By Matteo Tranchero, Haas School of Business Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 Case-based teaching is the primary pedagogical approach used in postgraduate business education. Most classes in the Master of Business Administration (MBA) involve the in-class discussion of case studies based on real-world situations where managers must…
By Alex Ramiller, City and Regional Planning Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 One of the most challenging aspects of teaching U.S. housing policy is conveying the complicated progression of events and policies that contributed to the contemporary housing policy landscape. It is impossible to discuss housing policy…
By Nicolette Puskar, Chemistry Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 The reality that humans can only see the world at the milliscale level is an unfortunate tragedy for chemists who long to witness the nanoscale building blocks of matter they aim to study. Relegated to using theoretical models…
By Madeleine Levac, Philosophy Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 introduced new challenges for educators, several of which were front of mind as I prepared to GSI a philosophy course last fall. There was the obvious issue of academic dishonesty. We…
By Thomas Lee, Political Science Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 Many students in my political theory courses every semester would come to my office hours distressed about how they should go about writing their political theory papers. While the wide-ranging possibilities of political theorizing reflected in the…
By Britt Leake, Political Science Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 Teaching Middle Eastern politics to students is difficult in the best of times. Teaching a class entitled War in the Middle East recently at UC Berkeley is perhaps uniquely challenging. Our students have to learn about a…
By Andrea Lara-Garcia, Geography Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 Last semester, I had the privilege of teaching two discussion sections of GS10AC, or Introduction to Global Studies. Our first writing assignment was an analysis of the documentary film Writing with Fire. Set in Uttar Pradesh, India, the…
By Emily Kang, History of Art Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 In Fall 2023, I was a first-time GSI for History of Art 101: Theories and Methods for a Global Art History. The challenge (and joy) of this course was that the “content” of the lectures ranged…
By Sukriyo Chokraborty, Chemistry Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 “Ethanol possesses polar atoms; hence, it fully dissolves in water.” Or, “toluene has induced dipole-induced dipole bonds”. Or, “ethyl acetate is non-polar while water is polar”. These were some of the answers that surfaced while grading data analysis…
By Vivek Bharadwaj, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2024 The demand for computer science classes has ballooned across the nation, and UC Berkeley is no exception. Given massive class sizes of hundreds of students, the workload for teaching assistants (TAs) is so immense…