by Sereeta Alexander, Education Social loafing and diffusion of responsibility may permeate and ruin group work, to the dismay of the teacher and the students who do actively participate. ... I have learned to design group activities that either inherently entice (or even incite!) participation or that are structured in a manner clearly requiring each student's contribution.
by Sarah Macdonald, Sociology While teaching Sociology 5: Evaluation of Evidence, I encountered a problem that is not unique: how, as GSIs, can we prepare our students for challenging final exams without teaching exclusively to the exam?
by Justin Underhill, History of Art After 20 minutes of excited measurement and discussion, the groups disbanded and I led a very successful discussion about San Francesco della Vigna. Students challenged one another and made observations that I had not noticed. I always know I have succeeded when my students teach me how to look anew.
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 Alejandro Reyes Arias, Latin American Studies I divided the class in small groups, each of which would represent a different historical character...The various characters had been kidnapped from their contexts and transported to Berkeley in 2004 to participate in a Conference on Latin America, to debate the future of the continent and to discuss issues of race, identity, gender, economy, sovereignty, nationhood,[and] culture.
by Kimberly Cassibry, History of Art I wanted my students to recognize the urban impact of such monuments as the Colosseum and Trajan's Column, and to do that, I had to help them imagine the way Rome looked before these structures existed.
by Meredith Thomsen, Integrative Biology My students' papers clearly reflected the problems they had with group writing. For some, the sections appeared to be written by different individuals and then pieced together, with big swings in quality between sections; other papers seemed to be the work of a single student who had taken over the entire project...Spring semester, I decided to break the assignment into two sections.
by Francesca Rivera, Music Without the terminology or solid knowledge of the historical context in which the composers worked, students can't move beyond simplistic taste statements...or value-laden judgments. My problem, then, was to help them quickly memorize key musical concepts with sufficient depth of understanding to recall the term and apply it effectively, and, to help them connect the works of individual composers with the larger time period in which they lived.
by Heidi Saleh, Near Eastern Studies After a couple of weeks into the class, I found that coming up with fresh ways to discuss and interpret texts that have been studied for hundreds of years such as The Odyssey was becoming a problem. The students were getting tired of straight literary analysis, and quite frankly, so was I.
by Jess Wendover, Architecture The exercise, while sometimes comically oversimplified, demonstrated the importance of not relying on a single method of gathering data in designing a space. The students really enjoyed the activity; everyone laughed at the conflicting demands for spaces within the theater...[and] they began to see the biases and drawbacks of each of the methods of inquiry.