Roosevelt, Harvard summer of teaching excellence

Nieuws | de redactie

9 maart 2012 | Roosevelt Academy welcomes two Harvard experts for a summer program on excellence in teaching and learning. Teachers from Dutch university colleges, universities of applied sciences are invited to a series of workshops on microteaching, student-teacher co-creation and other innovative concepts.

After last year’s successful edition, Roosevelt Academy (RA) andHarvard University are set to organize another 4-day workshop onexcellent teaching and learning in higher education. Between the18^th and 21^st of June,  RA welcomes Dr.Ellen Sarkisian and Dr. Terry Aladjem, teaching experts fromHarvard’s Derek Bok Center, to meet with seniorinstructors from Dutch university colleges and universities ofapplied sciences.

Microteaching and student-teacherco-creation

One of the focus subjects will be microteaching, a techniquedeveloped and practiced at the Derek Bok Center and HarvardUniversity. The intensive program also covers lessons on coursestructuring, course management and presentation skills.  

In this context, Harvard’s experts will furthermore discuss withparticipants how they can co-create courses by involving studentsin the process. Main goal of the program is that participantsbecome empowered to take lessons learned to their respectiveorganizations afterwards and spread them there as well.

Teachers as creators of learningexperiences

Last year, speaker and Head of the AcademicCore Department at RA, Michael Burke, stressed that “teaching iscurrently extraordinarily undervalued, while research isovervalued”. Universities would often push their academic staff topublish research papers instead of having them prepare theirclasses properly. Their institutions look for reputational gain bybeing more visible in the research world while students are onlysecond priority.

Terry Aladjem, lecturer at Harvard, concurred with this view andemphasized that teachers should understand themselves as “creatorsof learning experiences”. By using ‘reverse-engineering’, teachersshould ask themselves “not what they want students to know, butwhat they want them to do with that knowledge later on.”Accordingly, course syllabi would become less an enumeration oftopics 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 prepareand highlight the impact and content of the upcoming seminar. Thefollowing weeks and months you will see more on excellence inteaching and learning.

Would you like to participate in the 4-day program onexcellent teaching and learning by Harvard University and RooseveltAcademy? For more information on how to register for it, click here.