeley: Developing a Workshop and Course Module on How Students Learn
Project Leader: Linda von Hoene

$35,000 over 15 months to form a faculty-graduate student working group focused on enhancing the University's existing graduate student teaching certificate program. The working group will meet to discuss the literature on how students learn and translate that literature into disciplinary language and pedagogical practices that can be used by instructors to foster learning. The group will create a bank of learning activities that will be housed on the Graduate Student Instructor Teaching and Resource Center website, as well as develop an outline for a graduate student workshop, and create a course module for the certificate program. The module will be incorporated into the "level 1" (as a required workshop) and "level 2" (as a required, semester-long course on syllabus and course design) certificates.

Grants to National Organizations

Council of Graduate Schools
Preparing Future Faculty to Assess Student Learning Outcomes: A Project to Explore National Needs and Opportunities
Project Leader: Daniel Deneke

$75,090 over 12 months to explore the integration of learning outcomes assessment into Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) programs. A set of activities (survey of active PFF programs, production of a white paper, national conference) will be undertaken to identify the ways in which PFF programs could enhance graduate students' skill and understanding of assessing learning outcomes, to explore how PFF's programmatic features could serve to address gaps in the current practice and dialogue on learning outcomes assessment, and to identify gaps and potential linkages between national assessment experts and existing faculty development programs.