by Hayden Shelby, Environmental Design (Home Department: City and Regional Planning) Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 For the first week of class, my students in Environmental Design 100: The City: Theories and Methods of Urban Studies were expected to read three difficult, foundational works of urban theory. When I attempted…
by Caitlin Scholl, Comparative Literature Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 Something that I struggled with since I first started teaching R1B courses was how to design assignments in such a way that my students develop their research skills incrementally throughout the semester. Anyone who has taught the second part of…
by Leila Mansouri, English Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 Engaging with scholarly criticism for the first time is daunting for undergraduates. Accustomed to thinking of academic books and articles as authoritative, students often struggle instead to point out what scholars have misunderstood or overlooked. Likewise, unsure who (aside from their…
by Rajan Kumar, Materials Science and Engineering Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 In Spring 2015, I served as the GSI for Properties of Materials (E45), an introductory materials science and engineering course usually taken by freshmen and sophomore students. My primary responsibility for the course was to lead the lab…
by Elise Piazza, Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Studies (Home Department: Vision Science) On my first day as a graduate student instructor for Introduction to Cognitive Science, I noticed that participation was limited to a few students, while the rest sat silently, either intimidated or bored...As an experimental psychologist, I decided to introduce my scientific approach to teaching by turning our discussion section into an experiment.
by Julie Wesp, Anthropology I wanted to create an environment that would stimulate higher-order learning and instill a deeper understanding and organization of the information. Answering the kind of questions the students were asking did not help them to piece together the parts into a whole; it only insinuated that repetitive memorization was the key to success. In an effort to break this cycle, during the next section I simply stopped answering them.
by Genevieve Painter, Legal Studies (home department Jurisprudence and Social Policy) Sorting through masses of research is a key learning objective of the reading and composition seminar. Students reported feeling overwhelmed as they confronted a wealth of sources and ideas in preparing their final papers. What is one way that participatory social movements deal with analyzing an excess of information? Card clustering!
by Laurence Coderre, East Asian Languages and Cultures My...students were having difficulty understanding how to approach literary texts beyond the simple recapitulation of plot. Focusing on what a given reading said, they rarely considered the significance of how it was conveyed....Ming dynasty xiao pin wen, or “short personal essays,” in which authors write in great detail about frivolous or mundane things, offered me an opportunity to address this concept, and students’ difficulties in grappling with it, head on.
by Raphaëlle Rabanes, Anthropology My intention throughout the class was to lift each of their cultural assumptions ... and to reveal how anthropology as an analytic tool could help reveal the social construction of what we take for granted ...
by Daniel Bliss, Molecular and Cell Biology (Home Department: Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute) Their proficiency at internalizing and recalling textbook-level explanations had led them astray. My challenge, I realized, was to help them be able to switch into the thinking mode of an experimenter.