This Week for Graduate Students: How to Observe Teaching, Cognitive Overload in the Online Class, and More!
Featured Programs
Learning by Observing: The Art of an Effective Teaching Observation
Observing faculty or peers teaching can be a powerful way to expand your awareness of teaching techniques, train your attention on student learning, and generate reflection about your own instructional approaches. But how can you ensure that an observation leads to all these benefits?
This workshop will provide participants with a model for conducting online or in-person observations of teaching that focus on learning objectives, student engagement, and insights about the observer’s own teaching development.
Note: Observation of someone else teaching is a requirement of the Advanced Track of CTL’s Teaching Development Program (TDP).
Date: Today! Monday, October 26
Time: 2:40 PM – 3:55 PM
Teachers’ Lounge: Cognitive Overload for Students in the Online Class
Teachers’ Lounges are a series of informal discussions for graduate students about teaching practices and the culture of learning at Columbia. In this session, we will consider the often competing demands on attention when learning in the online environment, and discuss their impact on retention and understanding. What can instructors do to focus and pace the attention of their students while interacting with them in digital spaces? How can supplemental or asynchronous materials help? Join us to share tactics and gain inspiration.
Date: Thursday, October 29
Time: 12:10 PM – 1:25 PM
Featured LTF Event: Teaching Language with Poetry
Poetry is not the most popular genre of the traditional triad (prose, drama, poetry). It’s often experienced as an annoying communicative challenge not really worth the effort of arduous decoding. Confronting the reader with difficult linguistic structures and sounds, poetry requires a certain determination and concentration to become a pleasant phenomenon. This workshop takes as its departure the resistance that poetic language materializes, with the aim of exploring its value for the foreign language classroom.
This event will be led by Cosima Mattner, Lead Teaching Fellow in the Department of Germanic Languages.
Date: Friday, October 30
Time: 4:00PM–5:15PM
Featured Resource
Teaching Conference Support
Current Columbia doctoral students are invited to apply for funds to help defray expenses associated with attending a conference or training focused on teaching practices in higher education. Approved applicants will receive up to $750.
Graduate students interested in exploring careers in academic teaching development may be particularly interested in the POD Network Conference, convening online from November 10–13.
This support is is being sponsored by the GSAS Office of the Dean, funded by the Office of the Provost, and administered by CTL.