Interested in helping Dartmouth students succeed in their courses? Ready to exercise your teaching muscles and help professors build and implement their courses? Ready to become a Dartmouth Learning Fellow?

This term, we had 18 Learning Fellows at Dartmouth, each bringing their unique talents to our program.  They helped students dissect readings in the classroom, solve complex problems, and build a community around their learning. They helped professors pick out activities and write lesson plans. They trained for handling the tough situations, like advising students struggling with course material. They made a difference to the way we teach and learn at Dartmouth.

If you’d like to become a Dartmouth Learning Fellow, now is the time. We’re expanding our program and looking for 30 talented Dartmouth undergraduates to work as Learning Fellows during the winter term. You can apply now to become a Learning Fellow in one of our winter courses: BIOL 13, CLST 10, ENGL 29, ENGL 52, ENGL 62, LATIN 1, PHYS 13, or SOCY 2. If you have special interest in working with community organizations, we also have openings for Social Impact Learning Fellows in some of our service & learning courses, like ANTH 32.

Learning Fellows work for 6-10 hours a week, and they are paid ($12/hr) for their time and talent. They meet in weekly teaching huddles to improve their teaching skills and stay on top of course material. To apply for the program, you need to meet only two requirements. You must have 1) already completed the course or a similar course and 2) received a B or above grade average in the course. First-year students and first-time teachers are welcome to apply; this could be the job that starts your career in education!

Let us know if you have any questions by using the contact forms on this site or by emailing me directly.

Thanks!

-Kes

We are very pleased to announce the upcoming Winter 2017 courses that will employ Dartmouth Learning Fellows! We had fantastic turnout from our faculty, with numerous requests for Learning Fellows in winter courses. While we were not able to accommodate all of our requests this time around, we hope to support many more Learning Fellows in the coming terms. Thank you to all the faculty who expressed their support of the program, and congrats to the faculty who will be working with Learning Fellows this term!

Undergraduates interested in becoming Learning Fellows may apply to serve these courses and help engage Dartmouth students in their learning! Please see our online application if you are interested in becoming a Learning Fellow.

Our winter 2017 courses will be:

Congrats to all!

-Kes

In 2015, four Learning Fellows served as undergraduate teaching assistants in COLT 1: Read the World with Professor Rebecca Biron. At that time, our program was nascent. The four Learning Fellows in COLT 1 were among the first students at Dartmouth to step up and fill a much needed role in Dartmouth courses, as small group facilitators helping students engage more deeply with course material. The Learning Fellows worked with Dr. Biron and Ashley Kehoe, an instructional designer at the time and now associate director for the Experiential Learning Initiative. Ashley wrote up a story about the Fellows for our EdTech connection blog, and the Learning Fellows provided great insights into why they become Fellows and what they’ve learned. Here’s just one snippet from the conversation Ashley recorded:

Q: What has been the most rewarding aspect of the experience as a learning assistant?

Whitney Martin ’17: “Being able to follow the progression of the course, know what’s coming up, and being really excited about each progressive step of the course. Knowing full well that there’s a path that you follow and knowing it ahead of time makes it more interesting to relate back and see the whole picture.”

John French ’17: “Having listened to [students’] conversations on day one, two, three…and then hearing a much more engaged, productive conversation weeks later, I wish I could hear that more. I like tracking that kind of increasing engagement.”

Arjun Sachdeva ’17: “Listening in on one group on any day, hearing them struggle through at the beginning, and if they have questions then prod them on. Not that there’s always a right answer, but there’s always something that clicks in a group, and that’s so rewarding, when they’re on the right track and engaging deeply with the material, and you recognize and help facilitate that in some way.”

Abena Frempong ’17: “I think that being a learning assistant specifically for COLT 1…is a really great way to see how you’re thinking, and be really introspective. Being able to lead discussions and learning how to encourage rather than shut people down has been really helpful.”

Arjun and Abena were able to join us for our Learning Fellows orientation this year and speak to our current cohort of students. Whitney Martin is continued to work as a Learning Fellow in COLT 1, which is taught this term by Dr. Dennis Washburn. Thank you to Arjun, Abena, John, and Whitney for their great work in COLT 1 and for jump-starting the Learning Fellows program at Dartmouth. If you’d like to read Ashley Kehoe’s story in full, it’s here.

-Kes

Thank you to all the faculty from the College of Arts & Sciences who submitted applications for Learning Fellows in Winter, Spring, and Summer 2017. We are excited (and maybe a little intimidated) at the number of responses we received! Although our application period for winter is now closed, remember that faculty can continue to submit their applications for Spring and Summer 2017 through our online application.

Faculty who submitted during this period will hear back on October 19 regarding their Winter and Spring applications. Thank you for your great responses and ideas, and for your continued support of the Learning Fellows!

-Kes

We are rocking and rolling in Fall 2016! Last year, we piloted the Learning Fellows program at Dartmouth and the program has been rapidly growing ever since. Just this term, we more than doubled our number of Learning Fellows working in Dartmouth courses – from seven in two courses this summer to 18 in five courses this term! Thanks to additional funding from the Experiential Learning Initiative and the continued support of the Gateway Initiative, we will be placing many more Learning Fellows in Dartmouth courses. We are very grateful for the immense support we have received from the college and especially our faculty, and we’re thankful for the great work of the 2015-2016 Learning Fellows, who led the way.

As program coordinator, I’d like to extend a special thanks to the people behind-the-scenes who make some of this great work happen.  Cindy Tobery at Dartmouth’s Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL) and many of our instructional designers (Erin DeSilva, Adrienne Gauthier, Scott Millspaugh, and Adam Nemeroff) have been helping organize and facilitate our teaching huddles, where faculty and Learning Fellows meet to discuss how the course is running. These huddles give us a great chance to see how students are connecting with course material and to evaluate strategies for reaching more students in more efficient ways. At the huddles, faculty and students share their wins and challenges from the past week, and here’s just a sampling of our voices from the past week:

“I watched a few students this week have some lightbulb moments, which was a lot of fun.”
“[There is] lots more interaction in both group work and lectures.”
“I noticed when walking around, most (if not all) students were engaged with class material ([even with] laptops, surprisingly.”
“Students love the Learning Fellows!”

Hey, we love you too. Thanks to our faculty, fellows, the DCAL staff, and the instructional design team who are making innovation happen here at Dartmouth.

-Kes