By Erez Buchweitz, Statistics Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2026 When I began my role as a GSI for my department’s statistical machine learning class, I examined the labs’ curriculum and noticed a disconnect with our field’s rapidly changing reality. The existing labs were built around step-by-step coding walkthroughs,…
By Taylor Brown, School of Social Welfare Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2026 Social welfare policy is forged through democratic deliberation—through the messy, necessary work of disagreement, persuasion, and the building of consensus across differences. Yet our students arrive having come of age amid acute polarization and democratic backsliding,…
By Annabel Barry, English Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2026 Teaching an R1A on “Feminism and Language,” I discovered that students struggled to engage with feminist texts from the past in ways that went beyond rejecting them as outmoded or pedestalizing them. Student responses to the texts we read…
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.