This Week for Grad Students: Expanded CTL office hours for graduate students
Office Hours are expanding this spring!
CTL Office Hours for Graduate Students
Do you have a teaching-related question or challenge you’d like help responding to? Are you looking for help with drafting a syllabus or teaching statement? We are here to help! The CTL invites all Columbia graduate students and postdocs to our recurring office hours.
In addition to drop-in office hours every Friday from 2:00-4:00 pm in 212 Butler Library, the graduate student support team is launching ‘pop-up’ office hours this spring in Nous Cafe (Philosophy Hall), Joe’s Coffee (Dodge Hall), and the Core Curriculum office (Hamilton Hall).
⭐️ Resource Spotlight ⭐️
How to improve your own office hours
If you’re currently running office hours, you may be wondering how to better structure this time to be more beneficial to your students and less exhausting for you. This short article by a graduate student offers easily implemented tactics for getting students more engaged in their learning during office hours.
Access resource: Standing Room Only Office Hours Strategies in Teaching Gradually: Practical Pedagogy for Graduate Students, by Graduate Students (Taylor & Francis, 2021)
Apply now for 2025-26 fellowships!
The CTL is accepting applications through March 17 for the 2025-26 cohorts in three of our graduate student fellowships:
These opportunities entail stipends for successful participation. They are available to doctoral students in years 2-7 of their program as of Fall 2025, as well as MFA students in years 2-3. Information about each program follows. We are also happy to answer questions about these fellowships in Office Hours.
Apply to be a 2025-26 Lead Teaching Fellow
The LTF program is a professional development opportunity for doctoral and MFA students who are committed to promoting pedagogical practices and conversations among graduate students. LTFs participate in a series of meetings at the CTL, organize teaching-related workshops in their home departments, and act as liaisons between their peers and the CTL.
Apply to be a 2025-26 Teaching Assessment Fellow
TAFs work closely with the Center for Teaching and Learning, faculty, and each other during the academic year to support and assess teaching initiatives. This fellowship is designed for graduate students who have particular interest in learning about methodologies and strategies for assessing course redesign efforts.
Apply to be a 2025-26 CIRTL Fellow
CIRTL Fellows serve as an instrumental link between the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) network and the Columbia community. CIRTL Fellows leverage CIRTL Network resources to support evidence-based, inclusive teaching and mentorship practices in Columbia’s STEM communities.
Graduate student-led programs at CTL
Graduate students in CTL fellowships run workshops, learning communities, and services with CTL’s support. All these offerings count towards track completion in the Teaching Development Program.
CTLgrads Learning Community
Look I Made You Some Content: Assigning and Evaluating Creative Assignments
Designed and run by Senior Lead Teaching Fellows Miriam Nielsen (Earth and Environmental Science) and Grant Woods (Music)
Breaking away from the classic exam or essay can be fun! And it doesn’t necessarily mean more work for the instructor or TAs. This learning community will focus on how to design assessments that invite and value student creativity. We’ll discuss what works, what doesn’t, how to connect students with available resources, and construct rubrics for evaluation. As part of this learning community, participants will have the opportunity to design their own creative assignments, and collaborate with other attendees to strategize methods of assessing those assignments.
Date: Thursday March 27 (Part 1) and Thursday April 3 (Part 2)
Time: 1:10 PM – 2:25 PM
Location: 212 Butler Library
Register: Register for Part 1, Register for Part 2
CTLgrads Journal Club
Online discussions designed and facilitated by CIRTL Fellows
Are you interested in creating an inclusive educational climate for all STEM learners? This informal discussion community is an opportunity to discuss resources and research on teaching and learning with fellow grad students and postdocs across the CIRTL Network. These sessions are designed by a Columbia graduate student to help you consider how you can use findings in education research–in your field and beyond–to inform your own teaching practices.
Date: Thursday March 27
Time: 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Location: Online
Register: Register for March 27 session
Date: Thursday April 11
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Location: Online
Register: Register for April 11 session
Graduate student-led events in departments
2024-25 Lead Teaching Fellows are running workshops and discussions in their departments all around Columbia. These are generally advertised locally. Below are upcoming events that are open to participants beyond the LTF’s home department.
LTF events also count towards track completion in the Teaching Development Program.
Absent. Again? Accompanying students and navigating administrative challenges in the event of repeated absences
This event’s aim is to provide students with information about the tools and resources they have access to in the event of repeated absences from students. How to keep students from falling behind? How to make sure their progress can still be assessed fairly? How to communicate with students so that they feel supported?
We will discuss how to use hybrid teaching and asynchronous teaching effectively to support students who cannot come to class. But we will also learn from the perspective of ODS officers as well as the Berick Center for Student advising on what the best course of action is on the part of instructors when facing the challenge of repeated absences.
This workshop is led by Lead Teaching Fellow Eponine Senay (French and Romance Languages). It is open to all graduate student instructors.
