by Ari Nieh, Mathematics
The homework problems that generated the most confusion among my students were not particularly long, complicated, or computationally arduous; rather, the difficult problems were the ones which involved formulating a rigorous argument. Faced with any problem that used the word “prove” or “show,” the class was unsure how to get started.
by Leonard von Morzé , English
Students taking my reading and composition class may be better at uncovering sources than I am. Adept at searching Google Scholar and other online databases of articles…my most resourceful student writers continually demonstrate the capacity to plug appropriate and erudite-sounding quotations into their research papers…It might be useful, I thought, to get them to resist some of the familiarity they believed they already had with the research paper.
by Timothy Randazzo, Ethnic Studies
Last summer I made the decision to alter my approach to teaching radically, and the result was the highest level of analytical thinking and enthusiasm among my students that I have ever seen in my six years of teaching…I decided upon three principles to guide my formulation of class activities and assignments: 1) there will be no lectures, 2) there will be no exams, and 3) whenever possible, student work will be reintegrated into the class, rather than being just “for the instructor.”
by Benjamin Yost, Rhetoric
Grappling with divergent understandings of a text is a highlight of the class, but for many students is also fraught with uncertainty and confusion…When they occur, I slow down the discussion, and remind students that different interpretations are not signs of hopeless undecidability, but reveal that arguments work only on the basis of particular assumptions.
by Christopher Rider, Business Administration
By providing detailed, constructive feedback specific to each student’s essay, my students developed a stronger idea of what was expected. By posing open-ended questions in the feedback emails, I engaged many motivated students to participate in an ongoing email exchange and stimulated many students’ interest in pursuing their topics further.
by Mayumi Takada, English
I noted a startling discrepancy between the intelligent insights students provided in class and in office hours and the poor critical papers they wrote…In the language of high school math, they simply wrote out answers without showing their work. They were incapable of doing a close reading, the building block of literary writing and analysis.
by William Scott, History
To them, the history of architecture meant telling the story of the construction of a building, rather than thinking through the ways that campus spaces produce and reflect changing ideas and practices of education, gender, engineering, race, memory, ornamentation, and the environment, to name but a few subjects…I dug into my teaching background and realized that I needed to take my students on, of all things, a field trip.
by Meredith Thomsen, Integrative Biology
My students’ papers clearly reflected the problems they had with group writing. For some, the sections appeared to be written by different individuals and then pieced together, with big swings in quality between sections; other papers seemed to be the work of a single student who had taken over the entire project…Spring semester, I decided to break the assignment into two sections.
by Ana Villa-Lobos, Sociology
“Showing” students how sociology is done, letting them witness the process of the sociological analysis of raw data, live and uncensored, is almost universally absent from the classroom. This leaves a shroud of mystery over the process, with many students intimidated and confused when it comes to their own research projects. I decided to try to incorporate this missing component into my own teaching.
by Chantelle Warner, German
I hope to make it clear to students that it is not enough to dismiss the textbook as biased, but they must realize that authorship is always somehow biased in that it involves making choices…When they are faced with the task of trying to do a better job than the textbook does, students realize firsthand how difficult the task of cultural representation is.