President&#039;s Teaching Award

Cell and Systems Biology

Biology

Physiology

STEM

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

U of T Mississauga

Undergraduate Students

Undergraduate Education

One initiative uses an app that encourages active learning. Another wants to help students reframe how they think about failure. Yet another enhances knowledge of science by developing materials for high school students.

As University of Toronto faculty gather for tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning Symposium at the Rotman School of Management's Desautels Hall, the U of T Teaching Academy and colleagues from across the university will highlight how these and other projects are contributing to enhancing the student experience.

The academy, composed of past President’s Teaching Award winners, is an advisory group that offers expertise and advice to U of T’s Office of the Vice-President & Provost and the Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation, or CTSI.

“All three ideas represent innovation and experimentation of how to enhance our student experience and how to focus on things that we know make a difference for our students and the meaningfulness of their time at the University of Toronto and the kind of skills and knowledge that they’re developing that are going to serve them well in life,” says Carol Rolheiser, CTSI’s director and an academy co-chair.

“Part of what CTSI and the Teaching Academy are all about is we’re trying to influence the great teaching culture we have here, knowing we can always continue to improve.”

The CTSI is U of T's hub for teaching and learning development. The centre serves instructors, graduate students and teaching assistants on all three campuses with leadership and support on all teaching related and student engagement issues – including through the teaching academy.

Professor Carol Rolheiser (photo by Perry King)

The highlighted projects will open opportunities for further collaboration and encourage innovation, adds Rolheiser, a professor in the department of curriculum, teaching and learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).

One of the initiatives is a learning app called Team Up!, which has already been used by thousands of students. Invented by Melody Neumann, an associate professor, teaching stream, in the department of cell and systems biology, the game-like app was initially created to enhance a second-year, webinar-style course.

“I wanted the students to work in groups, in their virtual breakout rooms, together on some kind of problem set,” says Neumann, who thought of the app as a “low-stakes” approach to developing teamwork skills and a connection to the course material. “I wanted [the students] to get immediate feedback while they were working on a problem set, and I wanted them to work together to build consensus before they would choose an answer.”

Funded through internal grants, Team Up! was recently showcased to U of T President Meric Gertler and Vice-President and Provost Cheryl Regehr by Michelle French, an associate professor, teaching stream, in the department of physiology. Now available on mobile, tablet and desktop devices, the app is supported by the university’s online teaching and learning environment Quercus and fosters collaboration among students. It was used in 10 undergraduate courses by about 6,000 students this past school year.

“We don’t know of any other app that allows this dynamic grouping function plus the immediate feedback,” says French, who won a President’s Teaching Award in 2017.

In addition to building connections and workplace skills, French and Neumann emphasize that Team Up! also delivers cost savings since it’s an alternative to educational services like Top Hat and devices like clickers. “As someone who has used it in a few courses now, the financial savings [are] huge,” says French, who noted students collectively saved about $250,000 over the last school year alone.

“As an instructor at the university, we all want to include more active learning in our classes and there are many different ways you can do it. This is one way where the barriers are really low,” added Neumann.

Neumann and French want to build the app’s bandwidth capacity, expanding question types and opening the platform to more social sciences and humanities courses.

It’s an app that Fiona Rawle says could come in handy as her own teaching project takes its next steps.

Rawle (pictured right), an associate professor, teaching stream, in the department of biology at U of T Mississauga, has been developing an undergraduate course about failure. Her course, titled “Productive Failure: Teaching Students the Value of Failure in Science,” seeks to inform students about embracing failure, learn and bounce back from failure and recognize the value of failure in science and everyday life.

“Failure is such a crucial component of science. To be a good scientist, you need to be good at failing, and that hasn’t been taught before in the concept of science,” says Rawle, who won a teaching award from the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations and a President’s Teaching Award in 2018.

“Sometimes when we teach science, we teach how science was done, we teach about past experiments. I want to teach students how to think like a scientist and that means you have to be open to failure.”

After an initial pilot was embedded within an introductory biology course at U of T Mississauga, Rawle has reframed the course for this coming fall semester to include material on failure. Instead of an initial lecture on biology content, students get a lecture on the science of learning, including how we learn from failure and why embracing failure is important. Rawle will be weaving in new case studies for students, unveiling a podcast – which will explore historical examples – and bringing in personal narratives of failure.

Rawle hopes her students take away valuable practical skills. “When students graduate, we don’t want them to regurgitate a list of facts,” she says.

