This Week for Faculty: Reflecting Back and Forward on Pandemic Teaching

“…one of the main benefits of the pandemic was that it gave me a time to stop and think about why I was doing what I was doing. Was it because I was in the habit of doing it or was it actually valuable?” – Yevgeniy Yesilevskiy, Lecturer in Discipline of Innovation and Design, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Watch Dr. Yesilevskiy talk about his teaching at the 2021 Celebration of Teaching and Learning.

New Resource – Reflecting On Your Experiences with Remote Teaching: Making Meaning of Pandemic Teaching

Whether you are seeking to recover the joy of teaching after an online pivot during the pandemic, be a better online teacher, be more responsive to student needs, prevent teaching burnout, or plan ahead to teach an in-person, hybrid, or fully online course, it can be important to hit pause. Taking an intentional moment of pause affords you an opportunity to reflect back on your teaching experiences, evaluate your approaches, and consider how your course design decisions impacted your students’ learning.

This resource provides suggestions, tips, and questions to guide your self-reflective process. Interwoven are Columbia faculty insights shared during the 2021 Celebration of Teaching and Learning, which can offer context and community for processing the last year.

Faculty Book Discussion Group: Radical Hope
Rejuvenate your pedagogical framework

Could your classes use more hope after a year of teaching and learning during a pandemic? Are you looking to prepare for your fall semester among a community of like-minded colleagues? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then join the CTL this summer for a discussion of Kevin Gannon’s Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. Participants will meet at three 75-minute sessions to discuss radical hope as a pedagogical lens, while also collaborating to rethink and revise their own course materials through this framework. All meetings will take place via Zoom, from 12:00-1:15pm on the dates listed below:

• Tues., July 13 | Introductions & Goal Setting (Introduction, Chapters 1-3)
• Tues., July 27 | Inclusivity, Accessibility, & Agency (Chapters 4-6)
• Tues., August 10 | Transparency, Pedagogy, & Naming what you don’t know…yet (Chapters 7-10, Coda)