improving teaching and enhancing career development
The Presidential Chair Fellows Program offers ladder-rank Senate faculty a unique opportunity to improve their teaching and enhance their career development. Ten to twelve faculty members a year participate in a two-semester series of workshops and seminars focused on teaching and learning.
Presidential Chair Fellows will meet in workshop and seminar sessions eight times (once a month) during the course of the academic year. Meetings will include presentations by other Berkeley faculty and staff with expertise in teaching and learning, as well as discussions by the faculty participants themselves. Topics will include course and syllabus design, the development of instructional and assessment strategies that support student learning, and new methods of pedagogy.
In the course of the program, each participant will lead the group discussion on an issue or idea of their choice, for instance, a teaching method, exam technique, syllabus component, active learning exercise, difficult classroom issue, etc. Participants will also arrange to visit each other’s classes. One session will be devoted to break-out groups by discipline, so that participants can discuss issues directly related to science, humanities, and social sciences.
At the end of the program, participants will submit a short narrative report to their department chair describing the effect of the program on their teaching. Participants will also be asked to fill out an evaluation at that time.
All participants must be scheduled to teach at least one undergraduate course during the year of their fellowship.
Each faculty member selected to participate in the program will receive a course improvement grant of $2,000 to be applied to his or her home department account.
How to apply
2008-09 Program Schedule
What Presidential Chair Fellows say about the program
Past Presidential Chair Fellows
Good Ideas from the Presidential Chair Fellows
Pedagogy for Policy Analysis and Management [pdf], an article by Presidential Chair Fellow Michael O’Hare
To see what the program has meant to some of the participants, see “Talking teaching, pondering pedagogy”
The Presidential Chair Fellows program gives faculty the chance to discuss what matters most
“The Berkleyan,” December 2, 2005