“We want to ask good questions, seek out answers, to be critical thinkers and resilient learners.”

Professor Judith Poë (photo by Drew Lesiuczok)

Judith Poë, professor, teaching stream, in the department of chemical and physical sciences at U of T Mississauga, hopes her Science Pedagogy Research Opportunity Program (ROP) participants – second- to fourth-year students – also learn key skills and teaching knowledge.

In her initiative, Poë’s ROP students are challenged to pay attention to detail as they develop learning materials for Grade 11 and Grade 12 STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) courses and facilitate in-class lessons.

“Their attitude toward this work is quite different because it’s their creation and it’s going out there for the world, on the web, and it’s going to be used in real schools by real students,” says Poë, who won a President’s Teaching Award in 2007.

Within the ROP, after her students learn about problem-based learning pedagogy, they select a topic, define their learning objectives and create a real-world scenario for their students to solve, which may include an accompanying experiment. They then work with a teacher, either in the high school or at the U of T Mississauga labs, to facilitate the high school students’ work on the problem.

The high school students also prepare their problem for publishing on Poë’s pedagogy website.

The program has built a stronger relationship between U of T Mississauga and local high schools, Poë says, and the feedback from her students and high school teachers has been positive. “A measure of the success is the fact that the [high school] teachers keep coming back for more,” says Poë.

“They’re seeing increased interest in the subject and increased critical thinking in the classroom.”

Poë is considering expanding the program’s scope to include environmental science, and possibly transform the program into a full course.

In the short term, because the ROP program is labour intensive, with much more “one-on-one” interaction compared to a standard lecture course, Poë wants to increase teaching help to accommodate the growing demand.

“With appropriate personnel,” she says. “We could accommodate a great many more students.”

U of T honours four exceptional faculty members with President's Teaching Award

geoff.vendeville — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 04:00:00 +0000

U of T honours four exceptional faculty members with President's Teaching Award

geoff.vendeville Fri, 06/01/2018 - 00:00

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Dr. Pier Bryden, an associate professor and director of program integration at the Faculty of Medicine, is one of four professors who received the President's Teaching Award (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

Topic

Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy

Faculty of Medicine

History

Humanities

Meric Gertler

Religion

U of T Mississauga

Subheadline

University also announces five faculty members promoted to University Professor

Dr. Pier Bryden says her best professors all had one thing in common: They were able to focus on a narrow subject and extrapolate, explaining its wider significance. In her history studies at the University of Toronto, she had a professor who could take a sentence from Dostoevsky and relate it to the Russian Revolution. Later, in medical school, she had lecturers who went from talking about symptoms to society.

“Those were the teachers who always made me feel like my brain was stretching,” she recalls.

As an educator, she tries to emulate the professors who inspired her, and her efforts have been recognized by the university community. The associate professor in the Faculty of Medicine and co-author of a popular book on psychiatry, How Can I Help? A Week in My Life as a Psychiatrist, is one of the four winners of the President's Teaching Award – the university's highest honour for excellence in teaching.

Her fellow recipients are William Cluett, a professor in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, Jennifer Murdock, an associate professor, teaching stream in economics in the Faculty of Arts & Science, and Fiona Rawle, an associate professor, teaching stream in the department of biology at U of T Mississauga.

Cluett has been teaching at U of T for over 30 years. He's also contributed to the curriculum through academic leadership positions, including by developing and implementing the faculty's flagship first-year design and commmunications course, Engineering Strategies and Practice. He has also expanded summer research opportunities for students in Canada and abroad.

After a few years as an economist in the anti-trust division of the U.S. Department of Justice and in economic consulting, Murdock joined U of T in 2004. She has helped recruit teaching-stream faculty and spearheaded important curriculum redesign and enhancement efforts for undergraduate economics and commerce programs.

Rawle is the associate dean, undergraduate at U of T Mississauga and the lead author of the first and second editions of CAMPBELL Biology, an introductory biology textbook used widely in Canada. She says she approaches teaching like she does bench research, by taking an evidence-based approach.

“I want to congratulate this year's four outstanding winners of the President’s Teaching Award,” said U of T President Meric Gertler. “They are an inspiration not only to their students, but to their colleagues as well.”

