Stanford
Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education

SGSI 2024: Teaching as Research (TAR): Leverage Your Skills as a Scholar to Improve Your Teaching

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Monday, Sept. 9 – Friday Sept. 13, 10 AM - 3 PM

Are you curious about what influences student learning and experience in the classroom? Join this community to ignite your curiosity, utilize and develop research skills, and discover pedagogical literature that will guide your design of a project centered on understanding and ultimately improving student outcomes. Designing this TAR project will help you become a more reflective instructor who can use classroom evidence to improve and inform your teaching. Completing the TAR project afterward will fulfill a significant portion of the requirements for the Practitioner level CIRTL@Stanford teaching certificate and may also help with future job applications and interviews.

Instructors

  • Gloriana Trujillo, PhD, senior director, Academic Teaching Programs in the Center for Teaching and Learning
  • Jamie Imam, PhD, advanced lecturer, Biology
  • Shima Salehi, PhD, assistant professor, Graduate School of Education

Audience & Capacity

Open to all graduate students in any discipline* and postdoctoral scholars (if space allows). We will prioritize enrollment for those more advanced in their teaching careers or who have started or completed the Associate level CIRTL@Stanford teaching certificate. Space limited to 16.

*MSx Class of 2025 and first-year MBA students are ineligible to participate due to mandatory program requirements.

Objectives

By participating in this course, you will:

  • Formulate questions that can inform how you approach teaching and learning; select one question as a focus for your teaching as research (TAR) project.
  • Explore scholarly literature in teaching and learning to identify prior work that informs and guides your TAR project.
  • Increase familiarity with methods for collecting and analyzing data in an education context and apply relevant options to your TAR project design.
  • Draft a written plan for your TAR project, informed and improved by colleague feedback, that uses feasible sources of evidence to analyze project impact on student learning and experience.

Summary

How do we know what influences student learning and experience in the classroom? How might research skills be applied in a classroom context?

Join this community to ignite your curiosity, utilize and develop research skills, and discover pedagogical literature that will guide your design of a project centered on understanding and ultimately improving student outcomes. Designing this TAR project will help you become a more reflective instructor who is confident in using classroom evidence to improve and inform your teaching.

Stanford is a member of the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) Network, whose overall mission is to improve the quality of undergraduate education. One of the core principles of CIRTL’s approach is “Teaching as Research” (TAR), a deliberate and systematic approach towards investigating, reflecting on, and improving one’s own teaching.

The TAR process follows an inquiry cycle consisting of the following stages:

  • Identifying a challenge within the context of teaching and learning
  • Exploring the relevant scholarly literature
  • Designing and implementing (a) a project to elucidate why the challenge occurs and/or (b) a teaching intervention to address the challenge
  • Collecting, analyzing, and interpreting classroom data
  • Reflecting on the TAR experience from the perspective of scholar/researcher

By the end of the course, participants will present a TAR project plan that could be implemented in future teaching or other academic contexts. You will also build a community that will support you in the implementation of your project in the coming year. Completing the TAR project designed in this course will provide evidence of reflective professional practice and fulfill a significant portion of the requirements for the Practitioner level CIRTL@Stanford Teaching Certificate, which may also help you in future job applications and interviews.

Additional Course Expectations

  • The course will be highly active and interactive and include a mix of workshops, peer interaction and feedback, and other group and individual work. We will provide some in-class working time but there may be some days where you will need time outside of class time to complete work. Some additional reflection and work may be required outside of our time together. Students should expect no more than 1-2 hours of work per day outside of class.
  • Full attendance is expected.

SUNet ID required to log in; all SGSI correspondence sent to your Stanford email account.