The future of the YTC

Back in November of 2012, we announced that the Graduate Teaching Center was morphing into the Yale Teaching Center, and that a 15-year-old program built on supporting teaching by graduate students and post-docs was expanding to serve faculty as well.  In fact, we’ve been serving this population on a limited basis for years, but our new mandate to expand presents an opportunity to invent new services and rethink some old ones.

One question that we’ve been discussing is how the creation of the Yale Teaching Center will allow us to expand or improve our graduate teaching program.  One doesn’t have to look very far to find answers to this question.  All of our peer institutions have graduate teaching programs that are part of larger teaching centers, and they benefit greatly from their centers’ involvement in broader questions of teaching and learning on campus.  With our new arrangement, we’ll be able to match their efforts and do even more.  Here are some examples:

Faculty/Graduate Student Conversations about Teaching:  Talking about teaching with peers and “near peers” has well established learning and mentoring benefits.  The GTC has long made great use of these relationships to help graduate students navigate the process of becoming teachers.  The YTC plans to build on this structure, adding sessions with junior and senior faculty and creating new conversations that cut vertically, in addition to horizontally, across the teaching landscape.  A mixed group of faculty and graduate students can discuss the relationship between lecture and discussion, or the way a course advances a student’s quantitative reasoning skills, or how a curriculum can promote the development of a broad interdisciplinary perspective, in a way that either of those groups working separately cannot.

Faculty/Graduate Student Conversations about the path to Assistant Professor:  With the creation of the Certificate in College Teaching Preparation, we’ve aimed to encourage graduate students to take a long view of their teaching experience and preparation -- thinking about time in the classroom and each workshop or consultation as laying the foundation for the academic job market and an eventual teaching career.  The YTC will be much better able to infuse this process with insights from junior faculty who have recently made the transition.  Which activities in graduate school boosted his or her confidence on the market?  What experiences made the first year as an assistant professor easier or more productive?

The Associates in Teaching Program:  This program, now in its fourth year, is a prime example of an innovation that bridges the faculty/graduate student experience to the enormous benefit of both.  We plan to pilot more programs like this–programs that reconfigure how we teach and, in doing so, open the door to new ways of thinking about our teaching, our scholarship, and our disciplines.  

In the weeks ahead, the Provost will convene a steering committee to help guide the Yale Teaching Center to focus its energy on issues that matter most to our classroom teachers.  We’ve been talking to the fellows in our office about the Yale Teaching Center, and we’ve also scheduled a meeting with the Graduate Student Association’s teaching subcommittee.  

How have you experienced teaching at Yale, and how might the Yale Teaching Center further enrich the experience of teachers and students alike?

Bill Rando
Kristi Rudenga
Risa Sodi