Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award Teaching Effectiveness Award Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award What is the Outstanding GSI Award? The Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (OGSI) Award, sponsored by the Graduate Division’s GSI Teaching & Resource Center,…
Most instructors worry that students will not speak up in class. By helping students better prepare for section, instructors can ensure more frequent class participation.
Sometimes a tragic, violent, or other powerfully emotional public event can overshadow section participation. There are a variety of resources to help navigate these situations.
R&C courses are a complex challenge for students and GSIs alike.
A methodical way to turn your course ideas into a well designed set of student learning objectives, activities, and assessments.
by Nadia Kurd, Molecular and Cell Biology I was frustrated to find that any time I catered to the more advanced students and presented more challenging topics, the rest of the class struggled to follow along; whereas when I continued to conduct class at a level where most of the students were comfortable, the advanced students again lost interest. In an attempt to remedy this problem, I decided to try to develop “interactive” worksheets for class.
by Justin Hollenback, Civil and Environmental Engineering Based on the mistakes the students were making, I felt that the example problems I presented weren’t conveying the material as well as I wanted. Students did not appear engaged or actively learning during lecture. In response, I developed a strategy ... to make the process of working out example problems in class more interactive.
by Jeff Benca, Integrative Biology During the in-class debate, we focused on the question “What caused earth’s greatest mass extinction?” ... It was truly inspiring for me to hear both discussion sections of the class spend 1.5 hours actively ... debating which arguments held most credence by analyzing the approaches of the papers, considering the expertise of the authors, and applying trends in the fossil record covered in previous lectures.
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 Kevin Krasnow, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management I decided to leverage my own research to devise an inquiry-based experience for students to explore the history of our own Sierra Nevada forests...This led to a lively discussion...[and the students] were engaged in a way that they never would have been if I had merely told them the history of fire in the Sierras.