by Julia Comerford, Astronomy Before the students started building their own PowerPoint presentations for class, I showed them the infamous slide that was held partially responsible for the Columbia space shuttle disaster, as well as several ill-conceived slides of my own. Through collaborative debate and discussion, the class broke each slide down and identified what was bad, why, and how to improve it.
by Benjamin Freedman, Molecular and Cell Biology Why had the fishing metaphor been so successful? I theorized that it gave the students a way to personally relate to the microscopic events of cell division. In the next class, I decided to take this one step further.
by Timothy Randazzo, Ethnic Studies Last summer I made the decision to alter my approach to teaching radically, and the result was the highest level of analytical thinking and enthusiasm among my students that I have ever seen in my six years of teaching...I decided upon three principles to guide my formulation of class activities and assignments: 1) there will be no lectures, 2) there will be no exams, and 3) whenever possible, student work will be reintegrated into the class, rather than being just “for the instructor.”
by Benjamin Yost, Rhetoric Grappling with divergent understandings of a text is a highlight of the class, but for many students is also fraught with uncertainty and confusion...When they occur, I slow down the discussion, and remind students that different interpretations are not signs of hopeless undecidability, but reveal that arguments work only on the basis of particular assumptions.
by Michael Markham, Music The difficulty of classical opera for students...lies in a perceived cultural distance between the realistic dramatic forms that today’s students relate to and cartoonish images of huge, blubbering sopranos...The form tends to remain closed to undergraduates; a huge, hulking, messy, "dead" thing with little direct emotional impact resonance for them. In the 2004 Summer session, however, I decided to meet the students halfway.
by Oron Frenkel, Public Health It was our first discussion section for Drugs and the Brain. We were about to embark on the study of some advanced concepts in neuropharmacology, but before we could get to the "drugs" part, my students needed to understand the "brain." And they only had one week to do it, which meant I only had one shot at making sure they got it right.
by Badr Albanna, Physics I decided to reverse the dynamic of our discussion sections. When it came time to work on problems, instead of my standing in front of the class begging the students to explain how they reasoned the first part of problem one to their classmates, they would become the teachers and I would adopt the role of a particularly knowledgeable assistant.
by Amy Lerman, Political Science Each group had read their own article as a reasonably complete account of “the way it had happened.” When they began to see the differences between the pieces, though, they were struck by how disparate each account was from the others. In particular, the students were surprised by how even those that were technically “unbiased,” “academic” or “scientific” were unintentionally framed in certain ways.
by Christie Dowling, Civil and Environmental Engineering It seemed to me that many students had not come to the discussion section to learn the lecture concepts, but rather to just be told how to do their homework. I was immediately faced with a challenge: how to create meaningful discussion sections that provide useful information without simply giving the answers away.
by Vasudha Paramasivan, South and Southeast Asian Studies To my class, it seemed almost irreverent to read into such marvelous tales, prosaic explanations of power struggles and gender discrimination. While their skepticism was welcome, I had to find some way of addressing their resistance to the idea that there could be meaning and purpose behind folkloric narratives.