Home » teaching
Category Archives: teaching
PFF Fellows Series: Samanthis Smalls
As a graduate student, it is rather difficult to ignore the issues that trouble my colleagues, particularly the dreaded job market. I found that as I got closer to the glorious PhD, the anxious whispers of others became the deafening roars of my own inner voice and I wondered, “Will I get a job?” Then my mind hit me with a shockingly basic query: “What does the life of a professor actually look like?” (more…)
PFF Fellows Series: Samantha Deffler
As a graduate student at Duke with the desire to teach, I am awash in opportunities to improve my pedagogical abilities. I have attended numerous Teaching IDEAS workshops, taken classes through the Certificate in College Teaching program, and taught during two summer sessions. However, the most enlightening experience that I have had in my journey to becoming an effective educator was my participation in the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program. (more…)
Behind the scenes of an academic career: Preparing Future Faculty
Since I began working in The Graduate School in 2003, I have coordinated RCR ethics training, taught courses on college teaching & higher education, and had the privilege of directing the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program. PFF is an annual, professional mentoring program for 25 advanced Ph.D. students and 5 postdocs at Duke who are mentored by faculty members from nearby partner colleges or universities: Durham Tech Community College, Elon University, Guilford College, Meredith College, and NC Central University. PFF Fellows are those who want to learn about different types of academic institutions and the reality of faculty life and responsibilities at colleges beyond a research university. (more…)
Three lessons learned from a Bass instructional fellowship
Their eyes were upon me, and I was stuck. I had just given students a worksheet that had them calculate the relatedness of haploid-diploid bees. In my ideal lesson plan, the students would have worked together to discover that female bees may actually be more related to their sisters than their own offspring. Instead, the students told me that they didn’t know how to calculate relatedness in humans, yet alone weird bees. I had made an incorrect assumption about their prior knowledge, and now I was struggling to figure out how to best teach the basics before making things more complicated. (more…)
Graduate students talk about their MOOC experiences
Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) blog recently featured two PhD students in a post in which they talk about their experience taking a massive, open online course (MOOC) as part of their Bass Instructional Fellowship. Over the coming 14-15 academic year, they’ll be applying some of this experience as online apprentices in CIT.
Read more: Keri & Giuseppe tell all!
Dr. Hugh Crumley (http://www.hughcrumley.com) directs the Certificate in College Teaching and teaches courses in teaching, technology and design in The Graduate School.
The CCT and why I chose Duke
As a second year in the Ph.D. program in the Duke Department of Statistical Science, meeting prospective Ph.D. students is one of the enjoyable events of the Spring semester. Each week, faced with the quintessential question “why did you choose Duke?”, I emphasize the ability to personalize the program to individual research interests and career goals. (more…)
Starting to teach online
There was an interesting post recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog ProfHacker. This post, Adventures in Synchronous Online Teaching, details one faculty member’s first foray into developing and teaching an all online seminar, including some of the initial quirks and struggles she faced. You may find this a reassuring read if you are also looking at making the leap to teaching an online or hybrid course and find this a daunting prospect. By the way, if you are looking at a faculty career path and are not reading ProfHacker already, you really should be.
If you happen to be here at Duke and are interested in online teaching, you might find the Bass Online Apprenticeship a great opportunity to get started.
New Graduate Bass Teaching Fellowships
We are so very pleased to announce that the newly restructured Bass Undergraduate Instructional Program for Duke PhD students has made its first awards. Thanks to a generous endowment gift from the family of Anne T. and Robert M. Bass, this program is able to support teaching experiences where normal means of funding are unavailable, and to help students become knowledgeable in online college teaching.
The fellowships come in several varieties: Teaching Fellows, who will either be a TA in another department or teach their own course as instructor of record (IOR), and Online Apprentices (OAs) who will take the new class GS 762 Online College Teaching and then apprentice in the Center for Instructional Technology to support Duke’s growing roster of online or hybrid courses.
This year’s recipients of Bass Teaching Fellowships as TAs: (more…)
