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 Brittany Meché, Geography Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2017 “Introduction to Development Studies” is a lower division survey course tackling some of the world’s most pressing issues. From refugee resettlement to gender-based violence to humanitarian famine relief, the course teaches students to evaluate reports from international organizations like the World…
by Nicholas Kern, Astronomy Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2017 In the Astronomy Department, we place a strong emphasis on teaching our students how to problem solve. This means we tend to prioritize fluency with equations and their physical contexts over route memorization of numbers and concepts. One way I accomplish…
by David Gardner, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2017 Challenge: Thermodynamics is a notoriously difficult subject. It’s no surprise that the subject causes anxiety and animosity – even physicist Arnold Sommerfeld was quoted as saying that even by the third time you learn thermodynamics, “you know you…
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 Beatriz Brando, Chemistry (Home Department: Education) Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 Chemistry 1AL, General Chemistry Lab for non-majors, is generally structured such that students attend a weekly one-hour lab lecture, a four-hour lab, and have the option to attend office hours with GSIs or a review session with the…
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 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.
by Suzanne Scoggins, International and Area Studies (Home Department: Political Science) When a few students dominate, it diminishes the opportunity to hear different voices. This pattern, once established, worsens with time, and by the end of a semester, only a handful of students may be participating in section...Once I began asking groups of two to participate in section, I noticed a marked improvement in overall participation rates. Prior to using this strategy, a “good” section was one in which about half of the students spoke in class. After focusing on groups of two, I found that an “average” discussion was one in which all but one or two students spoke up.