lead teaching fellowship

The lead teaching fellowship is an opportunity for current PhD students to lead pedagogical workshops and make resources from the Center for Teaching and Learning available to their home department. In the 2021-2022 year, my workshops focused on lessons learned from online teaching and a survey of approaches to ungrading. Below is a reflection handed back to the CTL that summarizes the work and lessons learned over that year

What goals did you have for your LTF role? What progress did you make toward these goals? What challenges did you encounter? How might these experiences translate more broadly?

A major goal I had for myself as an LTF was to continue to bring the graduate students within the Psychology department together in a meaningful way. I know I’m a better teacher when I have a strong support system of other teachers, and I was set up in a departmental administrative role to put together the kinds of events that might strengthen that network. This was relatively easy to work towards, it mostly relied on sending out some very comprehensive emails at the beginning of each semester making clear I could be a point person for any departmental or pedagogical needs, and then coordinating between students and the various staff to make sure we had time and space to meet up. I tried to make an opportunity for us all to see each other every two weeks – especially once it was warm and we could use departmental money to meet indoors.

The greatest challenge was in properly motivating people to get together. Weirdly – and I don’t know how generalizable this is – my biggest success in this domain was by hosting a methods workshop in Amity Hall in which we were all at a table and someone was presenting on the TV above the table, and then at the end of the workshop people just stayed in the bar and all caught up. Other events that were mostly post-talk receptions where people left from the talk and went to a separate locale – typically well attended – were far less popular. I really think there’s something about hijacking people’s training goals to get them to actually hang out with each other.

It’s that kind of insight that makes the LTF probably the most useful role I’ve been in for gaining skills useful to any professional context. Motivating dispersed groups of people, uniting them around a common narrative, and creating the space for genuine interactions is critical to any form of leadership.

What did you learn about modeling or leading as a result of facilitating your LTF events (or resource)?

I think probably what I learned most was how critical “putting in the work” is to both leading and modeling. That sounds very simple, but there’s so much about teaching that feels just about energy and tone and instincts that it’s easy to pass over how much of our pedagogical practices rely on being actively steeped in the method, literature, and practice. For my second LTF event on ungrading, this was obviously apparent during the portion that was mostly literature review I had done in preparation, but it was just as much true that I would not have had the instincts for leading any discussion on the topics had I not done the thorough literature review myself.

Please describe a resource that was helpful to you this year as you developed your LTF events (or online resource).

Having Ana DiGiovanni as a co-LTF was incredibly meaningful. From reading previous reports from the departmental LTFs, it seems the hardest part of this job was doing it alone. Having another LTF in the department felt like the interest in pedagogy was distributed, and all the more cultural rather than personal. I hope the department keeps the budget for it. It makes things easier on the individual LTFs as much as it tangibly demonstrates to the rest of the department just how committed we are and ought to be to the practice.

Lucy Wang, my SLTF, has been a bottomless and effervescent resource during my time, and has made herself available and made sure I was connected with my fellow LTFs in a way that really connected me with the role. Her and Emily Fitzgerald’s learning community was also incredibly impactful on my ungrading event as well as my line of research generally!

The last resource that was indispensable was the archive of LTF documentation. It was absolutely fundamental to how I contextualized myself within the LTF role and in regard to the other graduate students. It is a brilliant resource that provided me countless ideas and tangible materials.

If you were planning a third LTF event or resource, what might that event be, and is there something in particular you would do differently?

I was so inspired by Lucy and Emily’s learning community I would have a hard time not making a third LTF event about embodied knowledge! There were so many critical insights as to what exactly it was we all missed over Zoom and how we relate to our materials and each other that were so fun to pick apart together. It really resonated with my ungrading LTF event about how we can be so encouraged to consider one another and the objects of our study as abstractions of themselves, whose physical properties and phenomenological experiences are overwritable, exchangeable, and ultimately irrelevant.

