By Karen Villegas, Education
Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024
As an undergraduate student, I remember dreading group work and public presentations. As a doctoral candidate, I came to value the experience of collaborating on research projects and presenting our findings at academic conferences. There was something special about genuine collaboration, where we learned from one another and then had the opportunity to share our work with a wider audience. As a Graduate Student Instructor, I was teaching a class whose culminating project was that of public presentations in the form of group work, and I recognized that same sense of dread that I had felt in my undergraduate students.
To address these challenges, I structured their final presentations in the format of an academic conference. This approach aimed to encourage students to cultivate scholarly collaboration among their peers to overcome an aversion to group work. Through this method, students not only refined their skills in public presentation but also gained valuable insights into how their final project could prepare them for their future work beyond this classroom.
For this specific group project, students needed to work together to present a strategy for a political campaign, whether that be a presidential campaign or a bill for gun control. I scaffolded the activity throughout the semester by giving students mini assignments. This included grouping students based on topics that interested them, creating outlines, and reviewing draft proposals. To gauge the effectiveness of this teaching strategy, I devised a comprehensive rubric that privileged group cohesion and support.
Student groups submitted a title and an abstract of their project. From this, I put together a conference program (available upon request). I also gave students my grading rubric ahead of time for transparency so that students could prepare accordingly. By sharing the rubric, I answered as many grade-related questions as possible and began to encourage students to think beyond the grade. And lastly, days before the presentation, I facilitated a conversation with students to put together community agreements for the day of the conference. I took on the role of discussant for each of the presentations and put together a Q&A form for students to submit their questions.
By restructuring final group presentations as an academic conference and implementing a tailored assessment, this approach encouraged students to envision their work in a broader context and fostered a more positive orientation to collaborative learning. Students supported each other as colleagues and collaborators, not as competitors, and seeing their names in the program meant something—students became authors! Recognizing the research-focused environment of our institution, I actively seek opportunities to further develop students’ research skills for college-level work. At the end of the conference, I introduced various pipeline programs that students could pursue to explore research opportunities beyond our course, such as Social Science Research Pathways (SSRP), the McNair Scholars Program, Getting into Grad School (GIGS), and departmental honors programs.