by Riva Bruenn, Plant and Microbial Biology Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2016 Plant morphology is a well-organized catalog of vegetative form. Every week students have dozens of plants to illustrate, interpret, and describe in lab, and even more material to cover and review in discussion. In order to finish the…
by Auyon Siddiq, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research While the content in a typical operations research course is usually technical, the field itself is actually quite practical… I viewed it as part of my job to help convey the idea that the seemingly abstract methods taught in class could in fact have a significant positive impact on how decisions are made in a wide variety of domains.
by Britney Kitamata-Wong, Integrative Biology (Home Department: Optometry) I approached my teaching this second time around from a more clinical perspective, pulling from my patient-care experiences in my optometry clinical rotations. … I polled the class to gauge their interests and confirmed that many of the students were interested in pursuing careers in a medical or health-related field. I structured each of my lectures in a case presentation format starting with patient information, initial signs and symptoms, and applicable visuals.
by Nadia Kurd, Molecular and Cell Biology I was frustrated to find that any time I catered to the more advanced students and presented more challenging topics, the rest of the class struggled to follow along; whereas when I continued to conduct class at a level where most of the students were comfortable, the advanced students again lost interest. In an attempt to remedy this problem, I decided to try to develop “interactive” worksheets for class.
by Justin Hollenback, Civil and Environmental Engineering Based on the mistakes the students were making, I felt that the example problems I presented weren’t conveying the material as well as I wanted. Students did not appear engaged or actively learning during lecture. In response, I developed a strategy ... to make the process of working out example problems in class more interactive.
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 Sonja Schwartz, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management My goal for this laboratory was to engage students of all learning styles by using a combination of passive and active, visual and auditory, and conceptual and applied activities. By reinforcing the material this way, I wanted to get beyond endless bean counting to more effectively teach my students key concepts of evolution.
by William Coleman, History of Art It was my hope that paintings that have meant so much to me could be made to speak anew...[that] canvases laden with allegorical references would become legible again, equipping our group of newcomers with crucial analytical skills for the course...Despite best laid plans, it became apparent early in the semester that many students found these complex paintings...utterly incomprehensible.
by Emily Frey, Music The lowly sounding course title is thus deceptive; teaching Basic Musicianship II is a baptism by fire. Desperate times, I thought when I received the assignment, called for experimental measures. With its mélange of skills, requirements, and student backgrounds, 20B is chaotic by nature, and it seemed unproductive to try to work against that.
by Natalia Cecire, English The project was designed to produce a scholarly community that would provide an intellectual context for research findings. Yet because the community was composed of students, all with similar experiences with nineteenth-century literature, the debates occurred in terms that were meaningful to the students at their particular stage of exposure to literary criticism, rather than in the remoter terms of my discipline.