One of the most persistent questions that faculty face is how to engage our students productively, both in and out … More
Author: cynthiabrame
I am a scientist who loves to teach, to learn more about how we build our knowledge and understanding, and to share resources and ideas with colleagues. I'm associate director at Vanderbilt's Center for Teaching, where I get to work with faculty members and graduate students as they think about how they want to grow their teaching abilities. I'm also a senior lecturer in the Biological Sciences department, where I teach biochemistry and get to challenge myself to do that better.
Before I came to Vanderbilt, I was associate professor in the Biology Department at Centenary College, where I taught cell biology, genetics, cancer biology and where I developed a course-based undergraduate research experience in molecular biology.
Using expressive writing and reinterpretation of stress to deal with test anxiety: Study from Harris et al.
One of the issues that I struggle with as an instructor is test anxiety—not my own, but my students’. Every … More
Student motivation journal club: Starting the year with a framework to understand motivation
Last week, my colleague Heather Fedesco and I convened the first meeting of a new, CFT-sponsored journal club on student … More
Big classes, name tents, and anxiety in the classroom
Classes at my institution started last week, which means that my co-teacher and I greeted just over 150 students in … More
Signal-to-noise in the classroom
I’ve been thinking a lot about signal-to-noise ratio this summer. My post-doctoral research relied heavily on mass spectrometry of complex … More
Evidence Based Teaching Guides: Links to and summaries of the literature
A few years ago, the editorial board at LSE hatched the idea of “choose your own adventure” guides to literature … More
Evidence-based teaching: my definition
I’ve been thinking lately about what we mean when we say “evidence-based teaching.” It’s a term I’ve used a lot … More
