Blog as a Tool for Engagement in the Classroom
2015-2018 | Future Faculty Program + Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation Summit
Eberly Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA | website
​
As a young adjunct faculty at the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University and while designing my first course, I decided to take part int the Future Faculty Program offered by the Eberly Center. The Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation at Carnegie Mellon brings pedagogical and technological issues together to support Carnegie Mellon faculty and graduate students in their roles as educators. One of their key programs is the Future Faculty program, which helps graduate students develop and document their teaching skills in preparation for a faculty career. Participants in this program learn the principles of effective course design and pedagogy through our seminars, receive feedback on their teaching through teaching feedback consultations, and apply what they have learned in completing a course & syllabus design project and a statement of teaching philosophy project.
I completed the program successfully, during which I attended seminars on course and syllabus design, guiding attention and memory to build knowledge, monitoring my teaching effectiveness, and providing helpful feedback among others. I also took part in workshops, put together my statement of teaching philosophy, and was observed while teaching and received feedback about my performance in the classroom. During that period, I also completed successfully my first semester teaching a course I had designed. The Eberly Center was impressed by some of the techniques that I used during my class and specifically about how I used blogging as a way to increase participation in the classroom. So, they invited me to present some of the work I had been doing that semester in their first Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation Summit.