U of T celebrates exemplary teaching

ullahnor — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 16:41:34 +0000

U of T celebrates exemplary teaching

ullahnor Wed, 11/16/2016 - 11:41

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U of T's Jonathan Rose (left) Alison Gibbs and James D. Thomson (right) are the recipients of the 2016 President's Teaching Award

Geoffrey Vendeville

Author legacy

Geoffrey Vendeville

Topic

President Meric Gertler

Provost Cheryl Regehr

Education

Professors

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

innovation in education

One tries to make sense of the world through statistics. The other is a coding wiz. And the third focuses on explaining the relationship between plants and animals.

Alison Gibbs, an associate professor (teaching stream) in the department of statistical sciences; Jonathan Rose, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering; and James D. Thomson, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, received the 2016 President's Teaching Award – the University of Toronto's highest honour for excellence in teaching.

While the three come from different backgrounds, they share a devotion to their students.

“It’s not about teaching. It’s about learning,” Gibbs said.

Gibbs and Thomson are from the Faculty of Arts & Science. Rose is from the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. All three were honoured Tuesday night at a ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of the first university-wide teaching award. U of T President Meric Gertler and Vice-President and Provost Cheryl Regehr presented the awards.

President Meric Gertler (right) and Provost Cheryl Regehr (left) present Professor James D. Thomson with the award (photo by Johnny Guatto)

Thomson co-teaches an introductory biology course on adaptation and biodiversity that is so popular that enrolment often exceeds the seats in Convocation Hall. To accomodate the 1,900 students who typically sign up, the class has morning and evening sessions.

Thomson has also taken students as far as Vietnam to study flowers and pollinators, and he wrote a textbook called The Struggle for Existence, a nod to Charles Darwin.

Known for his dry sense of humour, he tries not to recycle jokes for students.

“If some little witticism occurs to me while I’m phrasing a sentence, I’m willing to take a bit of a flier and throw it in. Usually, those pretty much fall flat,” he said with a laugh.

Innovations in teaching: Alison Gibbs

lavende4 — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 14:13:22 +0000

Innovations in teaching: Alison Gibbs lavende4 Tue, 06/21/2016 - 10:13

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President’s Teaching Award recipient Alison Gibbs (Diana Tyszko photo)

Author legacy

Arthur Kaptainis

Topic

Statistical Sciences

Subheadline

Statistical science associate professor is having too much fun to go back to traditional lecturing

No point in calling Alison Gibbs at home to congratulate her on being one of the 2016 winners of the President’s Teaching Award.

“I don’t know about your home line,” the associate professor (teaching stream) said in her office in Sidney Smith Hall. “But I rarely pick up mine.”

Indeed, many Canadians no longer have such lines, a fact that is probably related to the failure of any polling company to predict the size of the Liberal majority in the federal election of last October.

“We’re not getting a decent random sample anymore, because of the way technology is going,” Gibbs explained. “You need other sources of information.”

Which is only one of the reasons this is an interesting time for the department of statistical sciences and for the study of statistics in general. Others have to do with the rapidly expanding range of activities to which statistics are newly relevant.

“Every transaction in a business is now being recorded in a huge dataset,” Gibbs said. “Business people want to use that and leverage it to their advantage.”

Medical research more than ever is an enterprise driven by statistics. English professors can study an author’s evolving vocabulary over time with statistical science. All this while the new analytical methods have changed the way baseball teams are recruited and managed.

“Moneyball was brilliant,” said Gibbs, referring to the system adopted by the Oakland Athletics and documented in a 2011 movie and a book by Michael Lewis. “Figuring out measures other than the traditional ones, that really worked.”

New applications have resulted in a rise in enrolment in STA courses at U of T from fewer than 500 four years ago to more than 2,000 in 2015-16. Only human biology courses in the Faculty of Arts & Science have higher enrolment.

The increase has required changes to the curriculum. Gibbs is described in her nomination letter as “the leading innovator of statistics education renewal in the department.”

Gibbs is so enamoured of teaching that in 2002 she gave up a tenure-track position at another Canadian university to take a teaching job at U of T, where she had earned her MSc and PhD. Her present U of T appointments include associate chair of undergraduate studies in statistics and chair of the undergraduate curriculum committee.

Nor are her activities confined to campus. Gibbs organized the “census at school” initiative of the Statistics Society of Canada, an effort to put high-school students in touch with StatsCan. On a global scale she is vice-president on the International Association of Statistical Education.

In her department Gibbs has led the “inverted classroom” revolution that shifts basic information to online learning and uses class time for active problem-solving.

“It’s really fun,” she says of the inverted model as it is applied to STA 220: The Practice of Statistics I. “I don’t think I could go back to straight lecture teaching ever again.”

