Excellence in teaching and learning

Nieuws | de redactie
1 mei 2013 | University College Roosevelt welcomes its Harvard colleagues for their combined summer program on excellence in teaching. Teachers from HE are invited to a series of workshops on microteaching and other innovative concepts. Teaching in HE is as vital for its quality as research, is the shared philosophy.

After two successful editions, University College Roosevelt (UCR) and Harvard University are set to organize another 4-day workshop on excellent teaching and learning in higher education. Between the 10th and 13th of June, UCR welcomes Dr. Ellen Sarkisian, Dr. Terry Aladjem and Dr. Elise Morrison, teaching experts from Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, to meet with senior instructors from educational institutions. Last year, Terry Aladjem shared his inspiring vision on excellent education on ScienceGuide.

Fruitful student-teacher relationships

One of the main subjects will be microteaching, a technique developed and practiced at the Derek Bok Center and Harvard University. During the course, there will also be looked into the principles of course design, syllabus design and course initiation, presentation and implementation as well as into the nonverbal aspects of excellent teaching, such as voice and speech.

In this context, Harvard’s experts will furthermore discuss with participants how they can co-create courses by involving students in the process. There will be built upon the principles of social psychology to acquire the skills to develop a highly fruitful working relationship between teachers and students. One of the main goals of the program is that participants become empowered to take the lessons learned to their respective organizations afterwards and spread them there.

Teachers as creators

Speaker – and Full Professor of Rhetoric at UCR! – Michael Burke, stresses 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, concurs and emphasizes 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 University College Roosevelt 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 University College Roosevelt? For more information, click here. You can also visit Facebook at www.facebook.com/UCRSummerSchool


«
Schrijf je in voor onze nieuwsbrief
ScienceGuide is bij wet verplicht je toestemming te vragen voor het gebruik van cookies.
Lees hier over ons cookiebeleid en klik op OK om akkoord te gaan
OK