Essential Policies for GSIs
Every GSI should be familiar with this brief information about campus-wide and departmental policies that directly affect GSIs, along with the Collective Bargaining Agreement.
Queering Anthropology: A Lived Experience of Critical Knowledge Production
by Raphaëlle Rabanes, Anthropology My intention throughout the class was to lift each of their cultural assumptions ... and to reveal how anthropology as an analytic tool could help reveal the social construction of what we take for granted ...
Seeing for Yourself
by Ryan Turner, Astronomy (Home Department: Earth and Planetary Science) Not everything we learn in school is easily quantified, and the goal of the C12 star party did not include specific learning objectives. The effectiveness of the project was measured in oohs and aahs as students took their first look through the eyepiece.
Problem Solving and the Random Number Generator
by Justin Hollenback, Civil and Environmental Engineering Based on the mistakes the students were making, I felt that the example problems I presented weren’t conveying the material as well as I wanted. Students did not appear engaged or actively learning during lecture. In response, I developed a strategy ... to make the process of working out example problems in class more interactive.
The Advantages of Rearranging the Topics Covered in a Course
by Peyam Tabrizian, Mathematics in the spirit of my Math 54 experience as a student and as a GSI, I decided to reorganize things. Instead of teaching the course in two separate chunks, I mixed the topics up in a way that I would first teach a linear algebra concept, and then immediately apply it to differential equations.
Breaking Down the Barriers Inhibiting Effective Learning Environments
by Yekaterina Miroshnikova, Molecular and Cell Biology (Home Department: Bioengineering) I decided to set up an unconventional discussion section environment... I strategically utilized the uneven playing field in students’ prior knowledge to our benefit by facilitating team-based learning...[and] I taught the entirety of the material in a hands-on and application-based style.
Teaching Students ‘Street Smarts’ Necessary for Navigating Peer-Reviewed Literature
by Jeff Benca, Integrative Biology During the in-class debate, we focused on the question “What caused earth’s greatest mass extinction?” ... It was truly inspiring for me to hear both discussion sections of the class spend 1.5 hours actively ... debating which arguments held most credence by analyzing the approaches of the papers, considering the expertise of the authors, and applying trends in the fossil record covered in previous lectures.
Expanding the Classroom: Using bSpace to Encourage Student-Driven Discussion
by Ashley Leyba, History Over time it became clear to me that, more often than not, the discussions were a showcase of what I, and not my students, found intellectually exciting. I wanted something more for my students.
Elusive Allusions: Discovering Kafka in Coetzee
by Sarah Mangin, English We spent a few minutes venting about our most memorable Kafkaesque ordeals, from S.A.T. testing nightmares to transcript requests ... By cultivating a collaborative environment for thinking about literary allusiveness, our class found opportunities to make these references first familiar and then potent.
Policy Consulting Simulations as a Tool for Understanding and Applying Economic Concepts
by Anna Rubin, Public Policy Assigning students to small groups leveraged the economics background that many students brought to this class by putting them in the role of a peer teacher... This structure...help[ed] students struggling to understand core concepts...[and created] opportunities for all students to apply these concepts to public policy questions.