by Julia Lewandoski, History Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2018 After several semesters as a GSI and Reader for history classes, it has become clear to me that a concise, clear, and specific thesis statement is essential to a successful student paper. Developing a strong thesis statement enables students to frame…
by Rosalind Diaz, English Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2018 Grading rubrics are an invaluable teaching tool. Ideally, they promote fairness and transparency in assessment, and help students set reasonable goals, develop metacognition, and practice self-assessment. But a rubric can also act as a gatekeeper of knowledge. Vague, abstruse, or circularly…
by Eduardo A Escobar, Near Eastern Studies Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 The problem of translation remains one of the most enduring challenges for scholars of literary cultures. Translating texts from any historical period can be a challenge, but reading texts from the “dead” civilizations of the ancient world, including…
by Eric Armstrong, Integrative Biology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 In addition to providing the educational scaffolding necessary for life-long learning, we as instructors face an equally important challenge in preparing interested students for professional careers in our fields. In biology, the ability to analyze and visualize data is a…
by Tammy Stark, Linguistics As a solution to the related problems of limited time and a lack of incentive to carry out scholarly research on final papers, I decided to make the final project a Wikipedia assignment, in which students worked in groups to significantly improve Wikipedia pages related to sociolinguistic topics relevant to their independent research interests…
by Dwight Springthorpe, Integrative Biology Students come from many backgrounds, including biology, engineering, and physics, and range from second-year undergraduates to Ph.D. candidates.… I addressed this difficulty with carefully structured group problem solving during discussion sections.… Since the problem sets drew on all the group’s skills, students would find themselves alternating between teaching and learning roles.
by Chris Herring, Sociology While most professors have converted to Power Point, sociology professor Michael Burawoy remains wedded to the blackboard and diagrams relentlessly… [A] primary task became figuring out a way to get my students to take these illustrations as the starting point for discussion rather than the end-point.
by Jordan Greenwald, Comparative Literature I...came to realize that this lesson could not be learned through class discussion alone, since asking these questions while leading discussion is pedagogically less effective than getting students to ask those questions themselves. I therefore decided, with the encouragement of my co-instructor, to design a group assignment that would familiarize students with the choices one makes when bringing a dramatic text to life.
by Jesse Cordes Selbin, English I believe that education functions best when students are not merely passive recipients, but collaborative creators, of knowledge. To that end, I designed an ongoing assignment wherein students used online software to contribute to a collective historical timeline of the nineteenth century...The function of the timeline was primarily informational: it was intended to give a deeper understanding of a historical era. But its crucial secondary function was to ask students to reconceptualize their own role as creators and perpetrators of historical narrative.
by Nicholas Knight, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science I knew it would be completely infeasible to teach half of the class how to program during office hours or via a forum. So for the first homework, I designed teams that each had a member with computer programming experience. As a result, every team completed the assignment, and the collaborative write-up ensured that each team member understood the material, even if one team member did the majority of the programming. I was explicit with the class about our strategy to combine programmers and non-programmers.