by Laura Basini, Music I wanted to bring a seemingly abstract concept to life by placing students in an unfamiliar position: that of the composer. They would have to engage more actively with each passage of music, working out what each did in musical terms, and how each led to and from its neighbors.
by Susan Schwab, Molecular and Cell Biology The professor asked me to give a section about the complement pathway (for killing bacteria)...to my horror, I found that the textbook had 20 pages of "C4bC2b cleaves C3, and then..." So I divided the section into three parts based on a play, each of was designed to reach different students and add another layer to the discussion.
by John Johnson, Astronomy As the Head GSI for Astronomy 10 last fall, I was challenged with administering effective, individualized assistance to the students who needed it most. The solution I developed is The Astronomy Learning Center (TALC). TALC uses collaborative learning as an alternative to traditional office hours...[and] uses the philosophy that students learn better by doing than just by hearing or seeing.
by Melina Esse, Music I wanted the students to understand the difference between listening and hearing. In order to succeed in the course, they would need to practice directed listening: "listening for" rather than "listening to."
by Eric Masanet, Mechanical Engineering This approach — called design-for-environment — has gained significant momentum worldwide and is an invaluable skill for UCB design engineering students to acquire...I was therefore surprised to learn...that design-for-environment was not being taught as part of UCBs undergraduate design curriculum, nor was it even introduced as an important concept to the design students. To address this problem, I initiated, developed and presented a comprehensive design-for-environment lecture that has since become a regular feature in the ME 110 course.
by William Hayes, Sociology While sociology of culture courses regularly assign selections from his text, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, US students usually encounter these readings without the necessary theoretical knowledge (symbolic capital) or cultural knowledge (cultural capital) for understanding the main arguments or referents in his survey analysis of 1960s Paris. Hence, the teaching problem emerges of how to "materialize" these Parisian abstractions within our Berkeley students.
by A. S. Cheng, Mechanical Engineering Many engineering students have been conditioned that they can succeed by simply duplicating textbook examples or blindly churning through mathematical formulas without understanding the underlying theory. Teaching these students to engage in critical thinking is vital, and was a particular challenge in the course ME 107A: Experimentation and Measurement.
by Jennifer Powell, Molecular and Cell Biology To address my goal of encouraging the students to take the quizzes seriously so they would be useful to everyone as a tool to evaluate their progress in the course, I developed a quiz strategy for my discussion section...Rather than just telling them the [quiz] answers, I asked volunteers to come up to the chalkboard and write their answers for the rest of the class.
by Deanna Kiser, Near Eastern Studies The daily activities and concerns of the earlier society's participants are lost on modern people, who view the entire culture as dead. This affects new students to the field in particular... I have found that helping Egyptology students to identify with the ancient Egyptians generates more enthusiasm for the subject matter and makes it meaningful to them.
by Mathew Gelbart, Music I feel strongly that a course of this nature should not give musically experienced students an unfair advantage, especially since it is nominally geared toward those with little to no musical background. I want the less experienced students to come away not with an inferiority complex, but rather, with a new interest in some exciting music.