Peer instruction, as the technique is known, provides results in real time. If 80 percent of students get a question right, the other 20 percent are aware instantly of their need to revisit the material.

“The most interesting peer-instruction questions are those which nearly everybody gets wrong, or that are spread evenly between right and wrong answers,” Gibbs said. “Then you get students talking to each other.”

The tonic ingredient is the enthusiasm, for which Gibbs is widely praised in course evaluations.

“I initially dreaded taking this class but it turned out to be my favourite class of the semester,” said one undergraduate. “It was all due to the excitement Gibbs had for statistics; it was infectious.”

Ashley Cohen, a double U of T alumna with a BSc in actuarial science and statistics and an MSc in statistics, credits Gibbs in part for her success after school.

“Not only was her commitment to her teaching and her students exemplary,” Cohen says, “but many of the skills and techniques I learned in her classes have had a hugely positive and helpful impact on my professional career as a biostatistician.”

While computers might seem to be a clear aid to data collection, the steady increase of computing power has created conditions that are “a little messier” than they once were. The need for careful instruction in statistical science has never been keener.

“Computation is at an whole new scale now because the dataset is often so large that you can’t do it on your desktop,” Gibbs said. “A lot of people are looking at data where not a great deal of design has gone into the collection process.”

While the interpretation of data now plays a larger role in many industries, it also is important to individuals and their private lives.

“Even to be an informed consumer and an informed voter, we need to understand statistics,” Gibbs says. “To take ownership over your health care, you need to understand statistics.

“Health studies seem to contradict each other. Back in the 1980s, the question was: Should I be eating oat bran? More recently it was Vitamin D. An issue now is colonoscopy and colon-cancer screening. There is evidence that just the stool sample test is sufficient. Colonoscopies are expensive and unpleasant. What’s the evidence that tells us we should do them?

“There is a famous quotation by H.G. Wells about how the ability to compute and think in averages will be as important as the ability to read and write. This is becoming more and more true all the time. Because people are doing more and more with data.”

Innovations in teaching: James Thomson

lavende4 — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 13:38:48 +0000

Innovations in teaching: James Thomson lavende4 Fri, 06/17/2016 - 09:38

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James Thomson in the West Elk Mountains of Colorado

Author legacy

Arthur Kaptainis

Topic

Ecology & Environmental Biology

Subheadline

Burning pine cones in Convocation Hall, bringing students to Vietnam in search of plants and pollinators

Convocation is a time to celebrate U of T's students. Although they may make it look easy, graduating from one of the top-ranked universities in the world is a remarkable achievement.

When the 18,000 members of the Class of 2016 cross the stage at Convocation Hall – including an estimated 13,500 grads this spring – they'll be looking back at years of exams, essays, lab and field work, experiential learning, volunteer stints, creativity and hard work. And almost zero snow days.

On the stage with them – or following via live streams and Instagram feeds – will be some of the professors and instructors who also invested countless hours in their students’ success.

Who are the teachers who helped make this day possible? You can learn about some of them in our Inside Con Hall series from student writer Krisha Ravikantharaja.

And you’ll meet a few more in this series on Innovations in Teaching.

In this instalment, U of T News writer Arthur Kaptainis profiles Professor James Thomson of the Faculty of Arts & Science.

“Very conveniently, the university always plants beds of two species of Salvia,” said Professor James Thomson, one of three winners of the 2016 President’s Teaching Awards.

“The blue-flowered one is adapted for bees and the red-flowered one for hummingbirds, so we can talk about those adaptations, and do choice experiments where we offer both types to the local bees.”

The veteran of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology was talking about the expeditions he leads in the blocks surrounding the downtown Toronto campus as part of EEB 440: Plant-Animal Interactions.

“To show how the red species is suited to fit a hummingbird, I bring along a mummified hummingbird in my shirt pocket,” he added. “Students generally are surprised by its appearance.”

Thomson spoke to U of T News from the West Elk Mountains of Colorado, where he and his wife spend high-altitude (and snowy) early summers amid the flora and fauna of the Rockies.

Thomson has taken students as far afield as Vietnam in search of interesting flowers and pollinators, and keeps them busy in the laboratory during winter months with experiments involving bee colonies.

“I fall into the ‘showing is better than telling’ school,” Thomson explained. “I certainly am a big believer in demonstrations as the best way to make a memorable point."

