Vanderbilt Center for Teaching Podcast

This episode continues our podcast series focusing on time-efficient teaching. Faculty at a research university like Vanderbilt must balance a number of competing demands on their time, including teaching, research, and service. For this series, we’re interviewing senior faculty members at Vanderbilt and asking them to share ways they teach effectively while making good use of their time.

In this episode, we feature an interview with Tim McNamara, associate provost for faculty and professor of psychology. In the interview, Tim describes time-efficient ways to approach lesson planning, grading papers, teaching with clickers, working with TAs, and selecting courses to teach. Allison Pingree, the director of the Center for Teaching, conducted the interview.

Episode 13 - Tim McNamara on Time-Efficient Teaching

[MP3, 14 min 35 sec]

Relevant Links:

• Tim McNamara’s Home Page
• CFT guide to lecture design
• CFT guide to supervising TAs

Please take a minute or two to leave a comment here and share your thoughts about time-efficient teaching. Vanderbilt instructors are also welcome to call the Center for Teaching at 615-322-7290 to arrange a meeting with a CFT teaching consultant to discuss any aspect of their teaching.

This episode begins a new series here on the podcast, a series focusing on time-efficient teaching. Faculty at a research university like Vanderbilt must balance a number of competing demands on their time, including teaching, research, and service. For this series, we’re interviewing senior faculty members at Vanderbilt and asking them to share ways they teach effectively while making good use of their time.

In this episode, we feature an interview with Todd Giorgio, professor and chair of biomedical engineering. In the interview, Todd describes time-efficient ways to approach office hours, in- and out-of-class assignments, and class preparation.

Episode 11 - Todd Giorgio on Time-Efficient Teaching

[MP3, 16 min 50 sec]

Relevant Links:

• VaNTH Engineering Research Center for Bioengineering Educational Technologies
• CFT guide to teaching with clickers
• CFT guide to classroom assessment techniques

Please take a minute or two to leave a comment here and share your thoughts about time-efficient teaching. Vanderbilt instructors are also welcome to call the Center for Teaching at 615-322-7290 to arrange a meeting with a CFT teaching consultant to discuss any aspect of their teaching.

In this episode, we feature excerpts from an interview with Stephen Buckles, Senior Lecturer in Economics here at Vanderbilt. In this interview, Steve describes his use of a classroom response system in his large undergraduate economics courses. This system allows Steve to pose multiple-choice questions to his students during class and his students to submit their answers to these questions using small handheld devices called clickers. The system them displays on an overhead screen a bar chart showing the distribution of student responses. Steve uses this system to engage his students actively during class.

Episode 2 - An Interview with Steve Buckles

[MP3, 16 min 50 sec]

Relevant Links:

• CFT guide to teaching with clickers
• Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur’s home page

If you’ve used clickers in your teaching or have ideas for doing so, we encourage you to leave a comment here. Vanderbilt instructors are also welcome to call the Center for Teaching at 322-7290 to arrange a meeting with a CFT teaching consultant to discuss ways to use clickers effectively in their teaching.