Date: Wednesday, March 12
Time: 5:00 PM
Location: 521 Philosophy
Register: RSVP here
Pedagogical Techniques in the Social Sciences
Do you feel like you end up going back to the same techniques over and over again in your social science classes? Do you wish you had more techniques in your back pocket and knew when and what they worked for? This session is designed to be an overview of LOTS of different pedagogical techniques to use in the classroom, the pros and cons of these techniques, and how to combine different techniques. This session is not intended to be a deep dive on any one individual technique, but will provide participants with resources to go deeper after the session.
This workshop is led by Lead Teaching Fellow Anna Garner (Political Science). It is geared towards TAs in social science but open to all interested graduate students.
Date: Thursday, March 13
Time: 2:30 PM
Location: IAB 707
Register: RSVP here
Improvising in Science Classes
Rapport with our students is a key driver in their happiness, comfort, and presence in the course. It can be hard to read the classroom’s energy or know what energy we are presenting to the class. In this event, we will take lessons and activities from improvisation in the arts to learn how best to read the room, consider our presence in the classroom, and build rapport with our students.
This workshop is led by Lead Teaching Fellow Max Lee (Astronomy). It is open to all interested graduate students in Arts and Sciences.
Date: Tuesday, March 25
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: 1402 Pupin Hall
Register: RSVP to max.e.lee@columbia.edu
“Oral Preparation”: Creating Rubrics for Participation in the Language Classroom
In the language classroom, a large part of the student’s grade is based on their participation and spoken performance in the language. In the Slavic Languages department, the Russian language program has an assessment category called “oral preparation,” which covers this nebulous area. Assigning a grade for this category is notoriously challenging, as there are no rubrics or written guidelines for assessment.
In this LTF workshop, we will discuss experiences and ideas about assessing students’ oral performance, with the aim of creating a rubric to propose to the Russian language program. Together, we will brainstorm: what should be assessed in the category of “oral preparation”? Accuracy? Complexity? Effort? Hopefully drawing on experiences from other language teachers, we will consider ways to standardize this grading process with a fair, inclusive, and measurable rubric.
This workshop is led by Lead Teaching Fellow Myles Garbarini (Slavic Languages). It is open to graduate students from other departments, especially other language instructors or those who assess oral performance.
Date: Wednesday, March 26
Time: 12:00 – 1:00 PM
Location: 713 Hamilton Hall
Register: RSVP here
In Your Own Words: Disaggregate Instruction in STEM Higher Education
Science is more than a way of knowing—it’s also a language. In STEM education, concepts (e.g., gravity) are often bundled with technical language (e.g., free-fall, acceleration, vectors), which can overwhelm students—especially those from underrepresented cultural backgrounds. In Science in the City: Culturally Relevant STEM Education, Bryan A. Brown argues that transmitting science ideas separately from specialized language—the practice of disaggregate instruction—can improve learning outcomes.
In this workshop, we’ll explore the applications and limits of disaggregate instruction in university STEM classrooms. We’ll consider the role of language in accelerating science learning, and we’ll discuss practical teaching tactics to make science teaching more accessible without compromising accuracy.
This workshop is led by Lead Teaching Fellow Sean Li (Physics). The workshop will focus on STEM higher education, though all Columbia community members are welcome.
Date: Wednesday, March 26
Time: 2:00 – 3:30 PM
Location: Center for Theoretical Physics, 8th Floor Pupin Hall
Register: RSVP here.
Artificial UnIntelligence: Assignments and Reading in the One-dimensional World of AI
Artificial Intelligence is here to stay, particularly as universities and their administrations hinge their profit margins on the uses and possibilities of AI in the classroom and beyond. In our own classrooms, AI is utilizes surreptitiously to summarize texts, write papers, and ease the labor of research and critical thinking. As we, as graduate students, develop our own orientations and relationships to AI technologies, how we envision their use in our own classrooms is an inevitable and necessary part of teaching and research.
In this session, we will come together to discuss experiences with AI technology, share resources available to engaging constructively with AI, and hopefully add to our developing arsenal of practices of shaping learning environments for students. Please come prepared with an example (either from your own classrooms or from media) of AI technology used poorly, as well as an example of how you have used AI in your own research/studying capacity.
This workshop is led by Lead Teaching Fellow Nathan Blackwell (Religion). It is open to all interested graduate students.
Date: Wednesday, March 26
Time: 6:00 – 7:30 PM
Location: 80 Claremont, Room TBA
Register: RSVP to nkb2136@columbia.edu
The CTL is here to help!
Office Hours
Drop by CTL’s Office Hours for graduate students to consult with us about any aspect of teaching, CTL fellowships and other offerings, job market preparation, or making progress in the Teaching Development Program. Learn more about Office Hours.
Consultations
Graduate students can now request consultations to get support for their teaching and learning needs. The CTL provides consultations on a range of topics, including syllabus design, creating and refining a teaching statement, integrating instructional technologies into class activities, and presentation practices. Learn more and request a consultation.