by Hayden Shelby, Environmental Design (Home Department: City and Regional Planning) Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 For the first week of class, my students in Environmental Design 100: The City: Theories and Methods of Urban Studies were expected to read three difficult, foundational works of urban theory. When I attempted…
by Caitlin Scholl, Comparative Literature Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 Something that I struggled with since I first started teaching R1B courses was how to design assignments in such a way that my students develop their research skills incrementally throughout the semester. Anyone who has taught the second part of…
by Leila Mansouri, English Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 Engaging with scholarly criticism for the first time is daunting for undergraduates. Accustomed to thinking of academic books and articles as authoritative, students often struggle instead to point out what scholars have misunderstood or overlooked. Likewise, unsure who (aside from their…
by Christian Lambert, Goldman School of Public Policy Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 Assessing student work is the household chore of any given course: important and useful, but often begrudged and disparaged, too. As an instructor in an introductory course that many students pursue in order to fulfill pre-requisites for…
by Rajan Kumar, Materials Science and Engineering Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 In Spring 2015, I served as the GSI for Properties of Materials (E45), an introductory materials science and engineering course usually taken by freshmen and sophomore students. My primary responsibility for the course was to lead the lab…
by Johann Koehler, Legal Studies (Home Department: Jurisprudence & Social Policy) Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 Writing rarely improves without feedback. But even the most carefully prepared feedback, if offered a certain way, may remain unheeded. Take, for example, a common course structure: students endeavor to produce a long, meticulously…
by Eduardo A Escobar, Near Eastern Studies Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 The problem of translation remains one of the most enduring challenges for scholars of literary cultures. Translating texts from any historical period can be a challenge, but reading texts from the “dead” civilizations of the ancient world, including…
by Riva Bruenn, Plant and Microbial Biology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 Plant morphology is a well-organized catalog of vegetative form. Every week students have dozens of plants to illustrate, interpret, and describe in lab, and even more material to cover and review in discussion. In order to finish the…
by Beatriz Brando, Chemistry (Home Department: Education) Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 Chemistry 1AL, General Chemistry Lab for non-majors, is generally structured such that students attend a weekly one-hour lab lecture, a four-hour lab, and have the option to attend office hours with GSIs or a review session with the…
by Eric Armstrong, Integrative Biology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 In addition to providing the educational scaffolding necessary for life-long learning, we as instructors face an equally important challenge in preparing interested students for professional careers in our fields. In biology, the ability to analyze and visualize data is a…