Image Source: Tim Green

In the spring of 2017, I was accepted as a participant in the ‘Classroom Visit Exchange’ Program, a part of the Open Teaching Initiative of the Teaching and Learning Center at the Graduate Center, which aimed to “foster cross-disciplinary dialogues about teaching among Graduate Center student instructors”. For this program, I was paired with another graduate student in another department, who taught at a different school in a different discipline than the one I taught in. We were to visit each others classes during Open Classroom Week and observe their teaching style, and subsequently compare and contract our praxis, and our experience visiting each others classroom.

This experience culminated in a jointly written, peer-reviewed piece for Visible Pedagogy, a digital publication edited by the Teaching and Learning Center at the CUNY Graduate Center. Our piece was entitled ‘Assessing Active Learning Praxis: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue‘. In the piece we co-reflect on what active learning means for us, and how it grounds our pedagogical values, as well as how classroom dynamics can make implementing active learning techniques challenging. Overall, it was a great experience, and I am happy to have had the opportunity the share some of what I learned through this experience with the larger public in this way.

I welcome any comments, critiques and questions about the piece or the program; contact information is here.

I also encourage you to peruse the writings on Visible Pedagogy more broadly. Though a young publication (one year!) it already has a number of excellent pieces on teaching and learning written by faculty and students from across CUNY.