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…
By Zhixiang Su, Sociology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025 Teaching quantitative methods to students primarily trained in qualitative research is never easy—especially as a first-time Graduate Student Instructor. Last year, I began teaching a two-semester statistics sequence in the sociology department to PhD students. Many students took these…
By Anna Scharnagl, Integrative Biology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025 It is not commonplace for the position of GSI to be involved in curriculum redesign or other changes to a course’s structure, but I have been fortunate enough to be able to teach courses here at UC Berkeley…
By Keren Zou, History Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025 While teaching the history of American westward expansion, I asked my students whether they were familiar with the term Californio, referring to a group of mixed-heritage people of Spanish, Mexican, and Indigenous descent who lived…
By Emily Thompson, Anthropology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025 One of the central challenges I encountered while teaching The Image and the Archive: The Power and Politics of Visual Anthropology was helping students develop critical reading and writing skills in response to visual materials.
By Sylvie Thode, English Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025 Skimming can get a bad rap, especially in the literature or composition classroom. In reading too fast, the story goes, students risk missing the point of a text or blazing past the wonders of its language. But for many…
By Sharaban T. Zaman, Legal Studies Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025 The Teaching Problem: While teaching “Immigration and Citizenship” in the Legal Studies undergraduate program at the law school, I encountered a significant instructional challenge. Many students had personal or family experiences with immigration issues, making the subject…
By Kieren Rudge, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025 As a Graduate Student Instructor at UC Berkeley, I have encountered many challenges when teaching courses on environmental issues. While serving as a GSI for both ESPM 163: Environmental Justice and ESPM 100: Environmental Problem…