The McGraw Teaching Seminar is a year-long opportunity for graduate student and faculty participants to engage collaboratively with current research on a range of issues in teaching and learning in higher education. Based on the current scholarship on teaching, the seminar provides a unique context for participants to have sustained conversations in which they can inquire and reflect on the goals and processes of their teaching and then draw on the literature and our discussions as they design or redesign courses, carry out their teaching, and assess their students' learning.
In the Fall semester of the McGraw Teaching Seminar, monthly meetings consist of discussions of readings aimed at identifying the complexities inherent in undergraduate learning within their disciplines and the challenges these pose for teaching. Based on the research on student learning, seminar workshops provide a context for participants to reassess their teaching practices and to begin developing new teaching plans and principles. In the Spring semester, graduate fellows present issues and questions that arise from their own concurrent teaching experience and work to identify and promote general and discipline-specific ways of learning, student engagement strategies, and effective assessment methods. Graduate participants will design a course syllabus and write a statement of teaching philosophy that draw on the seminar.
The primary goal of this seminar is to enable participants to draw on pedagogical research and literature to inform teaching goals and strategies that will enhance their students’ learning. Participants acquire and enhance their own language for analyzing, assessing and describing their students’ learning. They also learn to set focused course goals, create a syllabus, and plan assignments, exams, and assessments as well as use course management systems and consider new digital and online tools that enhance student learning.