Summer GRED Courses

In this practical, discussion-based course, students will develop skills and perspectives for applying to, interviewing for, and navigating within academic jobs. Students will reflect on their experiences, strengths, and goals; develop and receive feedback on their application documents; learn and practice interview skills; and discuss how to succeed in academic life. Students who complete the course will be better prepared for the academic job market as well as for the challenges and opportunities of higher education careers.

It is critical for instructors to use evidence-based principles and strategies to intentionally design and cultivate inclusive learning environments in order to support a wide range of students. We will begin by critically reflecting on how our perspectives and experiences with differences and similarities inform our approach to teaching and learning. Additionally, we will discuss practical strategies for fostering community within the classroom, fair grading and assessment, choosing course content, and more. We will do this by reading current research in higher education that spans social sciences, humanities, and STEM disciplines. By the end of the course, the hope and expectation is that you will be able to: articulate your own goals for teaching inclusively, identify concrete ways to apply these principles and strategies, and create documents that can be used in future classrooms and on the job market for teaching-related positions.

Distance education, online learning, massive open online courses, blended/hybrid, hyflex and dual-mode delivery—a non-exhaustive list of terms used to describe teaching and learning with at least some digital components. Now, perhaps more than ever before, it is critically important to demonstrate best teaching practices that transcend various modalities. During this six-week course, students will learn and apply pedagogical approaches, design principles, and explore digital tools that facilitate online/hybrid learning. This fully online course consists of asynchronous readings and videos and weekly live sessions. Modeling effective teaching strategies through the coursework, students will experience a variety of active learning strategies and understand the theory that supports them. Additionally, students leave this course with experience in practical strategies for using tools like learning management systems (e.g., Canvas), web conferencing (e.g., Zoom), and other online collaborative tools to optimize teaching and student learning now and in the future.

This course will cover major issues in teaching and career development for students in science, mathematics, and engineering. Topics covered will include:

• Finding academic employment
• How academia works: postdocs, networking, publishing, and tenure
• Teaching science, mathematics, and engineering at a university
• Course and syllabus design
• How to engage students in the classroom
• How to gauge student learning
• Balancing teaching and research

Students will be expected to give a short presentation on a topic of their choice within their own disciplines.

This course is for continuing graduate students, primarily in biology and chemistry, who want to improve their effectiveness in teaching in the science classroom and laboratory. It is also intended as a preparation for graduate students planning to have a significant teaching component in their future career. Students will be asked to actively participate in the course through discussions, designing and delivering short lectures, and short writing assignments. This course is required for the completion of the Teaching Development Certification Program in Biological Sciences.

The primary goal of this course is to prepare you to teach successfully in the college classroom. You will read and discuss literature from higher education pedagogy and the scholarship of teaching and learning, reflect on your own teaching approaches, learn about major theories and trends in pedagogy, and apply what you learn to developing your own new course. After successfully completing the course, you will leave with a set of original course materials for your own use, a broad and solid foundation of pedagogical knowledge, and increased expertise and confidence in your teaching abilities.

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

• Use backward design principles to design a new college course
• Describe and apply a range of teaching practices that are research-based, student-centered, and inclusive
• Espouse and discuss a critically reflective approach to your own teaching

While the course is open to all graduate students, it is particularly well-suited for those with some TAing background who are approaching their first instructor-of-record teaching experience or preparing to teach as their careers progress.

The Summer Session Article Accelerator is an eight-week course designed to help graduate students and postdocs make consistent progress toward revising an existing piece of writing—such as a conference paper, seminar paper, or dissertation chapter—into an article manuscript ready to be submitted to a journal. Students will be assigned reading from Wendy Laura Belcher’s book Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks and meet weekly to discuss the reading, check in with peers on progress and productivity, and participate in drafting and peer-editing exercises designed to model good article-preparation practices alongside Belcher’s recommendations.