Center for Teaching & Learning Expands Efforts
BU Center for Teaching & Learning fellows: (back row, from left) Jonathan Hibbard, Christophor Cavalieri, Cheryl McSweeney, Kaija Schilde, Pary Fassihi, Peter Zink, and Scott Marr; (front row, from left) Sophie Hochhäusl, Gouri Gupte, center director Matthew Trevett-Smith, Bruce Anderson, and Rosina Georgiadis; (not pictured) Anthony Mecham. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi
Matthew Trevett-Smith sent an email in April inviting faculty to apply for a six-week summer fellowship at the Center for Teaching & Learning designed to inspire creative changes in classrooms across BU. And while the fellowships include a $6,000 stipend, new center director Trevett-Smith didn’t expect a big response given that it was already late in the semester and both he and the center were unknown quantities. “I thought 5 or 10 responses would be a good number,” he says.
Instead, 40 proposals came in from faculty members in nine schools across both campuses. The applicants’ objectives ranged from improving class videos to fine-tuning collaborations among students. Trevett-Smith chose 12, he says, because a dozen is the most you can have in a comfortable and cohesive faculty learning community, “particularly if you want to get everyone around a single table.”
And that was exactly what he wanted. Weekly group conversations over lunch and dinner at Silber Way were high points of the six-week program, which ran concurrently with the first summer term.
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