McDougal Graduate Teaching Fellows group

McDougal Graduate Teaching Fellows Program

Community of graduate students invested in teaching and teaching development.

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Join the McDougal Graduate Teaching Fellows!

Overview

Overview

Would you like to grow as a pedagogue and scholar, while engaging with a community of like-minded people? The McDougal Graduate Teaching Fellows Program may be for you! 

The McDougal Graduate Teaching Fellows at the Poorvu Center lead programs on effective and innovative teaching, develop teaching resources, and provide individual observations for graduate student and postdoctoral instructors at Yale. The Poorvu Center emphasizes teamwork and individual growth. This group of approximately 20 doctoral graduate students and professional school students facilitates a wide array of programming, including Teaching at Yale Day for first-time teaching fellows, discipline-specific Fundamentals of Teaching workshops, and advanced teaching workshops. McDougal Graduate Teaching Fellows work within their own departments or disciplines and across disciplines.

While our fellows are often experienced and successful teachers, the program is also an opportunity for dedicated and scaffolded professional development. As a fellow, you will grow and deepen your expertise, while you reflect on and refine your approach to teaching through sustained engagement with interdisciplinary pedagogical scholarship. In early May, fellows receive 16 hours of required training over two days to prepare them to serve as consultants and workshop leaders. An additional day of mandatory training takes place in mid-August. Fellows attend bi-weekly staff meetings throughout the academic year, during which they contribute to the direction and offerings of the Poorvu Center and continue to develop their own teaching. These training opportunities are built into the stipend, which is $5800 for 2025-2026.

Testimonials from Alumni of the Fellows Program

Benefits

Eligibility

Questions

Testimonials from Alumni of the Fellows Program

The [McDougal Graduate Teaching] Fellows program became the most important part of my graduate school training. Not only did I learn about pedagogy as a field of active research, I also got the chance to hone my leadership skills and practice vulnerability, active listening, and creative problem solving. Most importantly, though, I discovered a community of others who, like me, care deeply about teaching. Our conversations have made me a much more reflective teacher–and a better human being.

The fellows program at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning was an irreplaceable and invaluable experience for me. It brought me into community with scholars across disciplines to further our shared interest and practice in the scholarship of teaching and learning. It was also singularly inclusive and made me feel like I belonged at Yale during times that notion was challenged. Finally, my time as a fellow made me an appealing candidate to get hired as an Assistant Professor at the conclusion of my PhD.

Through the fellows program, I found a supportive community of my peers, united by a shared passion for and commitment to effective teaching. It was life-changing. Our conversations about equity, inclusion, and care for our students helped me to become a better teacher and continue to inform my practice post-graduation.

Three people listen closely to one person who is actively talking.

Benefits

Compensation: Fellows receive training, access to a shared workspace, and an honorarium for the academic year ($5800 in 2025-2026). The honorarium may be held jointly with most research, teaching, and dissertation fellowships from Yale and outside funding agencies.

Team Work: Fellows work as part of a team of approximately twenty McDougal Teaching Fellows, plus two McDougal Teaching Fellow Coordinators and the CTL leadership.

Part-Time Commitment: Fellows work 6-8 hours/week in a flexible schedule that fits with most coursework, lab, teaching, clinical, and research activities and personal lives. Not every week requires constant effort: fellows are able to plan their schedules, in consultation with the two graduate fellow coordinators, so that they may have some off weeks combined with some busy weeks. Fellows will co-facilitate an average of five workshops per semester (often drawn from previous iterations), and they determine the timeline of those sessions. Occasional opportunities for additional paid work are available.

Eligibility

Applicants must be registered PhD students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. They must be in good academic standing, and have completed at least one semester of teaching at Yale at the time of application.

As a reminder, international students with F-1 or J-1 visa status may work on-campus for up to 20 hours per week while school is in session. Teaching Fellows appointments, along with any other on-campus employment, count toward the 20-hour-per-week limit, as does the McDougal Graduate Teaching Fellows Programs. For more guidance on working on campus as an international student, please see the GSAS website. 

Application

To apply, please complete this Qualtrics form (due February 6, 2026). You will be asked to submit a PDF or Word document with the following information: 

  1. Your full name, email, department, and year of study (for the academic year 2026-2027).

  2. A listing of your college teaching experience, both formal and informal, to date 

    1. if you have taught in the K-12 classroom, please include this experience. 

  3. Share an example from your teaching experience that exemplifies a central principle that you feel characterizes your approach to teaching.  Teaching experience can include classroom teaching, mentoring, outreach, tutoring, and other experiences where you interact with students at any level/age. (250 words max)
  4. As a McDougal Graduate Teaching Fellow, we hope you will share your expertise with other graduate students and postdocs while also developing toward your own goals as an instructor. What do you hope to gain, personally and professionally, from being a McDougal Graduate Teaching Fellow? (250 words max)
  5. A list of the teaching development activities in which you have participated. This may include Poorvu Center workshops, of course, but you may also consider sharing other pedagogical development you’ve attended or engaged with (e.g., events at other institutions, departmental trainings, and TF meetings with supervising instructors). For events not sponsored by the Poorvu Center, please share a sentence or two of description which includes the duration of the program and the nature of your participation (note: attendance at Poorvu Center teaching workshops is encouraged but not required to be a Fellow).
  6. In addition to facilitating our ongoing programs, McDougal Graduate Teaching Fellows develop new workshops and resources for graduate and postdoctoral instructors. Over the past few years, new workshops have included Trauma-Informed Teaching, Teaching Iteratively and Sustainably, and Online Teaching. Look over our current workshop offerings. Based on these offerings, and your own experience, identify one aspect of graduate and postdoctoral instructor preparation that you feel needs attention and describe a workshop that you might develop to address it. Your proposal may include a current workshop offered by the Poorvu Center that needs revision or redirection. (250 words max.)

We will also ask for a representative sample of your teaching evaluations.  To download teaching evaluations, follow these instructions.

Primary Contact

For questions about the McDougal Graduate Teaching Fellows Program, please contact the Poorvu Center.

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Reach out to the Poorvu Center team if you have any questions or to learn more about our programs.

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