In this episode we talk with Jenny Frederick, the Executive Director of Yale’s Center for Teaching and Learning. She tells us about her own formative experiences in the classroom, and how the new center brings together several existing organizations on campus to help students, train beginning teachers, and support established faculty.

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Show Notes

0:00 ⏯ Intro

1:05 ⏯ How Jenny got started teaching

• What do you want to be when you grow up? (Spoiler: Jenny loves school and always has.)
• The freedom of teaching when the administration isn’t paying attention
• Creating “new” ideas by borrowing from other disciplines
• Is good teaching transmitting knowledge as fast as possible during a lecture? (Spoiler: No)

6:25 ⏯ Why should know something about your student?

• Their motivation is important.
• Their prior knowledge is important.

10:00 ⏯ Has their been real progress in teaching or are some of us just paying more attention than we used to?

12:00 ⏯ The value of writing down what your university wants students to get out of their education

16:01 ⏯ Being explicit about the goals of your class even when they aren’t directly linked to the substantive content of the class

19:05 ⏯ Why teaching students facts isn’t enough (Spoiler: There are too many important ones)

23:15 ⏯ How to teach resilience (Spoiler: We don’t know)

27:39 ⏯ Teaching in a service department vs. a department that has majors

30:13 ⏯ An impromptu meeting of the Bill Rando Fan Club

31:38 ⏯ The birth of the Yale Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL)

33:38 ⏯ The vision for the CTL

39:28 ⏯ Instructional Technology is faculty training by stealth.

40:12 ⏯ Teaching should be a public act.

41:00 ⏯ Using “positive peer pressure” to incentivize faculty to improve their teaching

43:15 ⏯ The power of classroom observation

45:40 ⏯ Jenny’s biggest teaching mistake

47:45 ⏯ Connecting with students in the classroom and at the same time taking advantage of online resources