Kate Flom Derrick
Kate joined the Searle Center in 2017 and currently serves as the Assistant Director of Reflective Pedagogy. In this role, she supports graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career faculty in developing their teaching and learning skills through programs such Graduate Teaching Fellows, Reflective Teaching Guides, and Formative Feedback Partners and events such as New Faculty Transitions and other workshops.
Kate earned her master's in Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse from DePaul University in Chicago, where she then taught in the First Year Writing program and was a coordinator in the University Center for Writing-based Learning. In this role, she collaborated with faculty to develop programming to support learners in developing writing-based skills. Throughout her work at DePaul, she developed her appreciation for peer-to-peer learning and critical reflection, two core values present in much of the work she contributes to the Searle Center.
At Northwestern University, Kate co-teaches Linguistics 480: American Academic Culture for Non-Native Speakers of English, a course that prepares international graduate students for teaching in the United States and Design Thinking & Communication, a required course for all first-year students in McCormick School of Engineering. Kate aims to teach in ways that celebrates students' growth and development to create new, deep learning experiences.
Kate’s current scholarly interests include following the growing interest and scholarship around ungrading practices and alternative assessments. She also continues to deepen her understanding of critical reflection and how it strengthens the work of both instructors and learners. She is currently engaged in a collaborative research project entitled "Codifying Workshops: Surfacing the Purpose(s) of Workshops in Educational Development'' which investigates the role that workshops may play in supporting Centers’ visions and needs and collects and analyzes individual educational developers' guiding principles and wisdom on how to approach workshop design, development, and implementation. She was awarded the 2023 POD Network Early Researcher Grant to support this project.