1. Don’t just cover material, create competencies. Hamilton College professor Barbara Tewksbury, who will be leading a March 23 teaching workshop at Duke, gives the example of her introductory geoscience course: “Rather than just filling [students] up with hazards and disasters, you give them the skills to evaluate the hazards.”
2. A well-planned course is like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. “I’m actually trying to set up a number of possible narratives that could come out of the course,” says Professor Peter McIsaac, who teaches German literature and culture and won a teaching award last year. “But, I want to leave some room for students to help craft the narrative.”
3. Teaching is part of the process of scholarship. “I learn a heck of a lot from students’ questions,” says Professor Stephen Nowicki, dean of natural sciences. “Every once in a while you get a question that shows that they are really seeing something different and that’s part of knowledge generation.”
4. Increase students’ awareness of how they approach problems. For a single chemistry problem, Professor Richard MacPhail will ask students: What is the question asking? What are you given? What’s your plan for solving the problem? What concepts did you need to use to solve it? How could"
5. “Don’t teach for the test; teach for life.” Professor Sherryl Broverman, who won an award for teaching biology, puts science lessons in the context of current events. “Women and minorities, people who typically have high attrition, are more likely to stay in science if they can see a social application,” she said.
6. Push students to diagnose their learning difficulties. “A lot of students want to come to office hours and say, ‘I don’t get this, please explain,’ and that’s not effective, either for the faculty or for the students,” says Donna Hall, director of the Academic Resource Center. “We’re really trying to get students to self-assess their difficulties.”
7. Focus on fundamentals. “If you don’t know the alphabet, you’re not going to be able to read,” says Professor Owen Astrachan, a teaching award winner. In one of his computer science courses, he let struggling students take the first test again and again until they mastered the fundamentals it covered. “This is about learning, not the material I am going to cover,” he said.
8. Tell students what teaching method you use and why. To explain why he uses real-world problems to teach math, Professor Jack Bookman says, “I hold up a calculator in class and say, ‘If all you can do is these computations, you can be replaced. I want you to think more deeply.’”
9. See the class through students' eyes. When she trains graduate and undergraduate students to teach science to K-8 students, Glenda Kelly, a research associate in electrical and computer engineering, has found that her students "overwhelmingly rated the most beneficial part of their training as the hands-on activities in which they were placed in the role of the elementary and middle school students." She said, "They learn to put kids in that situation by actually going through it themselves."
10. Center classes around students, not the teacher. “The focus is often on what you do as the teacher; the shift in perspective is to focus on what the students will do,” says Doug James, program director of academic support programs in The Graduate School, who organizes the Teaching Instructional Development for Excellence And Success workshops. “Teaching is creating situations in which appropriate learning occurs.”
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