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 Kathryn Fleishman, English Challenged with independent critical thinking and absorbed in a network of ideas that reached out of our classroom and into their everyday lives, my students developed the willingness to risk an argument along with a strong grasp of the research process. … [S]tudents polished the opinions they had proffered as tweets and comments into solid theses for their individual research projects, transforming uncertain, visceral reactions into logical, distinctive arguments.
by Elise Piazza, Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Studies (Home Department: Vision Science) On my first day as a graduate student instructor for Introduction to Cognitive Science, I noticed that participation was limited to a few students, while the rest sat silently, either intimidated or bored...As an experimental psychologist, I decided to introduce my scientific approach to teaching by turning our discussion section into an experiment.
by Jeff Benca, Integrative Biology During the in-class debate, we focused on the question “What caused earth’s greatest mass extinction?” ... It was truly inspiring for me to hear both discussion sections of the class spend 1.5 hours actively ... debating which arguments held most credence by analyzing the approaches of the papers, considering the expertise of the authors, and applying trends in the fossil record covered in previous lectures.
Effective and efficient research strategies for students.
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.
by Kathryn Jasper, History I wanted the students to realize that historical interpretation, what appears on the pages of their textbook, was written by a human being who is not omniscient. The author’s conclusions are based on primary sources and informed analysis. In addition, that author is subject to his or her own biases. Moreover, the sources themselves are biased, which the students understood when they had to formulate arguments based on...[the] text.
by Charles Chang, Linguistics With so much course material to review in section, we are left with little time to get students comfortable with doing the technical things they need to be able to do to fully engage with the course material...In the end, students were offered the chance to come get their hands dirty with phonetics, and they came — even though it was on their own time, and even though it was on the weekend. Who woulda thunk?
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 Maria Goodrich, Integrative Biology My goals when teaching Bio 1B are...to help [students] move beyond rote memorization of definitions ... and to make [them] comfortable with using scientific literature and the scientific method to answer questions. I tried to meet these goals by assigning each of my students to find a focal organism that would help them connect to the course material throughout the semester.