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.
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.
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.
by Daniel Bliss, Molecular and Cell Biology (Home Department: Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute) Their proficiency at internalizing and recalling textbook-level explanations had led them astray. My challenge, I realized, was to help them be able to switch into the thinking mode of an experimenter.
by Margot Szarke, French Many students feel challenged when asked to analyze a literary or cinematic work because there is a certain amount of intellectual freedom involved in the task... How can a text or film be successfully and meaningfully interpreted in multiple ways? How can references and textual details be used to effectively build up an argument?
by Wendy Xin, English How, I wondered, might one instill an understanding of composition useful to engineering, political science, history, biology, literature, and math majors alike, when the nature of assigned readings across disciplines varied so widely? And how would the class find pleasure in engaging metacritically with the concept of narrative at 8 a.m., a time when most of us aren’t even used to experiencing narrative?
by Jennifer Johnson, Linguistics (Home Department: Education) I needed to develop in-class peer review and self review activities that assist students in exploring, understanding, and contesting feedback. ... How do I help students develop metacognitive skills — in other words, reflect on their reflections?
by Lindsay Crawford, Philosophy By making students more conscious of the degree to which modes of presentation shape the seemingly neutral space of discussion, the students who tended to feel intimidated by more assertive students came to realize that many of the factors that encourage and shape their feelings of intimidation are irrelevant to the quality of the positions being evaluated.
by Sonja Schwartz, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management My goal for this laboratory was to engage students of all learning styles by using a combination of passive and active, visual and auditory, and conceptual and applied activities. By reinforcing the material this way, I wanted to get beyond endless bean counting to more effectively teach my students key concepts of evolution.
by Conrad Hengesbach, Mathematics The variety of the students’ backgrounds meant that everybody brought different prerequisites to the table, especially when it came to their training in first-semester calculus... I needed a mechanism to ensure that towards the end of the first week everybody was on the same boat.