Striving Towards Innovations in Teaching

When Ted Magder was the vice dean of academic affairs at Steinhardt. “there wasn’t much discussion on an institutional level about what makes good teaching – this was true not only NYU, but at most universities. At Steinhardt, we felt like it was important for the university to start a conversation about this.”
In addition to being an associate professor in Media Culture and Communications, Magder was recently appointed to be the Special Advisor for Policy, Strategy, and Innovation. The initiative explores the relationship between teaching and learning, encouraging professors to think about their relationships with students from the design of the syllabus to the final assessment.
Ted was recently visiting Prague and other NYU global sites to find out to what extent they are the same and different as the Washington Square campus. In Prague he held two focus groups with local faculty where they discussed the challenges of teaching NYU students and the cultural differences that can emerge.
One of the initiative’s first projects – which they hope to launch in spring 2020 – is to create an online database of teaching “recipes”. These will consist of videos describing short, practical teaching methods based on evidence-based research aimed specifically at NYU professors. “Our goal is to help professors create teaching spaces where students can be confident,”explained Magder.