After last year's successful edition, Roosevelt Academy (RA) and
Harvard University are set to organize another 4-day workshop on
excellent teaching and learning in higher education. Between the
18th and 21st of June, RA welcomes Dr.
Ellen Sarkisian and Dr. Terry Aladjem, teaching experts from
Harvard's Derek Bok Center, to meet with senior
instructors from Dutch university colleges and universities of
applied sciences.
Microteaching and student-teacher
co-creation
One of the focus subjects will be microteaching, a technique
developed and practiced at the Derek Bok Center and Harvard
University. The intensive program also covers lessons on course
structuring, course management and presentation skills.
In this context, Harvard's experts will furthermore discuss with
participants how they can co-create courses by involving students
in the process. Main goal of the program is that participants
become empowered to take lessons learned to their respective
organizations afterwards and spread them there as well.
Teachers as creators of learning
experiences
Last year, speaker and Head of the Academic
Core Department at RA, Michael Burke, stressed that "teaching is
currently extraordinarily undervalued, while research is
overvalued". Universities would often push their academic staff to
publish research papers instead of having them prepare their
classes properly. Their institutions look for reputational gain by
being more visible in the research world while students are only
second priority.
Terry Aladjem, lecturer at Harvard, concurred with this view and
emphasized that teachers should understand themselves as "creators
of learning experiences". By using 'reverse-engineering', teachers
should ask themselves "not what they want students to know, but
what they want them to do with that knowledge later on."
Accordingly, course syllabi would become less an enumeration of
topics deemed important by the academic world and more an
"orchestration of events to achieve the goal of true learning".
ScienceGuide and Roosevelt Academy will work together to prepare
and highlight the impact and content of the upcoming seminar. The
following weeks and months you will see more on excellence in
teaching and learning.
Would you like to participate in the 4-day program on
excellent teaching and learning by Harvard University and Roosevelt
Academy? For more information on how to register for it, click here.