By Alexandra Courtois de Vicose, History of Art When confronted with a Monet water landscape last spring and asked, “What do you see?” [my students] rightly answered, “A boat.” “You understand this shape as a boat because, culturally, you know what a boat looks like. Keep in mind, however, this is but an amalgamation of pigment on a two-dimensional surface. So, really, what do you see?”
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 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 Yekaterina Miroshnikova, Molecular and Cell Biology (Home Department: Bioengineering) I decided to set up an unconventional discussion section environment... I strategically utilized the uneven playing field in students’ prior knowledge to our benefit by facilitating team-based learning...[and] I taught the entirety of the material in a hands-on and application-based style.
by Ashley Leyba, History Over time it became clear to me that, more often than not, the discussions were a showcase of what I, and not my students, found intellectually exciting. I wanted something more for my students.
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.
by Margot Szarke, French Many students feel challenged when asked to analyze a literary or cinematic work because there is a certain amount of intellectual freedom involved in the task... How can a text or film be successfully and meaningfully interpreted in multiple ways? How can references and textual details be used to effectively build up an argument?
by Lindsay Crawford, Philosophy By making students more conscious of the degree to which modes of presentation shape the seemingly neutral space of discussion, the students who tended to feel intimidated by more assertive students came to realize that many of the factors that encourage and shape their feelings of intimidation are irrelevant to the quality of the positions being evaluated.
by Francesca Fornasini, Astronomy I realized that they had little or no confidence in their answers and that they did not have any strategies for assessing the reasonableness of their solutions. Therefore, I tried to incorporate into my discussion sections a variety of strategies to help my students test the reasonableness of their answers.
by Mark Fisher, Political Science This...made me think quite differently about the GSI’s role in section...While our first impulse is often to try and “translate” the lecture into an idiom they are more comfortable with, this experience convinced me that the greatest service we can perform for students is to teach them the skills needed to speak our language.