Capstone Projects, 2023-2024

E.T. Stone

As the Pedagogy Fellow in American Studies during a year of transition and new beginnings for our program, my major goals were to (1) create a robust collegial support network for my colleagues as teachers-in-training and (2) establish a means of perpetuating that support network across the gap of a three-year admission pause. To these ends, I prioritized gathering our small interdisciplinary community together as regularly and often as possible and compiling institutional knowledge into a guide for the benefit of future students in our program (which ultimately became my capstone project).

View E.T.'s capstone project.

Mohit Mandal

Building off the work of previous Pedagogy Fellows, I edited and organized the Canvas page for Anthro 3636, "Pedagogy in Anthropology," a course for G-2s in their Spring semester, in anticipation of the beginning of their teaching over the Fall. Rather than creating a new Canvas page from scratch every year, this page can now serve as the permanent page for the course, fulfilling several objectives, namely: 1) serving as a repository for resources and pedagogy texts, incentivizing TFs to return to the site throughout their teaching trajectory; 2) simplifying the course handover process for future Pedagogy Fellows.

View Mohit's capstone project.

Mahan Moalemi

The 2023-24 teaching workshops in Art, Film, and Visual Studies functioned like an academic forum, a collegial hangout, and even at times like group therapy. The aim was to focus on pedagogy as a means to facilitate cohort- and community-building among peers. While many sessions hosted guest speakers and facilitators from within and beyond the department, efforts were made to hold space for face-to-face communication among the participating students with as little institutional filtering as possible. With the core values of connecting, learning, and sharing with each other, the workshops provided an opportunity for PhD students to practice and get feedback on essential skills for handling teaching assignments and applying for teaching positions.

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Lee Cannon-Brown

For my capstone, I gave a presentation on best practices for consulting with teachers on their teaching. I focused on the art of giving a “video consultation,” which involves talking with a teacher about a video recording of their class. I first outlined several goals a consultation might work toward, from expanding the teacher’s toolkit, to affirming their existing practice, to interpreting the needs of their students. I then argued that the best way to achieve these goals is to bring the teacher’s attention to classroom dynamics or behaviors that she might not have noticed, and to discuss their significance.

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Tommy George

This capstone project includes work in the following areas: 1) training and community-building for TFs in SEAS; 2) peer observation of other STEM pedagogy courses (CCB & MCB); 3) video consultations with current TFs; and 4) planning a new graduate course in electrochemical engineering, including a final project. A unifying theme of this work is that teaching has the potential to be the basis of community building in a department or cohort, and that discussing teaching among a community of TFs and PFs can be a helpful component of a reflective teaching practice, in which the reflection isn’t just a solo endeavor.

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Dave Song

As a Bok Pedagogy Fellow in STEM, I served as a teaching consultant to TFs and departments in various STEM disciplines. In addition to discussing pedagogy through video consultations, I designed and facilitated a workshop on high-leverage strategies for teaching equitable sections that was delivered to the teaching staff in my home department (CCB). The workshop used Poll Everywhere for real-time feedback, employed ChatGPT to summarize key themes from open-ended responses, and provided deliberate lesson planning through the “chessboard of teaching strategies.” It also covered tangible in-class active learning strategies aimed to enhance the effectiveness and inclusivity of STEM education.

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Colin Brady

My primary goal this year was to design a syllabus for a department pedagogy colloquium and have it approved to run in the 2024/2025 academic year. This has been a process of corresponding with faculty about what kind of a teaching colloquium would be feasible in our program. Because of other commitments for third-year Celtic PhD students, the course will be for G2s. Because they will not be teaching when they are taking the course, I want it to be a place where they can practice skills and create materials they can use in their teaching in their G3 year and beyond. I am happy to report the course was approved, and I will be teaching it next year. 