He admits to having been influenced by an instructor at the University of Chicago who jumped chest-deep into an icy pond to demonstrate the architecture of a muskrat lodge. “He was being more dramatic than necessary,” Thomson writes in his teaching statement. “But the drama made the facts indelible.”

Outdoor treks are not feasible for the more than 1,900 students who typically enrol in BIO120: Adaption and Biodiversity, but in-class demonstrations as magnified on a big screens are part of the teaching protocol.

What better means of illustrating morphological adaptation than to burn a pine cone on camera and watch the release of seeds as the scales crack open?

“Students in the front rows can smell the hot terpenoids,” Thomson writes, referring to compounds that give certain plants their scent. “Implanting unforgettable memories then gives me a fighting chance to instill some less dramatic considerations about how organisms are adapted to their environments.”

Specific examples illuminate general principles. Potentially dry information about atmospheric circulation patterns is better retained if illustrated by the ability of the Wandering Albatross to exploit the westerly winds to which it is adapted.

Enrolment in BIO120 regularly exceeds the capacity of Convocation Hall, so Thomson and University Professor Spender Barrett have convened an evening section in the Earth Sciences Centre to accommodate the spillover.

It is a credit to their teaching ability that some students attend classes in both venues. “My reaction is basically surprise rather than satisfaction,” Thomson said of the implied compliment.

Whether they attend both classes or settle for one, students experience a robust teaching style animated by humour as well as Thomson’s current research interests.

“It has always been policy in BIO120 to encourage lecturers to incorporate their own research,” Thomson explained. “When I joined the course, I enthusiastically adopted this approach as a way to personalize the course and to get students thinking more about science as a process rather than a body of facts.”

Not that Thomson is indifferent to the “telling” aspect of teaching. He is in the process of preparing the third edition of his custom-written textbook for BIO120, Struggle for Existence. “I tell my students that the lectures are my attempt to make the material memorable, and the book is my attempt to make it clear,” he writes.

Student questionsare answered in tutorials or on the discussion board of the Blackboard app (which Thomson regularly monitors). In EEB 440, a class of about 30, questions are an essential part of classroom dynamics.

“I consider answering questions to be as valuable as delivering my prepared material,” Thomson said. “My sometime co-instructor Megan Frederickson and I assign a portion of the course grade to participation, mostly to encourage questions and discussion.”

And his students say it gets results.

“Professor Thomson walked the class through the birth and development of new ideas in the scientific community,” Jessica Phillips, an ecology and evolutionary biology specialist from University College and a 2016 Rhodes Scholar, said of EEB 440.

“We saw the resistance and backlash to novel theories, and were taught to critically evaluate studies in the context of ideas that were being debated at the time. We were also encouraged to think of novel approaches and to test various theories.”

In a letter of support for Thomson’s award, Christopher Boccia, a Victoria College major in ecology and evolutionary biology and new grad,wrote: “His presentations are always well-organized and his incorporation of humorous anecdotes and props make them both enjoyable and effective pedagogically, as his examples tend to clarify concepts and make them more memorable.”

U of T honours great teaching, research

katie.fong — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 14:01:43 +0000

U of T honours great teaching, research katie.fong Tue, 06/07/2016 - 10:01

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Alison Gibbs, James Thomson and Jonathan Rose are the recipients of the 2016 President's Teaching Awards

Author legacy

Arthur Kaptainis

Topic

University Professorships

They’re renowned for their wit, creativity, ability to inspire students and colleagues – and an intense dedication to innovation in teaching.

Two faculty members from the Faculty of Arts & Science and one from the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering are the 2016 recipients of the President’s Teaching Award – the University of Toronto’s highest honour for excellence in teaching.

Alison Gibbs is an associate professor (teaching stream) in the department of statistical sciences. Professor Jonathan Rose hails from the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering while Professor James Thomson is appointed to the department of ecology and evolutionary biology.

Innovations in teaching: Andrew Petersen

katie.fong — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 20:10:43 +0000

Innovations in teaching: Andrew Petersen

katie.fong Fri, 06/03/2016 - 16:10

Cutline

(photo by Stephen Uhraney)

Author legacy

Arthur Kaptainis

Topic

Convocation is a time to celebrate U of T's students. Although they may make it look easy, graduating from one of the top-ranked universities in the world is a remarkable achievement.

Who are the teachers who helped make this day possible? You can learn about some of them in our Inside Con Hall series from student writer Krisha Ravikantharaja.

