Embedded Files
One of my Facebook posts from my days at Vanderbilt (I loved being outside then, too!)
I just posted my first guide at TWU and have been shuffling through topics for my next one, a process that has me reminiscing about where this practice began.
In the early 2010s, I worked at Vanderbilt University, where our Center for Teaching (CFT) was known as one of the best sources in the country for guides that distilled good research on both timely and timeless teaching topics. When I traveled to other campuses or conferences, people regularly remarked about their favorite guide and the quality of our entire collection.
We had Derek Bruff (the CFT Director at the time) to thank for the quality and quantity of these guides. He knew that faculty value research and evidence, so recommending a practice or approach without providing this support would have limited impact. So he encouraged everyone at the CFT to regularly write guides based on the topics we heard our Vandy colleagues faculty talking about, or topics we were seeing emerge on the national higher ed landscape.
He also kept us informed about the analytics of our guides: according to our 2013 annual report, for instance, our 68 teaching guides received over a million views. In an email yesterday, Derek told me that the views rose to over 3 million in 2018, with the most popular ones getting over 100K views each year. In the faculty development world, we might have been called "influencers," if that term existed back then.
I still hear such comments now, though less frequently--not just because I left Vanderbilt a decade ago, but because the guides are gone. The CFT (one of the early and most reputable Centers in the country) is gone, but some of its functions have moved into other units. As the institution's priorities shifted, the CFT and its website disappeared, the guides were deleted,* and those of us who worked there are now scattered across the country. Now, there's no go-to site for such resources of that calibre, but we still consider this work of keeping up with the research and sharing it in bite-sized formats central to our roles in our current contexts.
I share these musings to invite you to tell me what topics you're interested in, what guides you'd like to see.
December 2025
* Bless librarians! One of Vanderbilt's librarians had the foresight to save many of the guides before they were deleted, so Derek is slowly archiving them on his website, and I now have the text of all of mine. Some are still relevant, so I plan on updating and posting them here.
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