Since the mid-1970s, American colleges and universities have sought to improve the quality of undergraduate instruction by supporting teaching centers that work with faculty and graduate students on the “nuts and bolts” of teaching. Currently such centers exist at 222 colleges and universities, but few have succeeded in fully incorporating innovative pedagogies and new digital technologies into teacher preparation.

To address this challenge at Columbia, the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Teaching Center and the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) are endeavoring to re-imagine the roles and functions of a teaching center in the 21st century university.

The two groups were recently awarded a three-year, $125,000 grant by the Teagle Foundation to better prepare doctoral students for teaching in the 21st century and, as a result, bring undergraduate learning at Columbia to a higher level. The grant will support developing a Lead Teaching Fellows Program in the 12 largest Arts & Sciences departments; expand the Teaching Scholars Program to give doctoral students opportunities to offer innovative “for-credit” courses during the regular Fall and Spring semesters; support a program of intensive summer workshops on teaching with technology; and create a peer teaching assessment program.

CCNMTL will receive $40,000 of the funds to design and teach the workshops on teaching with technology and build a web-based resource hub that will make elements of these workshops publicly available. In addition, CCNMTL will provide teaching fellows with cameras, self-service uploading processes, and Mediathread visual analysis software to analyze and critique each other’s pedagogy in Columbia undergraduate classrooms.

“This is an exciting opportunity to expand support for innovative instruction at Columbia,” said Mark Phillipson, CCNMTL senior program specialist. "CCNMTL has traditionally collaborated with faculty, and this new project brings us into direct connection with graduate students, a population doing a significant amount of the teaching on campus.”