And you’ll meet a few more in this ongoing series on Innovations in Teaching.

Meet Diane Horton

Meet Greg Evans

In this third instalment, U of T News writer Arthur Kaptainis profiles Professor Andrew Petersen of the University of Toronto Mississauga.

To hear Andrew Petersen tell it, computer science, as a subject to be taught, is a little like life. It has certain difficulties that we cannot avoid and others we definitely can.

“Essential complexity is what you should be struggling with, what makes a problem really harder,” explained the associate professor (teaching stream) in the department of mathematical and computational sciences at the University of Toronto Mississauga. “Accidental complexity is what we do ourselves when we make a problem harder.”

Petersen’s determination to deal forthrightly with the first kind of complexity and wage steady war on the second type made him one of the three 2015 winners of the President’s Teaching Award. His dedication has also earned him the esteem of colleagues on all three campuses, where the Programming Course Resource System (PCRS), which he developed collaboratively with students, is a staple tool of undergraduate courses.

Ioan Stefanovici, a PhD candidate in computer science and former teaching assistant, admires Petersen’s mastery of the topic material, ability to explain it at the level appropriate to any audience and – in particular – willingness to place it in a larger context.

“He always goes beyond ‘today's lesson’ and relates the material to everything else in the field,” Stefanovici says. “This gives the new material an anchor and foundation.”

One of the advantages of teaching in the online era is the quick availability of information about where a majority (or significant minority) of students are having trouble. Nevertheless, there are limits to what data, big or small, can tell us.

“In the end you have to approach students and say, ‘Can you tell me what is going through your head?’” Petersen said over the telephone from New Zealand, where he is finishing a sabbatical.

“You have to understand what is getting in the way. And you’re only going to understand when you ask them.”

Such questions are more often teased out than posed bluntly. One of Petersen’s proven techniques is to undertake “live” programming in a large-enrolment introductory course.

“When you’re doing something you learn more than when you’re hearing something,” Petersen says. “But this process also gives me an opportunity to discover what is working and is not working.”

His twist is to leave out a line of programming and require students not simply to fill in the blank but also to exchange proposals with their fellow students. Individuals then present not their own solutions but the solutions of their neighbours.

“First, they validate it, if they think it’s good,” Petersen says, by way of explaining the double benefit of this “anonymous” method. “Second, there won’t be any embarrassment if it doesn’t work, because it’s not theirs.”

Petersen also makes sure to involve students in the upper rows as well as those who are seated, by accident or design, closer to the instructor.

“You want to get a sense of whether they are participating,” he says. “You want to know if they can write that one line. Because if they can write that one line, they know what the structure is."

In most computer science courses, some work happens outside the classroom, in accordance with the inverted teaching model. Petersen appreciates the benefits, which typically involve a video demonstration and a programming exercise. His own PCRS is an example of a product based on this teaching philosophy.

“This allows us, when we work with students in class, to know with some confidence that they have attempted to apply their knowledge, to get their hands dirty,” Petersen says.

Active problem-solving is the modus operandi even in one-on-one encounters.

“When a student comes in during office hours, I normally end up asking rather than answering questions,” Petersen says. “If the student doesn’t understand question 27 on page 17, my response usually is, there is a whiteboard behind you. Getting the students to start working on the question shows me where they are having trouble.”

Despite Petersen’s palpable success as an on-site and in-person instructor, the trend in computer science instruction has been toward more use of interactive technology. Will teachers and classrooms eventually be rendered obsolete?

“I don’t know that I’ve got a good answer to that,” Petersen says. “Although the current state of instruction certainly relies on experienced people listening to students, identifying the obstacles and relying on their experience to provide ‘just in time’ teaching, there is a lot of hype about how much of this activity can be turned over to a robot in 20 or 30 years.

“As professors, we think that educators are always going to be important. But as a computer scientist, I say: ‘I don’t know.’ Expert systems are getting pretty good. I don’t know what they’re going to be like in five years, let alone 20 years.

“But I believe there will always be room for a human expert – curating the material that needs to be investigated; identifying what, specifically, students are asking questions about; and providing the right response as they ask those questions.”

Innovations in teaching: Diane Horton

lanthierj — Tue, 24 May 2016 12:45:29 +0000

Innovations in teaching: Diane Horton

lanthierj Tue, 05/24/2016 - 08:45

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(all photos by Johnny Guatto)

Author legacy

Arthur Kaptainis

Topic