Excellence in Teaching: Meet CEUs Center for Teaching and Learning

Please jump to "Experience as a Doctoral Student" to continue reading from the CEU Weekly Print article.

Helga and Sally with students
Photo Credit: Abel Lakatos

When I registered for my Foundations in Teaching in Higher Educationcourse at CEU last year, I mostly expected some “Teaching for Dummies” course combined with some educational Psychology and Pedagogy. I soon discovered that CEU’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL henceforth) offers courses that are very different from traditional teacher training courses, and also that CTL’s activity is diverse and extensive – just not always visible at first sight. This is why I asked CTL faculty members Helga Dorner, Joanna Renc-Roe and Sally Schwager, with Tünde Polonkai as office manager, to talk about the Center’s past, present and future. Joanna answered to my questions via mail.

The history of teaching centers around the world goes back to the 1980s. They first appeared in the Scandinavian and in the US/UK context; the CTL at CEU was founded in 2011. As Sally told me, one of the main reasons for establishing such a unit at CEU was that “doctoral students at CEU – a graduate-only institution – have fewer opportunities to teach than at universities with undergraduate students.” Apart from doctoral students, as Joanna highlighted, CTL also works together with “CEU faculty, and other universities and the wider profession.”

The main framework for working with doctoral students is the CTL Certificate Program for Excellence in Teaching and Higher Education, graduate seminars and private consultations. The driving concepts behind the Program are scholarship, reflection, collaboration and innovation. These are not just empty words, but real organizing powers behind the CTL courses. During our discussion, we came to the conclusion that the CTL’s work with doctoral students turns CEU’s disadvantage – no undergraduate programs where students could teach – into an advantage, even a privilege. The CTL seminars and certificate program do not simply aim to offer a crash-course to survive doctoral students’ teaching duties – they empower students with skills and knowledge to become “self-reflexive scholars” and enable them to “sustain professional development both as teachers and researchers” in their academic and other professional careers. Concerning future plans, Helga highlighted possible projects to get out-of-town CEU students more involved with the CTL by using online technology.

Joanna at a poster session with students
Photo credit: Peter Rakossy

The CTL’s work with CEU faculty is voluntary, formative and confidential. Therefore, it is also quite invisible to the student body, but their professionalism contributes to many excellent CEU courses without you noticing. It is their foremost belief that they do not judge or evaluate – they offer their help, be it practical or other methodological issues, if it is asked for. Helga, Joanna and Sally are all researchers themselves, well-connected with colleagues all over the world, and they bring state-of-the-art, research-based knowledge on scholarly education to CEU.

All in all, I have learnt through CTL courses that teaching, good teaching, is hard and demanding. But I also learnt that teachers are not born – teaching can be learnt. And if you work together with Helga, Joanna and Sally, either as a professor or as a student, it becomes a bit easier (and definitely a lot more fun).

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CTL Experience as a Doctoral Student

The CTL’s Certificate Program for Excellence in Teaching and Higher Education consists of three parts: a semester-long, ambitious Foundationscourse; two short seminars in one of the three specific areas (Design for Student Learning, Teaching Strategies, Communication in the Classroom); and the final capstone project and seminar on Starting your Teaching Portfolio. The program is doable in one academic year, and it is advised that you start with the Foundations course and follow the order of the Program because it is designed as a developmental sequence to cultivate reflective thinking in students. So, why should you complete the CTL’s Certificate Program for Excellence in Teaching and Higher Education?

You can earn more than credits. CTL courses do not award credit except by special arrangement with individual doctoral programs. Therefore, many people are reluctant to sign up for them, as they are busy with fulfilling their mandatory credits for their academic programs. However, devoting time and energy into completing the CTL program is an investment with a high rate of return. It empowers you with transferable skills that are useful beyond both teaching and academia.

CTL Program Structure
Photo from: ctl.ceu.edu

Get inspired in a relaxed learning environment. CTL team’s professionalism in teaching, their love for their students and their enthusiasm for their work serves as a great model and a source of inspiration. CTL courses put a great emphasis on creating a relaxed and a friendly learning environment where you can take a step back and put your academic career, as a teacher and as a researcher, into perspective. Furthermore, it gives you an opportunity to join in-depth, thoughtful discussions with fellow doctoral students about a range of themes in academia – from teaching philosophies and session design plans to theoretical questions about learning, knowledge and intellectual development.

Experience inter- and multidisciplinarity first hand. In CTL courses you work – and think! – together with doctoral students from almost every discipline whom you would otherwise probably never meet and talk to. You get familiar with different ways of thinking and once you are familiar with them, you also learn to respect them more. Interdisciplinarity has become an overused by-word that is easy to talk about, but hard to actually do. Getting engaged in discussions with doctoral students from various fields highlights the disciplinary embeddedness of knowledge production, but it also turns our attention to its obsoleteness in thinking about our contemporary complex problems that demand an inter- and multidisciplinary approach and collaborative research – real challenges and requirements in academia to which current institutional systems and academic programs barely prepare students. CTL courses emphasise both the boundary lines of disciplinary thinking and encourage us to turn them into a multidisciplinary connective tissue in order to enhance our research capacities.

Develop self-reflection – the ultimate power. We usually assume that we know what we do, but sometimes it turns out that we do not. Teaching is a demanding job which requires careful planning, the integration and streamlining of goals with tasks, and all of this should be done in a nice, friendly and safe learning environment. Unless we are born magicians, designing and orchestrating a semester-long course with success demands continuous self-reflection from the teacher. CTL courses constantly encourage students to develop self-reflexivity about themselves, about their disciplines, about their prospective students and about their designs. Their main aim is to awaken and then automatize self-reflection as a way of thinking and working. As Sally and Helga highlighted, to develop such habits of mind early in your career will definitely have impact on other areas in your life and will be a great benefit in the future.
Thank you CTL team!

Alexandra Medzibrodszky

History Department
Hungary

For more information on CEU's Centre for Teaching and Learning, please visit: ctl.ceu.edu

This piece originally appeared in the 62nd issue of the CEU Weekly. To view th

e entire issue, please visit http://issuu.com/ceuweekly/docs/issue62_fullpages/1