Grants in Higher Education

TEAGLE FOUNDATION GRANTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

FRESH THINKING
GRADUATE STUDENT TEACHING IN THE ARTS AND SCIENCES

Click here for other projects in Fresh Thinking

February 2013

Northwestern University
Preparing Graduate Students in History for Teaching
Project Leaders: Monica Ann Gerlach

$85,000 over 24 months for Northwestern University to implement a program for graduate students in its History Department to prepare for undergraduate teaching.  The project aims to achieve this end through workshops, student and faculty reading and discussions groups, as well as an online teaching resource guide, which will be overseen by a faculty advisor and teaching coordinator.  The project will work in cooperation with Northwestern’s Graduate School (TGS),  the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence, and the American Historical Association.

November 2012

American Historical Association (AHA)
Preparing Graduate Students in History for Teaching
Project Leaders: James Grossman

$40,000 over 25 months to improve the preparation of college and university history faculty through a partnership of the AHA and the history department at the University of California at Berkeley. The AHA will recruit nationally recognized leaders in research on teaching and learning in the field of history to work closely with the Berkeley history faculty in revising a course for graduate students that prepares them to be teaching assistants at the university.  This project will also connect to the Teagle-funded initiative of the Graduate Student Instructor Resource Center at Berkeley, focused on preparing graduate students from across the University for teaching. AHA will disseminate their model through a series of workshops at its annual meeting.

May 2012

Columbia University
Preparing Doctoral Students for 21st Century College and University Classrooms
Project Leaders: Steven Mintz

$107,000 over 36 months to prepare graduate students for teaching careers by creating knowledge of digital teaching methods and communication technologies that will be essential to the success of future faculty, along with an understanding of how people learn and hands on classroom experience. Grant funds will support graduate students' stipends, the salary for the coordinator of the Lead Teaching Fellows program, costs for the development of digital resources, dissemination, and some equipment. The Teaching Center has plans in place to continue funding of the "lead teaching fellows" and "teaching scholars" program, and is developing plans to increase its staffing and so help sustain the programming developed under the auspices of this grant.

Cornell University
Preparing Graduate Students to become 21st Century Engaged Teaching Scholars
Project Leaders: Richard C. Kiely, A.T. Miller, and Theresa L. Pettit

$125,000 over 24 months to build a pilot program that created a Graduate Teaching Certificate Initiative. Through a remarkable collaborative effort that will involve the Graduate School, the Center for Teaching Excellence, the Center for Community Engaged Learning and Research, and the Office of Academic Diversity Initiatives, Cornell has developed a two-pronged program that will offer enhanced direct preparation of graduate students for teaching careers, through the development of a High Impact Teaching and Learning Certificate Program and develop campus-wide support for programming to prepare graduate students for teaching careers by also developing current faculty capacity to contribute to these efforts.

Princeton University
Expanding the Mission
Project Leaders: Carol Porter

$125,000 over 36 months to support Phase Two of Princeton's McGraw Center for Teaching program that brought together twelve graduate students and three faculty members from science, engineering and social science disciplines for a series of seminars in which they engaged with scholarship on learning and "ways of knowing in the disciplines," and discussed concrete strategies for teaching. The seminar will be seeded with a few "seminar leaders in training" from various disciplines who will - in phase two of the project - each lead their own seminars for 8-10 graduate students and faculty, but with a focus on a particular discipline or disciplinary cluster. Thus there will be 4-5 "breakout seminars" in each of the second and third years of the program that can explore more deeply the teaching and learning issues that are most relevant to the discipline on which each of those seminars is focused, though the McGraw Center will bring all of the breakout groups together twice a year in order to facilitate the clearly beneficial interdisciplinary conversation that has characterized the seminar to date.

University of California, Berkeley
Integrating the "How Students Learn" Initiative into Programs for Graduate Student Instructors
Project Leaders: Linda von Hoene

$125,000 over 36 months to scale up the work of the GSI Teaching and Resource Center pilot program significantly, ?integrating research on student learning and its application more fully into Berkeley?s programs for preparing graduate student instructors for current and future teaching.? Where the pilot program reached 75 students directly and 810 indirectly, the scaled up program will reach 532 directly and 14,400 indirectly. Among the strategies for developing and delivering the enhanced program will require first-time graduate student instructors to take a one semester, discipline-based course on teaching. The GSI Teaching Center will identify 8 departments in 2012 and another 8 departments in 2013 that would like to integrate into their required course a module on how students learn, and design a seminar for the instructors of those courses who can then integrate the module into their teaching. Program assessment will take multiple forms, and results will be disseminated widely.

February 2012

Council of Graduate Schools
Embedding Assessment of Student Learning into Future Faculty Preparation Programs: A National Strategy for Enhancing Undergraduate Teaching and Learning in Arts and Sciences
Project Leaders: Daniel Denecke

$300,000 over 36 months to work with five universities to develop model programs for integrating learning assessment into faculty preparation programs for graduate students. These programs will enhance skills and understanding of future faculty in the assessment of student learning outcomes in the arts and sciences, with an emphasis on the humanities and qualitative social sciences fields. CGS will work with all five institutions to coordinate common activities across programs to identify best practices, will convene key participants at the beginning and end of the project, and will also track the success of the program in terms of numbers of students participating and perceived effectiveness of program activities. CGS will also deploy its robust dissemination network to ensure that project results are both widely known and used, facilitating presentations at is own annual meetings and summer workshops, and producing a publication that documents what is learned both about assessing student learning in the arts and sciences, and about the effectiveness of the program models developed for integrating such knowledge into programs for preparing future faculty.

Stanford University
Graduate Student and Faculty Collaborative Teaching in the Humanities
Project Leaders: Russell Berman

$125,000 over 27 months to expand and sustain a program focused on deepening preparation of graduate students for teaching and enhancing the quality of undergraduate learning in classes taught by faculty and graduate student participants. Eight faculty-graduate student teams, drawn from the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages and from one outside department, will meet regularly in seminars to engage with readings focused on higher education generally, liberal education and the humanities specifically, and the literature of assessment. The project plans to document its work extensively, culminating in a major dissemination effort focused on developing new teaching paradigms.

University of Virginia
Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Implementing and Evaluating a Pedagogy Seminar for Higher Education (launch grant)
Project Leaders: Josipa Roksa

$35,000 over 23 months to fund a pilot program to teach and rigorously evaluate a seminar for graduate students entitled "Teaching and Learning in Higher Education." Drawing on lessons learned from smaller-scale programs on teaching and course design, the course lays out an ambitious semester's reading that will equip future teachers with knowledge of how people learn, with an understanding of key debates about teaching and learning, and with the tools to design, teach and assess classes effectively. The evaluation will study students' attitudes toward teaching and learning, knowledge about teaching and learning, and classroom practices. Data on key course outcomes will be collected before and after the course. The evaluation will also track students in a subsequent semester, when they are teaching their own courses, to determine its effectiveness.

May 2010

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 Leaders: 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.

Princeton University
Effective Teaching and Learning in a Research-Based Environment
Project Leaders: 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.

March 2010

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 Leaders: 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.

Northwestern University
Northwestern Initiative for Teaching and Learning by Graduate Students
Project Leaders: 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.

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 Website
Project Leaders: 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.

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