by Ryan Steele, Chemistry
I had to humbly undergo a transformation that allowed me to let the students’ discussion guide the session. Frankly, I had to shut up. Letting students speak and make mistakes does not mean conceding control of the classroom or the teacher’s sense of authority.
by Carolyn Sparrey, Mechanical Engineering
Due to the restrictions of the classroom I could not simply bring in tissue for the students to experiment with. Rather, I needed something tissue-like but without the mess and, because I was supplying the materials myself, at minimal cost. The solution was chewing gum.
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 Angela Chau, Bioengineering
I decided to redesign the lab sections to allow each student to learn at his or her own pace. Instead of using the few days before lab to plan out the chalkboard lecture, I used that time to implement a web page for that week’s section…Because students were being “taught” by the web pages during labs, I was then free to spend time working one-on-one with individual students without leaving the rest of the class waiting.
by Ari Nieh, Mathematics
The homework problems that generated the most confusion among my students were not particularly long, complicated, or computationally arduous; rather, the difficult problems were the ones which involved formulating a rigorous argument. Faced with any problem that used the word “prove” or “show,” the class was unsure how to get started.
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 Matthew Sargent, History
To my students…the past was merely a “repository of error,” and the history of science was only the chronicle of humankind’s gradual purging of mysticism and error. My goal was to convince them that the ideas long since discarded from the canon of science could teach them something worthwhile about science itself.
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 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 Aubrey Clayton, Mathematics
In addition to learning about the need for a precise definition when making an argument, the class learned to make sense of the symbols in the book by rephrasing them in their own words. Also, they learned that mathematics actually uses a lot of common sense, even if it is sometimes apparently obscured by notation.