By Anna Tomi, Scandinavian Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2022 When teaching Reading and Composition, I often encounter a wonderful group of students enthusiastic to display their knowledge and engage with the instructor. But when it’s time for the students to talk to each other, they withdraw into silence. This is…
By Danielle Spitzer, Molecular and Cell Biology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2022 Problem: MCB 141 (Developmental Biology) is an upper-division lecture course that covers fundamental concepts of animal embryonic development. The students learn about foundational experiments in the field which involve precise manipulations to animal embryos in three-dimensional space. They…
By Laura Ritland, English Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2022 One of the most common pieces of advice undergraduates have absorbed before beginning their first Reading & Composition class is to avoid using “I” in their academic essays. The admonition against using first person in academic writing is a standard, useful…
By Catherine Park, Education Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2022 The Education minor at UCB was developed to be taught online. I’ve taught and continue to teach ED140, “The Art of Making Meaning: Educational Perspectives on Literacy and Learning in a Global World,” where we combine the full capacities of digital…
By Marcel Moran, City and Regional Planning Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2022 A fundamental challenge of teaching transportation planning is bridging the divide between abstract material and the realities (and messiness) of the profession itself. No textbook chapter, white paper, or academic article can fully convey the prospect of altering…
By Taormina Lepore, Integrative Biology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2022 Teaching is most effective when it reaches students in an equitable way. One issue I’ve encountered in my teaching is that individual accommodations are provided for disabled students, but very often, disability accessibility isn’t included as a core facet of…
By Dhruva Karkada, Physics Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2022 Physics students often struggle to voice their confusion when presented with challenging material. In my experience, both as a student and as an instructor, this hesitation is often deeply rooted in a sense of shame: asking questions, especially in front of…
By Manon Ironside, Psychology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2022 As Fall of 2020 approached, it was clear that the assessment structure for Cognitive Neuroscience needed a major overhaul. The rigorous multiple-choice exams administered twice during the semester were not well-suited to remote learning and assessment, and the need to revise…
By Joy Esboldt, Education Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2022 Bettering one’s writing is a never ending task. However, receiving and giving feedback on written assignments is riddled with challenges. In my years of teaching, I have found that given the numerous demands and commitments students juggle, engagement with formative feedback…
By Gabrielle Elias, English Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2022 It would be accurate, I tell my students, to say William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is about grief, but it’s important to realize that that brief description overlooks all of the strange, rich detail that distinguishes Faulkner’s novel from all…