Past Symposiums

The Office of the Provost and the Center for Teaching and Learning welcomed the Columbia community to the 2023 Celebration of Teaching and Learning Symposium on March 21 and 23, 2023 to celebrate the ways that faculty and students transformed their courses and pedagogies. The Symposium featured panels of faculty and graduate students, remarks from Provost Mary Boyce, and a celebratory reception.

The Office of the Provost and the Center for Teaching and Learning welcomed the Columbia community to the 2022 Celebration of Teaching and Learning Symposium on March 29, 2022 to celebrate the ways that faculty and students transformed their courses and pedagogies. The Symposium featured panels of faculty and graduate students, a poster exhibition, and a keynote speech from Frank Tuitt, the University of Connecticut’s Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer. 

The Office of the Provost and the Center for Teaching and Learning welcomed the Columbia community to the 2021 Celebration of Teaching and Learning Symposium from March 15–17, 2021 to celebrate imaginative and effective teaching initiatives at Columbia during an unprecedented year. The Symposium featured daily instructor panels, Q&A sessions, and a gallery of instructor and student stories. Participants engaged with innovative educators, shared their insights, and gained inspiration for their own teaching. All programming was held online.

The Office of the Provost’s annual Celebration of Teaching and Learning Symposium celebrated the innovative efforts of faculty and graduate students in transforming their courses and pedagogies. The 2020 event featured keynote speaker Michelle D. Miller, Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at NAU, and author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology (Harvard University Press, 2014). Dr. Miller’s keynote, “Learning at the Intersection of Cognition, Motivation, and Technology: Fulfilling the Promise of Teaching with Technology” explores how we can leverage cognitive and motivational research to create technology-enhanced learning activities that make the most of how the mind works. 

The Office of the Provost’s annual Celebration of Teaching and Learning Symposium celebrated the innovative efforts of faculty and graduate students in transforming their courses and pedagogies, and brought together Columbia faculty, students, and staff to celebrate these accomplishments. The 2019 event featured keynote speaker Carl Wieman, Nobel Laureate and Professor of Physics and Education at Stanford University, as well as an interactive showcase from faculty and students and the announcement of the inaugural cohort of the Provost’s Senior Faculty Teaching Scholars.

The 2018 Celebration of Teaching and Learning Symposium featured keynote speaker Cathy N. Davidson, author of The New Education: How To Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux (Basic Books). In her talk on the “The New Education,” Davidson situates the modern research university within its Taylorist origins. She asks, provocatively, what would higher education look like if we were to consider, deeply and thoroughly, the kind of university students today need to prepare them for the complexities of the world they have inherited.

The Center for Teaching and Learning and the Science Of LEarning Research (SOLER) co-organized the inaugural Science of Learning Symposium. This year’s Symposium brought together Columbia faculty, staff, graduate students, and experts in the science of learning to share the research on metacognition in learning, and to translate it into strategies that maximize student learning.

In this video recording of the 2017 Celebration of Teaching and Learning Symposium, keynote speaker José Antonio Bowen, President of Goucher College, shares insights from his book “Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning.”

The Provost’s Conversations on Online Learning (PCoOL) is a series of public talks by leading experts and peers on the future of education, specifically around online education.