by Robert Held, Bioengineering My goals were to gauge the students' comprehension of the material, provide an assessment of the professor's effectiveness for the class as a whole, and help everyone understand the concepts more thoroughly. I adopted a three-tier solution to the issue of uneven experience. Brief quizzes, multimedia presentations, and interactive study sessions were employed.
by James Ramey, Comparative Literature I was dismayed to find that we had been located in a small, windowless basement room in Haas Pavilion. Claustrophobia heightened my awareness of the need for the students to get along, which led me to wonder how I might structure my course, not only as an intellectual opportunity but also as a social one.
by Veronica Herrera, Political Science I thought that many of these students would go on to teach, facilitate presentations in future careers, give public speeches, or otherwise coordinate and instruct a group of colleagues, students, etc. The way sections were commonly taught did not allow for them to be constructors of the material in order to prepare for such a career, but rather the students were often passive digesters.
by Sonya Lebsack, Legal Studies I have discovered, to my surprise, in the past few years, that most of my students—including those doing otherwise excellent work — struggle to read a chapter or article and state (in a paragraph or in person) what the author's “project” is and what the stakes of that project are...As a result, I focus my efforts on teaching this underserved area of focus.
by Matias Cattaneo, Economics I was facing a big challenge: I had to teach highly technical topics to a very diverse audience. More importantly, I had to do this while following the pace of the professor’s lectures, attending to the demands of the students with strong technical skills, and preventing those students with relatively less preparation for this class from falling behind.
by Jelani Mahiri, Anthropology The production of “field notes,” descriptive writings about one's field research, is an ambiguous enterprise for most students, yet an important part of anthropological methodology. Thus a key issue for professors and GSIs is: How do we build on students' previous writing experiences, but move them beyond the notion of field notes as a personal journal, for example, to conceptualizing field notes as concrete description of events, interactions, people, and places within their research setting?
by Kenneth Haig, Political Science The most difficult problem I faced was how to teach both the Japan-specific and broad theoretical aims of the course to students who were at best familiar with only one part or the other...The solution I settled on was to try to find applications for visual learning techniques and small group discussions wherever I could.
by Susan Hicks, Geography I realized that while there may be a bag of tricks for keeping things running smoothly in the classroom, there is no instant solution to the problem of students starting out with very different levels of familiarity with the material.
by Tatiana Fedyk, Business Administration At the beginning of this academic year, I chose a new strategy: make the subject itself interesting and funny, attractive and gameful. For every discussion, I created some entertaining exercise related to the new topic just covered in class. Though difficult at the beginning, it became easier with every new preparation and brought a lot of excitement into my classes.
by Daniel Perley, Astronomy In this case, words and diagrams were the problem, and no amount of them would solve it. My solution, instead, was to produce for my students an animated simulation of the motion of the planets around the sun, and display it on one wall using an LCD projector.