Thinking about teaching programming, particularly, as teaching a craft is a really valuable insight. It resonates with earlier language classes I’ve had where the structural syntax and rules reign supreme over the meaning of the actual words or what they’re supposed to sound like to the ear. In a similar way, we too often think functions and syntax are all the students need, rather than the actual lived experience of understanding why things go where they go, trying things, having them not work, and overall building an interactive system that models how one might fix a bike or pot a plant or make dumplings. Brain research is beginning to show that supervised learning – the process of backpropagating errors onto the network that made the error – is enacted by the cerebellum, the area responsible for fine motor control. All to say that treating our material as a craft to be learned ought to enact those same areas that develop learning in a much more naturalistic way.

What goals guided your liaison work? What are some highlights you can share from your liaison activities?

My primary goal was creating space for graduate students to connect after the pandemic. I knew I was in a relatively special position being an LTF with a departmental role that gave me access to some funds allocated for graduate students to use however we wished. Most of my liaison work was therefore spent towards organizing these relatively informal events, which almost invariably centered around teaching in the department.

Ana and I did manage to get some meetings with directors of undergraduate studies within the department to try to work out how graduate students could more readily become instructors of record on courses they wanted to teach. We compiled a list and are readying an open resource for future graduate students on what options there are and how to navigate them. Because there aren’t many strictly through Columbia undergraduate classes, it was all the more crucial to centralize and document opportunities in the surrounding area at secondary and other undergraduate institutions.

How do you think your LTF events and/or liaising may have impacted the teaching-related conversations, culture, and/or training in your home department?

I think my LTF events acted as a scaffold for a lot of the discourse I saw happen at the informal events throughout the year. In the way that Greek dramas made explicit the moral standards of society in a way that structured individual relationships, the LTF events made explicit what the goals and means of teaching were in the department in a way that structured ongoing informal interactions. Everything we covered about empathy, self-care, and teacher-student relationships set a standard of what the graduate student body was generally invested in that I felt reverberated through the community.

What advice would you impart to an incoming LTF in your department?

My advice would then be to make sure those casual events and interactions keep happening. This department is full of students who will take on seemingly endless amounts of noble work that makes our department, university, and city a better place – very few of them will spontaneously put their feet up and spend time with each other. A year and however many months of Zoom has only fed into that instinct, with every interaction taking on the appearance and feeling of a business meeting rather than an interpersonal exchange. The thing about teaching is that it often happens best in moments that feel more like the latter, and leading people towards those moments means modeling that kind of behavior and creating the space for them to happen.

Another initiative that is gaining traction within the department is unofficially documenting processes and opportunities. These have been as simple as which appointments to register for, how to get access to the computing cluster, or what teaching opportunities lie outside Columbia. Up to now the process was that a generation of students might learn things like this, utilize it, never share it, and forget about it, leaving it up to the next generation of students to figure it all out again. Centralizing and sharing this information has been critical to the department feeling unified and progressing. The CTL figured this out early on with its documentation procedures, but it’s just as relevant to the life of the department. The LTF offers a unique position to document the resources and procedures as they relate to teaching, which have never been officially codified by the department to the same degree that, say, grant writing or research procedures have been.

2021-22 liaising

September:

• Sent introductory email to department introducing Ana and I as the department lead teaching fellows

• Represented the CTL at graduate student orientation, specifically promoting the teaching development program

October:

• Held two graduate student receptions where Ana and I promoted our LTF events to the gathered graduate students

• Attended Ana DiGiovanni’s LTF event that acts as a “Part 1” to my “Part 2”

• Promoted my event through department-wide emails and individual solicitations.

• Held my “Part 2” LTF event

November:

• Mediated between departmental faculty and staff to allow graduate workers and TAs to gather using our allocated departmental funds.

January:

• Reached out to the department to collect graduate student teaching needs that could be addressed in upcoming LTF events

• Coordinated with the Directors of Academic Affairs & Undergraduate Studies about how to increase Instructor-of-Record opportunities for graduate students.

February:

• Coordinated and executed a number of informal meet-ups with graduate students to talk about personal and departmental needs, typically mostly to do with teaching.

March:

• Drummed up support and attendance for my and Ana’s LTF events through various emails, slack messages, and in-person reminders.

• Held a department-funded reception for the incoming graduate students that also acted as a debriefer for our LTF events

April:

• Held two more department-funded graduate receptions where students could informally discuss about personal and departmental needs in relation to teaching