By Sophie Buckner Aw… the research essay. The staple in undergraduate writing. At best, the student research essay poses a provocative question and curates convincing and credible evidence to support the student writer’s own unique answer to that question. At its worst, the research essay is a frustrating document embodying the boredom and/or confusion of […]
Author: Kaeppel, Kristi
Student Engagement: Where to Start As a Teaching Assistant
By Elizabeth Herder When I started in graduate school, I was expected to teach three laboratory sections of Fundamentals of Microbiology. I was anxious to perform well in this position. I, like so many others of my peer group, had heard phrases like “active learning” and “student engagement” but without having a clear understanding of […]
Applying James Lang’s Small Teaching in STEM Classrooms
By Andrew Miller Think back to your college mathematics courses. What is one word to describe how students in that class were learning? Does the word “passive” come to mind? Having taken countless math courses throughout my undergraduate and graduate career, I can confidently say that the structure of most courses is the same. Instructors […]
Non-Traditional is the New Norm: Lessons from Teaching at Community Colleges
Editor’s note: This is the second post in a two-part series focused on working with community college students and/or alumni. Please also see Samantha Lawrence’s post on challenging the community college stigma. By Katie Webber When referring to “college students”, many people think of a typical 18 to 22-year-old admitted fresh out of high school. […]
Challenging the Stigma of Community College Students & Alumni
Editor’s note: This is the first post in a two-part series on working with community college students and/or alumni. Samantha E. Lawrence The word “college” is often connoted with emerging adults attending 4-year universities as “full-time students,” living in dorms, and balancing their course loads with keg parties. Students’ college experiences, however, may differ radically […]
Prompting and Scaffolding Student Thinking
By Kristi Kaeppel Throughout my teaching career, I’ve seen standards for students’ academic performance rise and curricula adjust to meet new demands. These well-intentioned efforts by policy makers and administrators have done a good job of identifying skills that students should gain during their education, but it’s been left to instructors themselves to figure out […]
The Writing Classroom as Studio
“While the fields of writing and science might strike many as completely different if not diametrically opposed, once I began to look more closely at their histories, I realized how much was shared. Notions of learning by doing—as opposed to learning by listening to lectures and regurgitating that content on multiple-choice exams, whether that doing […]
A Short Pause Goes a Long Way: Using the Pause Procedure in Teaching
By Anna Marie LaChance Picture yourself as an undergraduate student, sitting in a standard lecture hall, staring at a whiteboard as a professor makes their way through a long lecture. Maybe it’s a detailed mathematical derivation or a careful dissection of a literary work. You and the nearly one hundred other students sit in silence […]
More Than an Athlete: Teaching the Whole Student
Stay informed of our latest posts plus resources on teaching by subscribing to our monthly newsletter! In one of my first sections as a Philosophy Teaching Assistant at UConn, I overheard an exchange between a student athlete and another classmate that I will never forget. As the students were packing up and heading out, the […]
Register for Spring 2019 Seminars in College Instruction!
Graduate students enrolled in GRAD 6000 as well as all UConn graduate students and post-docs are welcome to attend our spring teaching seminars. Seminars are offered from 1:25pm-3:20pm in McHugh Hall room 109 on the Storrs Campus unless otherwise noted. See the list of offerings and registration links below: 2/14 (*Thursday seminar*): Bringing Play into your Class […]