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Sam Veroneau

Last year, our department critically reflected on how our pedagogy course could better meet the needs of incoming graduate students. Based on feedback we collected, we consolidated our course to: (i) focus more on specific and practical elements of being successful educators and (ii) provide more opportunities to practice teaching with peers. The reception to these changes was overwhelmingly positive and we have already observed Teaching Fellows regularly implementing lessons from our course. Relatedly, we have begun discussing how to more regularly collect feedback from graduate student Teaching Fellows to improve courses throughout our department, a project which will hopefully be continued by next year’s Pedagogy Fellows.

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Louis Zweig

For my capstone project, I developed a guide for instructors in the Classics to help them make their teaching more inclusive. It is meant to work either as something that they can access before planning their course, or during the semester for the purpose of troubleshooting. The site’s information covers topics relating to motivation, day-to-day teaching techniques, course design, assessment, and self-reflection. All of this is organized around five questions that instructors interested in inclusive teaching might ask themselves. Each page offers a brief answer before giving concrete strategies for work in the classroom and bibliography for further reading.

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Yitian Li

My capstone project was the continual development of the department pedagogy course. Building on the work of the previous generations of Pedagogy Fellows, I added four workshops to the curriculum, including a roundtable discussion with the Undergraduate Pedagogy Fellows (UPFs), a creative assignment workshop at the Bok Center’s Learning Lab, a diversity statement workshop with the Bok Center, and a Generative AI workshop that I led. I also maintained the tradition of organizing hands-on activities, allowing time for casual discussion in class, and keeping the workload manageable.

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Joseph Shack

My capstone project is a short “guidebook” with lesson plans for each seminar that comprises the English Department’s teaching colloquium, a required course for third-year graduate student teachers. This represents an extension of the work done by last year’s Pedagogy Fellow, Carly Yingst, who collaborated with the department’s Director of Graduate Studies on creating and teaching a redesigned syllabus for the Teaching Colloquium. The purpose of this guidebook is to provide structure for future Pedagogy Fellows in English, who will be assuming a greater amount of responsibility in running the Teaching Colloquium, and to extend institutional memory regarding the role.

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Elizabeth Thom

My capstone project involved creating an online repository of teaching materials for Gov teaching fellows. I designed an updated version of a preexisting GovTeaches website using Sharepoint. I built out five main pages based on key resource categories: (1) getting started as a TF; (2) lesson plans and section syllabi; (3) teaching writing; (4) Expos details; and (5) tips for teaching online. Each page contains up-to-date links to handbooks, materials, and other resources. The goal was to alleviate some of the stresses that come with teaching by creating a shared space for experienced TFs to share resources and institutional knowledge.

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Noah Pinkham

In our department pedagogy colloquium this year, Teaching Fellows frequently reported that their students struggled with reading comprehension. This got me curious about what it means to read like a historian and how we can go about teaching these disciplinary-specific reading skills. For my capstone project, I developed a guide to teaching critical reading in history through active learning strategies that can be used in future iterations of the department pedagogy colloquium. Drawing on a survey of TFs in the department, pedagogical literature, and conversations with TFs in teaching consultations, the guide presents strategies specific to reading both primary and secondary sources.

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Hande Sevgi

My capstone project highlights my efforts to enhance teaching practices and foster a collaborative community within the Department of Linguistics. I sought to provide valuable resources for TFs and future PFs through tailored workshops and community-building events. Ultimately, my aim was to empower our Teaching Fellows, cultivate a dynamic learning environment, and promote professional growth within our department.

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Jonathan Boretsky

My capstone project was to amalgamate and reorganize the course materials for MATH 300, which is the pedagogy course in the Math Department. I created a Google folder with a lesson plan for each week, with access to past materials, and with reflections and preparation plans for each week of the course. 

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Cait Moffatt

Throughout this year as the MCB PF, I engaged with the MCB community in several ways: conducting video consultations for teaching staff, working closely with MCB courses and preceptors, and laying the groundwork for MCB-wide events. My two main focus areas were 1) developing lasting resources and 2) fostering community. Towards my first goal, I adapted CCB’s pedagogy coursebook to contain MCB-specific information and Bok Center resources for students in the MCB pedagogy course. Towards my second goal, I held two events focused on creating community – one within the MCB pedagogy course, and one that was MCB-wide.

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Chris Benham

My capstone project takes the form of a “Multimedia Rubric System,” a web-based platform designed to assist educators and students in effectively and fairly assessing multimodal projects like podcasts, video essays, and story maps. The system features detailed rubrics for each project type, incorporating interactive grading for various rhetorical, technical, and creative aspects of each project type. Each category is explained through dedicated pages that help to bridge the gap between multimodal workshop and final project, cementing practitioners’ understanding of the evaluation. The aim of this project is to provide a structured, accessible method for critiquing and improving multimedia assignments.

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Mark Wright

My efforts this year as Pedagogy Fellow for OEB prioritized strengthening year-to-year continuity of our department’s pedagogy course. A lot of information could be lost with annual turnover of the teaching team. In addition to developing lesson plans for each day of the year-long course, I have organized a Google Drive folder for the course that is easy to navigate and well-documented. My hope is that this work enables future Pedagogy Fellows to have a clearer understanding of how the course has run in the past as they continue to improve it for the future.

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Peter Aungle

I created a Google Drive folder to harness our PFs’ creativity and flexibility when creating syllabi for our departmental pedagogy course. The folder contains instructions on how to make the most of it, as well as resources and slides organized by topic, syllabi from previous years, contact information for previous PFs, and a list of speakers and topics. Imagine the PF as a chef with the Drive folder as the kitchen: it comes reasonably well-stocked, but it doesn’t have everything – and the chef might want to make something with different ingredients or a new recipe. The folder is a living resource intended to inspire and structure that process, and to be passed on to the next PF in the same spirit.

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Joie Szu-Chiao Chen

This capstone project encapsulates the work that I did with Lydia Shahan, the HDS TF Liaison, in the 2023-2024 academic year to promote pedagogical training in the Study of Religion. Our goal was twofold: to foster community among Religion graduate student-teachers and to provide useful resources for developing the craft of teaching. To that end, in the fall semester we hosted a series of TF Socials and one-off pedagogy workshops, while in the spring semester we convened the “Pedagogy in the Study of Religion” course with a roster of carefully chosen faculty guest speakers. The first half hour of every session of the course was attended by graduate students only in order to allow for a space to share experiences candidly.

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Amanda Gann & Roberto Talavera

The RLL Teaching Repository is an online archive of teaching resources we created to support instructors. This initiative aims to address three key needs: the diversity of our teaching staff's backgrounds and experiences, the lack of dedicated support for international teaching assistants (who make up the majority of our instructors), and difficulties accessing valuable materials. The repository organizes resources into six main categories: Department Orientation, International TA Resources, Guest Speaker Presentations, Placement Test Information, Teaching Demonstrations, and Technology How-To Guides. By centralizing support resources, the repository aims to help both new and experienced instructors navigate their roles within the department.

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Ashley Cavanagh

Past Pedagogy Fellows in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have identified crucial gaps in the SEAS new Teaching Fellow training procedure. This work helped lead to the integration of teaching training into CS290, a required course for new PhD students in computer science. Based on the success of CS290, I propose a model for similar courses that would serve the other SEAS disciplines. Additionally, I summarize key takeaways from this first implementation of teaching training during CS290 and provide suggestions to improve both CS290 and these new courses in the future.

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Longlin Wang

I dedicated much of my efforts this year to enhancing the pedagogy course's practicality and well-roundedness. I collaborated with faculty instructors to train students in teaching through micro-teaching sessions and practical TF section planning tips. We also introduced changes to better prepare students for academic careers broadly, including academic writing, peer reviewing, paper revising and submission. Our efforts ensured that students received comprehensive feedback on their teaching, presentation, and writing skills. Last but not least, we emphasized EDIB and ethical awareness, and the course culminated with a grand finale on the point of ethics education in science.

View Longlin's capstone project.